Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we are going to put a question before the church history figure, Charles

Hodge.

And it's a very important question.

What is systematic theology?

Well, Hodge is in a great position to answer that question,

because for 50 years from 1822 to 1878, he taught theology at Princeton Seminary.

Hodge was born in Philadelphia in 1797. When his father died, his mother moved him over to

Princeton. He was a student there at the university, then went to the seminary, and it was there in Princeton that he died in 1878. Well, in the years, 1871 to 1873, after all that teaching, five decades of teaching, and after a lot of living, seven decades

of living, Hodge was ready to write his systematic theology.

It was published in three volumes, and in the very first volume, the very first chapter,

and the very first section, Hodge calls theology a science. He speaks of the science of chemistry or the

science of astronomy or even history or political science. And in those fields, scholars in those

fields do not simply know truths. They also know the relationships of those truths, the connections, the causal

relations. They can even use that knowledge to think about what's going to happen in the

future and even in some cases sort of predict events that are going to happen in the future.

And so, Hodge says that if theology be a science, it includes something

more than a knowledge of facts. And that's something more than is, again, the relationship

of those facts. Hodge is zeroing in on this expression, systematic, a system, an arrangement of truths that shows the relations.

Hodge even likes the word the harmony of these truths. He wants us to see how all of these

truths fit together. For instance, what we think about the doctrine of God has everything to do

with what we think about the doctrine of humanity and what we think about the doctrine of God has everything to do with what we think about the doctrine of humanity

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