The establishment and integration of varied Christian ideas and Christianity-related notions, including diverse topics and themes of the Bible, in a single, coherent and well-ordered presentation is a relatively late development. The first known church father who referred to the notion of devising a comprehensive understanding of the principles of Christianity was
Clement of Alexandria in the 3rd century, who stated thus: "Faith is then, so to speak, a comprehensive knowledge of the essentials." Clement himself, along with his follower
Origen, attempted to create some systematic theology in their numerous surviving writings. The first systematic theology in Latin was Lactantius's
Divine Institutes, and the term
Intitutio would set a precedence for works of systematic theology in the western tradition. 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, wherein he thematically collected a great series of quotations of the
Church Fathers, became the basis of a
medieval scholastic tradition of thematic commentary and explanation.
Thomas Aquinas's
Summa Theologiae best exemplifies this scholastic tradition. 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, which is exemplified by
John Calvin's
Institutes of the Christian Religion. The 17th century saw a boom in focused systematic theologies within a renaissance of
the scholastic method.
Francis Turretin's
Institutes of Elenctic Theology (1696) and
Petrus van Mastricht's
Theoretical-Practical Theology (1680) became touchstone works in the field, profoundly influencing later theologians like
William Cunningham,
Jonathan Edwards,
Charles Hodge, and
Herman Bavinck. Similarly,
William Ames's systematic treatise,
The Marrow of Theology (1629)
, would become the standard textbook for Harvard and Yale in their nascent years. In the 19th century, primarily in
Protestant groups, varieties of systematic theology arose that attempted to demonstrate that Christian doctrine formed a more coherent system premised on one or more fundamental
axioms, often reasoned out as a form of
dogmatic theology. Such theologies often involved a more drastic pruning and reinterpretation of traditional belief in order to cohere with the axiom or axioms, and continental theology divided between various schools of
dogmatic theology, e.g.
Erlangen Theology (e.g.
F.C.K. Hoffman,
Thomasius, and
Gisle Johnson), Mediating Theology (e.g.
Isaak Dorner), classical confessionalism (e.g.
Hans Lassen Martensen and
Herman Bavinck), and liberal theology (e.g.
Friedrich Schleiermacher and
Albrecht Ritschle). In the United States,
Charles Hodge's
Systematic Theology became a popular text in conjunction with his work at Princeton Theological Seminary. Significant for this period,
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher's (
The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church [1821–1822]) espoused the fundamental idea of a universal presence among humanity, sometimes more hidden, sometimes more explicit, of a feeling or awareness of 'absolute dependence', and this became a focal point of either acceptation, integration, or rejection among theologians. As such, systematic theology in the 19th century became a sophisticated endeavor of developing and articulating theology from certain assumed first principles, often on the back of the philosophical conversations inherited from Hegel, Kant, and Schleiermacher. Systematic theology likewise saw a great variety of development into the 20th century, most notably with the advancement of
Neo-Orthodoxy and the multivolume
Church Dogmatics of
Karl Barth.
Helmuth Thielicke wrote his three-volume work,
The Evangelical Faith, as a confessionally-Lutheran theology with existentialist emphases, and
Wolfhart Pannenberg's three-volume
Systematic Theology is an eclectic example of modernist systematics that attempts to integrate faith and science.
Robert Jenson's two-volume
Systematic Theology, stands as a final installment of 20th century systematic theology, looking to questions of postmodernity from a Barthian perspective. Several popular-level textbook-style works emerged during this period within Evangelical theology, from
Lewis Sperry Chafer's eight-volume
Systematic Theology to
Wayne Grudem's stand-alone title
Systematic Theology, a particularly sophisticated non-textbook example being the epistemological worldview theology of
Carl F.H. Henry, contained in his six-volume
God, Revelation and Authority. Reformed theology also saw considerable contributions in the twentieth century, including
Louis Berkhof's popular
Systematic Theology and
G.C. Berkouwer's multivolume
Studies in Dogmatics. The latter half of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of systematic theologies dealing with critical themes from social, political, and economic perspective, including the
Liberation Theology of
James Cone and
Gustavo Gutiérrez, the
Post-liberal Theology associated with
Yale Divinity School, and
Feminist Theology (e.g.
Sarah Coakley). As such, the variety and perspectives of systematic theology in the 20th century has tracked well with both the broadening of ethical concerns post-World War II, its expansive pluralism, and the advent of postmodernism. ==See also==