When the Cathedral Changes While You’re Building It

 

Étienne Gilson famously described the great medieval summae as “cathedrals of the mind,” and I have returned to that image more times than I can count and probably more times than you can stand. It captures something about systematic theology that words like organization or doctrinal synthesis simply do not. A system has foundations, load-bearing walls, arches, sightlines, chambers within chambers. One doctrine leans upon another. Christology bears weight in soteriology; anthropology affects hamartiology; one’s doctrine of Scripture quietly governs almost everything else. Since my conversion, I have been drawn almost instinctively to that kind of theological construction. I eventually earned a terminal degree in systematic theology, have spent roughly three decades immersed in the discipline, and recently published The Craft of Systematic Theology: An Exegetical and Sequential Blueprint for Building a Doctrinal System.

And, with miles to go before I sleep, I am still building. My larger project is All Things in Christ: A Gospel-Centered, Christocentric Systematic Theology, a full-scale system that will probably land somewhere around one million words: eleven parts, roughly fifty chapters, a collection of appendixes, and enough footnotes to frighten a sane person. The governing conviction is there in the title. Christian doctrine is not merely a catalogue of theological loci arranged in tidy sequence. All things cohere in Christ, and the gospel belongs not in one isolated chapter between sin and salvation but near the architectural center of the whole structure. That is the plan, anyway. Cathedrals have a way of arguing with their architects.

One thing writing the work has taught me firsthand is just how iterative systematic theology really is. I understood that conceptually before. Alister McGrath’s Scientific Theology helped me think in terms of theological construction as an ongoing, self-correcting engagement in which conclusions elsewhere in the system can force us to reconsider assumptions we thought were already settled. That sounds wonderfully cerebral when you read it in a book. It feels rather different when Chapter 37 makes you realize that something you wrote in Chapter 12 now needs surgery. Exegesis alters synthesis; synthesis sends you back to exegesis; historical theology complicates the question; philosophical analysis exposes an inconsistency you had missed. Then you circle back around again. Now I know.

That process has already moved me on several questions. Most significantly, I have migrated from an essentially Amyraldian account of the extent and intent of the atonement toward a multiple-intentions model, which I think better handles the full range of biblical data without forcing every atonement text into a single explanatory category. I have also moved from a fairly hard cessationism toward Adam Harwood’s contextualism. There are smaller shifts scattered throughout the manuscript as well. None of this means doctrine is infinitely plastic, or that systematic theology is merely autobiographical theology written in increasingly expensive footnotes. Quite the opposite. The point of revision is submission: Scripture, being God-breathed, keeps exercising veto power over the fallible system we construct from it.

Even the architecture of the book itself has refused to sit still. Sections have moved. Chapters have swollen, divided, migrated, or acquired material I originally thought belonged somewhere else. It is fascinating and, occasionally, maddening. Here the cathedral analogy becomes almost embarrassingly literal. Florence Cathedral reached the fifteenth century with an enormous crossing awaiting a dome no one yet knew how to build; Brunelleschi’s extraordinary double-shell solution effectively solved a problem inherited from earlier planners. Milan Cathedral, begun in 1386, became a centuries-long argument among architects about proportions, buttressing, materials, and what the building was supposed to become. Sometimes you discover the dome only after you have already built the crossing.

There is, to me, a sterner lesson in Beauvais. Its thirteenth-century builders pushed Gothic architecture toward breathtaking height, only to see portions of the choir collapse in 1284. The vision had exceeded what its supports could safely bear. Siena offers another caution: its fourteenth-century builders attempted to enlarge the existing cathedral into one of the greatest churches in Europe, only to abandon the project when structural difficulty, expense, and then the catastrophe of the Black Death overwhelmed the ambition. The unfinished walls still stand. There is a theological warning there worth heeding. A system can be ingenious, immense, even beautiful, yet still place more weight upon an inference than the biblical foundation beneath it can carry. Better to reinforce the pier—or abandon the planned tower—than spend the rest of one’s life defending a crack in the masonry.

Perhaps that is one reason Marc Cortez’s remark (in reviewing Michael F. Bird’s brilliantly written Evangelical Theology) that writing a systematic theology requires a certain degree of insanity rings increasingly true to me. He is right. You have to be at least a little mad to attempt it. But there is something exhilarating about watching the thing slowly take shape: foundations laid decades ago, rooms rebuilt after better exegesis, old stones incorporated into new construction, scaffolding everywhere, and Christ continually drawing the lines of sight toward himself. I no longer imagine that finishing All Things in Christ will mean that I have finally constructed an impregnable theological cathedral. I hope for something more modest, and probably more useful: a structure faithful enough to Scripture to bear its own weight, coherent enough that one can see how the parts belong together, and transparent enough that, looking through its windows, one sees beyond the building to the glory of the God for whom theology exists at all.