History
The setting out of the varied ideas of Christianity (and the various topics and themes of the diverse texts of the Bible) in a single, coherent and well-ordered presentation is a relatively late development. In Eastern Orthodoxy, an early example is provided by John of Damascus's 8th-century Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in which he attempts to set in order, and demonstrate the coherence of, the theology of the classic texts of the Eastern theological tradition. In the West, Peter Lombard's 12th-century Sentences, in which he collected thematically a large series of quotations from the Church Fathers, became the basis of a medieval scholastic tradition of thematic commentary and explanation - best exemplified in Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. The Lutheran scholastic tradition of a thematic, ordered exposition of Christian theology emerged in the 16th century, with Philipp Melanchthon's Loci Communes, and was countered by a Calvinist scholasticism, exemplified by John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.
In the 19th century, primarily in Protestant circles, a new kind of systematic theology arose: the attempt to demonstrate that Christian doctrine formed a more tightly coherent system grounded in some core axiom or axioms. Such theologies often involved a more drastic pruning and reinterpretation of traditional belief in order to cohere with the axiom or axioms. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, for instance, produced Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church) in the 1820s, in which the core idea is the universal presence amongst humanity (sometimes more hidden, sometimes more explicit) of a feeling or awareness of 'absolute dependence'; all theological themes are reinterpreted as descriptions or expressions of modifications of this feeling.
Read more about this topic: Systematic Theology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)