Book Review : Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 4: Church and Last Things

By Campbell Markham

Why aren’t Christians arguing about theology anymore?

Becoming a Christian in the early 90s, I observed many a heated debate: covenant baptism versus credo baptism; Calvinism versus Arminianism; amillennialism versus dispensationalism; and lots of to-ing and fro-ing about Pentecostalism.

There was no YouTube nor any podcasts; we debated these things live in home Bible studies and over church morning tea.

If minds were closed then these discussions were useless at best. At worst they stank of prideful exclusivity. “I eat Arminians for breakfast”, I once heard a Calvinist say. The Reformed saw Pentecostals as toddlers running rampant in a playground. Pentecostals saw us as frightened, unspiritual, with all the life of a flaccid balloon.

But these arguments also showed that Christians cared. The church cared about doctrine and what it believed and did.

Having received heavy inoculations of postmodern subjectivism (that truth is not absolute but relative), and a false dichotomy between truth and love (that love means accepting “my truth”), an argument about the extent of the atonement, to take one example, is now as gauche as prunes wrapped in bacon.

But my concern runs deeper than this: not only have we been conditioned not to care about doctrine, I’m not sure if we know enough doctrine to care about in the first place. I don’t get hot and bothered about rule changes in the AFL because the sport is as important to me as Bolivia’s taxation laws, and because I don’t know enough about the rules to make any judgment about such changes.

General Bible knowledge is collapsing, and I look to myself as Exhibit A. In his Barchester Chronicles, Anthony Trollope tells of two old Anglican priests whose favourite game was to carry on entire conversations with Bible quotations. I can barely quote Psalm 23 and would be unable to give you a précis of 2 Corinthians chapter three if you asked me on the spot. When Jesus shirtfronts Nicodemus, “You are Israel’s teacher and do you not understand these things?” I take that personally.

So we expose ourselves, our families, and our churches to being like “infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Eph 4:14).

There is no doubt that we must rebuild programs of systematic Bible training, which must include training in doctrine, for pastors must “encourage others by sound doctrine/teaching (didaskalia) and refute those who oppose it” (Titus 1:9).

This means, in part, pursuing the discipline of systematic theology.

Systematic theology is the arrangement of Bible truth into systematic categories. It synthesises all that the Bible says about a particular truth – for example the human nature of Jesus, the marks of the church, what sin is, the nature of the atonement, the work of the Holy Spirit, the condition of the damned – so that these truths can be understood according to the totality of Scripture.

Systematic theology is no substitute for systematic Bible reading. It is important, though, because we cannot help systematising what we read and learn – placing new thoughts in relation to existing thoughts, and allowing those thoughts to inform each other.

When I read, for example, that the Holy Spirit settled as “tongues of fire” in the upper room at Pentecost, I cannot help but put that alongside other thoughts about the Spirit and fire: the Exodus pillar of fire, the seven-branched menorah, the Spirit equipping Bezalel, the Spirit rushing upon Samson, the new birth, the refining fire of sanctification, the gifts of the Spirit, the “Spirit and fire” baptism of Jesus, and so on.

Studying systematic theology helps us to order these thoughts well; to tame a naturally wild and haphazard system into a Bible-ordered and Bible-proportioned system. It helps to turn impenetrable and sterile scrubland into a fruitful orchard.

I would encourage every Christian, then, to invest in two reputable systematic theologies and to read and become familiar with them: to help order one’s thinking, and as a reference when considering difficult matters of doctrine.

One of your systematic theologies should be a single volume. I still regularly open my Louis Berkhof Systematic Theology which was published in the 1940s. I like it because he covers all the main doctrines concisely and proportionately, makes you aware of the main competing false doctrines and philosophies, gives abundant proof texts to look up, and follows a consistent form across the volume. (I also like it because I associate it with the time of my conversion.) Others swear by Bruce Milne’s Know the Truth (3^rd edition 2014). When I taught systematic theology in our Hobart church in midweek classes we all bought John Frame’s Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief  (2013). Notwithstanding his annoying obsession with triangles he handles every doctrine thoroughly and well.

But you also want a multi-volume Systematic Theology as a deeper reference tool. In the nineteenth century Charles Hodge’s three-volume Systematic Theology, though unfinished, was a standard text and is still useful. I haven’t yet purchased the recent English translation of Hermann Bavinck’s early-twentieth-century four-volume Reformed Dogmatics but we can all see how it is becoming a gold-standard. It is very demanding, though.  

The four-volume Reformed Systematic Theology by Joel R. Beeke and Paul M. Smalley may prove to be the most accessible large systematic theology that will help us.

Joel Beeke is an American theologian, the Chancellor of the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, who sits within the excellent Dutch-Reformed tradition. Paul Smalley is Dr Beeke’s research assistant.

The release of volume four, Church and Last Things, completes their 5,216 page colossus.

The first part of volume four deals with ecclesiology, the only part which I review here. (I will address the second part in a separate review; so this review should not be understood as a fair description of the whole volume, let alone the whole opus.)

At first, the book is very heavy in quotations. Sometimes I find that the quotes add little to the argument, and Beeke and Smalley’s own voice is barely heard within the great parliament. When the authors refer less and speak more freely, in their excellent chapters dealing with church officers for example, I find them to be warm, wise, pastoral, and just plain helpful.

Interestingly, the work is not polemical – it rarely addresses, dissects, and analyses opposing points of view: whether Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or liberal. (A whole chapter critiquing the papacy is an exception.) As a convinced Reformed Christian, I am in the presence of friends, who warmly explain and affirm the beliefs that I already hold.

This is pleasant, but arguably a weakness. Our iron needs to be sharpened with polemical iron. Calvin’s Institutes (1559), and Michael Horton’s Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrim’s on the Way (2011), are stronger in this regard.  

In general, the work is more conversational than technical. There is nothing that an intelligent Christian without a seminary education will not understand here – which I think makes it ideal for the Christian family’s reference bookshelf. When you want to know more, for example, about the marks of the true church, then you will find Chapter 6 a solid and straightforward help. For Bible teachers to sharpen their views against the technicalities of powerful competing views, however, they will have to look elsewhere.

Neither does this section describe Christian belief in the context of recent Western thought: against, for example, the challenges of postmodern relativism (truth is relative) and existentialism (existence precedes essence), the post-structural critique of binaries, and critical theories of community and identity. It does not address the contemporary landscape of thought assessed, for example, by Christopher Watkins in his superb Biblical Critical Theory (2022).

I need help to be able to explain why the church stands in today’s world as a solid reality, a powerful force to be reckoned with, as perennially maligned, but as the astonishing source of much that we count as good and valuable (like poor relief, healthcare, and protection for the vulnerable). I need help to be able to show why our very deepest needs – which wrong turns into modern race theory, libertarianism, and identity politics have failed to meet – are in fact met in Jesus’ church, his body.

But I shouldn’t review the book that wasn’t written.

If you want thorough, warm, wise, untechnical, irenical, and biblical reference tool on ecclesiology – the church’s nature, the extent of its doctrine and work, and the administration of the means of grace – then this is the book for you.

I strongly commend Beeke and Smalley’s Doctrine of the Church to young pastors as a “how to” for pastoring a church. In fact, this section is arguably more of a practical theology than a systematic theology. Semantics aside, you have in the nearly seven-hundred pages of this section a brilliant “church manual”, giving Scriptural, wise, and historically grounded instruction on every aspect of pastoring and growing a church that is biblical, reforming, and Christ-exalting.

Originally published on the AP website: https://ap.org.au/2024/06/06/book-review-volume-4-of-beeke-and-smalley/