An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Greetings, I’m Fred Zaspel, editor here at Books At a Glance, and welcome to another Author Interview. Dr. Joel Beeke has been teaching Systematic Theology for a long time, and we are very happy to see that his work is now coming into print. Volume one is now available, and Dr. Beeke is here to talk to us about it today.
Joel, welcome – great to have you with us again.
Beeke:
Great to be with you, Fred.
Zaspel:
Tell us, what is distinctive about your work?
Beeke:
Well, those people who do know me know that I have a strong emphasis on being Biblical. And my doctorate is in church history, so I love church history. But I also have a strong emphasis on what’s called experiential teaching. That is to say systematic theology should not only be designed for the head, the mind, but also the heart, the inmost being and the affections. To that and I’ve been reading the Puritans all my life who I think excel in this area. What I do when I teach systematics, Fred, is I use a four-pronged approach. I first try to collect everything the Bible says about a particular doctrine. Then I look at how it was developed under the tutelage of the Spirit throughout church history, both the positives as well as some attention given to the errors. Then we look at, thirdly, how does this doctrine impact me experientially in totality of my being as a Christian, as I journey on to the Celestial City? Then, finally, we look at the practical dimensions of the doctrine. Sometimes experiential and practical are kind of brought together, sometimes they are done more individually, but the idea is that by the time you finish each chapter, we want you worshiping God and not just being informed in your mind. So, the idea is to have a warm, comprehensive approach that is solidly Reformed, solidly Biblical, solidly rooted in the Reformed confessions, but also reaches the heart and the hands and feet so that people can respond to it after they read it. That’s the goal.
Zaspel:
That emphasis on experiential theology is something you’ve pushed for a while. I think it’s been a great emphasis. In fact, you just recently published another book dealing with that experiential preaching, right?
Beeke:
Yes. Both books are done by Crossway, and here’s the amazing thing that really excites me a lot. Crossway, as you know, has become a solid Reformed publisher and it’s by far larger than any other Reformed publisher in the world now, I believe. I asked them the question, how many catalogs do you send out when you do a catalog? Ligonier does about a hundred thousand, we do maybe thirty thousand, and Crossway does seven hundred and fifty thousand. They are just huge and they do such a good job. But what happened, Fred, was when they wanted my book on Reformed experiential preaching, they called me up, the senior editor there, a couple of weeks later and said, “we hear you’re also working on a systematic theology with your teacher’s aide.” And I said, “yes, that’s true.” He said, “well, if we’re going to become known as a Reformed experiential preaching publisher, shouldn’t we be known as a Reformed experiential teaching publisher? So, if you’re doing it in the same vein, send us a manuscript proposal and we will take a look at it.” And within two weeks I was signed up; and it’s been great.
Zaspel:
That’s great!
Give us a sketch of how you understand the task of systematic theology – how is it most responsibly approached, and what are the important steps?
Beeke:
Yes, well, in the book we try to stress that first of all, it’s a spiritual task; and you got to be spiritually right with God, you’ve got to be hungry for the Word and we have a whole chapter devoted to the spiritual dynamics of doing theology. Too often, we think that people just approach theology as if this is some kind of mental exercise, and if I know enough philosophy and theology and logic, I can put together a nice systematic theology.
Zaspel:
That’s an emphasis you rarely find in a systematic theology, isn’t it?
Beeke:
Yes, rarely find, recently. There are some, but I think in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the common practice. If you look at Wilhelmus à Brakel’s The Christian’s Reasonable Service, he’s using that warm-hearted, clear-thinking approach as well.
So then when it comes to the academic side of things, we actually divide the idea of how you do systematics into three sections. One is gathering truth. How do you go about gathering various pieces of information about each doctrine? Through reading the Scriptures and through familiarizing yourself with church history and the debates, and so on. The second section we call researching. What we mean by that is you focus narrowly on one strand of biblical teaching at a time, and you do your collecting of all your biblical data, but then you also look at individual key texts on that doctrine and you seek to really grapple with them. The systematic theologian needs to be an exegete. We need to work with it linguistically and literally as well as theologically. Then, of course, you take the work on the individual texts that you do and you use what the old divines use to call the analogy of Scripture where you compare Scripture with Scripture until you have a consensus in your own mind of the major truths the Bible is presenting on that particular doctrine. And then you ask various questions of yourself. What’s the intent? What’s the logic? What’s the application? How can we really live out this doctrine, and so on. And then you’ve got to of course deal with the various texts. Are they in a covenantal setting? What kind of setting, what kind of genre are they in? Are they typological in some way? That has to be factored in. Then we also have a large stress, we believe in doing Reformed theology, in looking at the Reformed historical context as well as really being familiar with confessional Reformed statements. And we think that’s important because really that’s a digest. I mean, things like the Westminster confession of faith, the Heidelberg catechism, really, they are a digest of Reformed theology, so we want to be very much in tune with them. And then we try to capitalize, in the book, on the great books of the past and see what people like Calvin and other major Reformers said about the doctrine, as well as some of the great Puritans and great Reformed experiential divines of the eighteenth, nineteen and twentieth centuries.
The third approach that we are stressing is when you actually go then to write your systematic theology, you’ve got to bring all of this together. And that’s where the sweat and the tears come in. You leave a lot of stuff on the cutting floor, of course, because you don’t want to be so long that you bore people, but you want to keep moving through one doctrine at a time. So we tried to do each doctrine in 15 to 20 pages, something like that. You bring it together by organizing all your topics, first of all in an outline, and then you develop a full systematic academic presentation. In the process, you explore relationships between doctrines.
Another part of doing systematics would be after you set out the biblical and the historical positions, you then deal with various objections. That was the old style and we thought that works well. So, you have an objection coming from the reader, “yes, but what about this?” And then you respond to the objections. We try to do that in most chapters. And then you apply the doctrine, as I said, to the believer’s experience and to our practice, our walk of life.
We purposely tried to make these volumes not too difficult, so the average, I would say fairly educated layperson should be able to read them without difficulty. We are trying to write it in a style that is easy to read and we are trying to assist in applying it to the believer’s heart by closing each chapter with a hymn or a Psalm, and then questions for meditation. What we’ve done with the questions, Fred, is we’ve divided them into two sections. The first section is for the average layperson and those answers can be found back in the chapters, so it can be used for Bible study groups and things like that. The second section is more for seminary students or pastors or things like that.
Zaspel:
Can you give us a brief overview of this first volume?
Beeke:
Sure. The first half of the first volume deals with what you call prolegomena which is the first things first, and that simply means that you deal with what is theology, what is doctrine, what is dogma and how do you distinguish them? And how do we do theology, first of all as Christians, but also as Reformed people? Then, after you talk about theology and doing theology, you’ve got to deal upfront with how do you know God is speaking? What is your authority base? And so you deal with the whole Doctrine of Revelation. Revelation is usually considered fully 50% of your prolegomena. You deal with natural revelation in nature, but you deal also with special revelation, namely the Scriptures. That entails looking at all kinds of properties about the Bible, its authority, clarity, necessity, unity, efficacy, inerrancy, infallibility, sufficiency, things like that.
Then we took a couple of chapters, due to the popularity of Pentecostalism and charismatic movements today, to deal with the question of cessationism. We believe that the Bible has the final word, so those are important chapters that I think are needed today. And then we have a full chapter in consistency with the whole set of books that we are hoping to do called Applied Revelation for Practical Fruit. How does God take his Word and apply it to our souls and to our life? So that’s the first half of the book.
The second half deals with what’s called the first locus of theology, often called theology proper, which is the doctrine of God. Who God is, and, of course, here we are already getting above our heads because we can’t grasp the fullness of God. But we look at the various attributes of God, the various names of God, and that takes up several hundred pages because there’s so much to say about God.
Then we spend I think three chapters on the Trinity and their relationship as divine persons. And then we look at all the works of God that are within God, that is, the decree of God, and that branches out into predestination, which in turn branches out into election and reprobation. We show how those doctrines developed also through Reformation history. Then we look at the doctrine of providence. We are including that, also, under the Doctrine of God. Finally, the Doctrine of Angels and Demons usually is incorporated in theology proper. Some systematic theologians put it elsewhere, but we decided to include it here. So, we have a traditional approach to the division of the subjects. Basically, Volume 1 is the Doctrine of Revelation and the Doctrine of God.
Zaspel:
Tell us about the full project in big picture – how many volumes do you anticipate, what topics will they each cover, and when do you expect this will be complete?
Beeke:
Well, Volume 2 is on the Doctrine of Man and the Doctrine of Christ. So that would be Anthropology and Christology and we are two chapters away from completing that right now. We have fifty-three chapters done and we’ve got two to go. That needs to be submitted to Crossway by June 15, 2019, so we are working hard on that right now. That won’t be printed, however, until October of 2020 because it takes Crossway about fifteen months. They do a careful job of editing, then they send it out to different people to review it to see if there are any problems, so it takes a long time.
Volume 3 – we’re going to do something a little different here, because in my teaching, I spend an extra credit on Soteriology, the Doctrine of Salvation. We’re putting some Pneumatology material about the Holy Spirit and who he is and how he functions in the Old Testament and New Testament, that type of thing, maybe two or three hundred pages of that, at the beginning of Volume 3. So, Volume 3 is really Pneumatology, the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, with the focus on him, and Soteriology, the Doctrine of Salvation. That will be about nine hundred pages on the Doctrine of Salvation, so it will end up being about as long as the other volumes. They are all going to be about 1200 to 1300 pages each. That’s a little unique to have a whole section on Pneumatology before Soteriology, but we think that’s important in our day, where there is a lot of confusion about the Holy Spirit. That volume, the whole section on Soteriology, is actually done already. We actually began with that first, but when we signed a contract with Crossway, they said, we want to begin with Volume 1. We are 70% done with Volume 3, and we’re about 95% done with Volume 2, so we are coming along quite well.
Then volume 4 is going to be the really time-consuming one, which of course, will be the last two loci of traditional Reformed systematic theology, which is Ecclesiology, the Doctrine of the Church and Eschatology, the Doctrine of the Last Things. Now, because I have never taught Ecclesiology (it’s the only one I haven’t taught), I’m going to spend a summer and the fall semester, which is my sabbatical, of 2020 trying to write most of that section. That volume will be the most work in terms of what we don’t have done. That will probably take two years, so we are hoping to have it all done by 2023, if God spares us both.
Zaspel:
You’ve been teaching systematic theology for many years now, but this project finally comes about only with the help of Paul Smalley. Tell us about his role in this work.
Beeke:
Yeah, Paul has a key role, so I’m giving him a full co-authorship. I’ve always felt this way, and I told him from the beginning. He’s the first TA I’ve ever had in my life…I’ve had him about seven years. He’s really a gift from a donor and just a wonderful blessing. He’s really learned to think like I think, and so on. What he does is he takes all my notes from teaching for about thirty years and he smooths them out, footnotes them, and then also addresses things I didn’t have time to address in class. And then presents it back to me and I go over it, tweak it, add things, subtract things, we talk, and we finalize. That has worked extremely well.
When I was a teenager, Fred, I really felt called by God, when I was called to the ministry when I was fifteen, I felt called by God actually to write a full systematic theology. I just felt there wasn’t something relevant for Reformed people that was really accessible. In my twenties that was my dream constantly, and I did a lot of reading, but when I got into my thirties I realized this is just a pipe dream, I can never accomplish this, I’m too busy.
Zaspel:
Then life took over, right?
Beeke:
Yeah. Then in my forties I thought, you know what? If I could just manage to get a Soteriology volume out, that’s probably the most I could do in the rest of my life. Then when Paul came on board in my late fifties, I said to him, “what do you think, Paul? If I gave you my notes on Soteriology, do you think you could turn this into a first draft of a book for me? And then I would go over it and we could co-author it.” He said, “I would love to do that.” And he turned that around in about one year, which was really surprising to me, and pleasing. And at that point I said to him, “you know, Paul, my dream since a teenager has been to do the whole of systematic theology. What would you think of taking my notes on another course?” So, he did Anthropology in another year. At that point I said to him, “you know, Paul, we’ve got to make up our minds, if we’re going to get someone like Crossway or RHB to do these books, what if we were to just do the whole thing? Would you be willing to go home and pray with your wife and commit five years of your life to me? That you will go anywhere, you won’t leave me; and I’ll commit five years of my life to this project and we’ll see it through to the end, if God spares us, healthwise.” So, he came back a couple days later and said, “you know, I’m committed to this.” So that’s how it all was born. At that point Crossway came into the picture, which was a huge boost, as well.
One other exciting thing about this – I wanted to say to you, Fred, I’m really excited about this – is we actually are writing this at a beginning seminary level, toning it down a bit academically so it’s not overwhelming for beginning theological students, but at the same time informative enough so that it really is a textbook that will be usable all the way through the fourth year of M.Div. program. It’s not really a ThM or PhD textbook, so much, because then we’d have to really upscale the academic end. But we wanted it simple enough that it could also be translated into all kinds of languages and used in seminaries around the world, because most seminaries tend, in most foreign countries, to be at a slightly lower level, theologically, than American academic seminaries. Already it’s being translated into Portuguese and Chinese and it’s going to be into Korean and hopefully into Dutch and a number of other languages. We’re hoping for about fifteen languages in the end. We really want this to be used as a standard text for a lot of Reformed schools around the world. So, pray with me to that end.
Zaspel:
Yes, Absolutely! And I think, by the way, that you have accomplished the goal of pitching it well to a beginning theological student but at the same time—I haven’t read all twelve hundred pages of this first volume yet, but I have looked through it considerably, and it has struck me that this is on the one hand substantive and solid, and yet it is accessible. You’ve reached your goal, I think.
Beeke:
Well, that’s great. That’s great, because that’s exactly our goal.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Joel Beeke about his new work on Systematic Theology. It’s a valuable contribution, and we happily commend it. Just glance through the Table of Contents, and you’ll see that a rich and profitable time of reading awaits you.
Joel, congratulations on this new accomplishment, and thanks for talking to us again today.
Beeke:
Thank you so much, Fred, and if it’s not out of place, I’d like to say that the first month, it’s out now, Reformation Heritage Books is offering it at a 50% discount which won’t continue forever. But right now you can obtain it for thirty dollars a volume at HeritageBooks.org.
Zaspel:
Great! Thanks a lot.
Beeke:
Thank you.
