On my desk there is a manuscript from 1987 for use at Calvin Theological Seminary; it is an Introduction to Systematic Theology – 411 Prolegomena by Fred H. Klooster. Including the Appendices it is just over 300 pages in length.

Consider this: “Preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can go on for only so long before you lose your audience.” (Jeffrey Stout)

“Preaching is powerful because of the message it communicates (1 Cor. 1:21)” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 59).

When I was young my mother would read out loud the Cooper Kids Adventures books by Frank Peretti. I remember pacing back and forth on the hardwood floors behind the couch in our living room while my mother read suspenseful parts of the stories; periodically she would ask me if I was okay. I loved it–“Keep reading, keep reading” I would plea. She always acquiesced.

Jesus Christ said “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” But we live in a time when people (both non-Christians and Christians) oftentimes give more time and thought-and-consideration, while standing in the check-out line at Wal-Mart, as to whether or not to purchase an extended-warranty on their newest electronic gadget, than the time and thought-and-consideration they give for their soul. And so in this sense, our priorities are severely upside down.

We invest the majority of our time in things of little importance, and, regarding things pertaining to the eternal, our investments are small, while our deductions are large.

But why is this? For starters: we are sinful, and not only sinful, but Totally Depraved. Sin affects everything: our mind, our thoughts, our hearts, our desires. So, we desire and care for the temporal and short-term over the eternal. Additionally, we live in a society that does not encourage long-term thought; it does not engender thinking about one’s own soul. As the saying goes, it is difficult to swim against the current.

One thing we need to acknowledge is that American Pragmatism is the engine driving much of American Culture; by-and-large our society cares about the short-term and immediate over-and-against the ethical and eternal. We are, sadly, a ready-made and instantaneous-results infatuated culture. We want solutions now! for the problems we are faced with. (“I want the baby! Not the labor pains!”) And whether or not they are genuine solutions are irrelevant so long as we can get over the current hump-of-a-problem. And if the new solutions create future problems, then so-be-it. The attitude is: we’ll just cross that bridge when we get to it.

The danger of pragmatism is that it works . . . sorta. You can “get by” with pragmatic policies; in fact, you may even be really good at it–you may gain the whole world–but if you did so without the fear of the Lord, if you did so without righteousness, that is, without having God’s law written on your heart by the Holy Ghost, if you did so with the relativistic attitude that, “My duty is to do whatever it takes to make things work, to accomplish the thing I feel is important to accomplish,” then it simply means, in the final analysis, that you are not concerned with truth; you are not concerned with your soul; you are not concerned with God’s glory. And sadly, this means in the end, as J.C. Ryle put it, hell will be the truth you know best.

This sort of pragmatism is antithetical to Christian-living. We don’t just do “whatever works” – and we certainly aren’t relativists – we don’t believe that the thing you’re supposed to do is different than the thing I’m supposed to do because your truth is your truth and my truth is mine. Christians, contrary to pragmatic and relativistic thought, believe that God has revealed to us what is true, and revealed to us what is ethical–what is wrong and right, what we may or may not do. These soul-sensibilities, which are derived from Scripture, they are, as one author says somewhere, the thingamajigs that provide the shape of our souls. These holy thingamajigs, aka Scriptural sensibilities, will run counter-clock-wise against the ticking-time-bomb of pragmatism. Pragmatism is disinterested in Scripture, and this is its downfall; pragmatism, in the final analysis, is not interested in listening, only doing . . . but the deeds of pragmatism are done without a moral rudder, and the results are disastrous, not only for culture, not only for a society, but even more tragically, the results are disastrous and damning for many souls.

And how often do we find ourselves operating with pragmatic sensibilities? In our relationships? Interacting with a spouse, or disciplining and raising our children? We care more about what works rather than what God says in Scripture. And sure: we balance a budget, we paid down the mortgage, we stayed married all of life, and the kids grew up to be basically normal . . . but if we didn’t do it according to Scripture, if we didn’t do it while waiting before the Word and listening to God, if we gained the world but in the process lost our souls, then what profit is it?

“Viewed as a whole, firstly, the Christian account of history is eschatological not only in the sense that it comes to a definitive and everlasting end, but in the sense that the end is a glorified beginning, not merely a return to origins” (Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope in Western Literature, xi).

Author Peter Leithart in the “acknowledgements” to his book Deep Comedy says: “This book is dedicated to my third daughter, MargaretAnn, who at five exemplifies as well as anyone I know what it means to live out of and in deep comedy. She is a constant source of amusement, with her bizarre, frequently gruesome stories, her prankishness, her wildly expressive eyes. More imprtantly and profoundly, she exudes the childlike confidence and careless freedom that comes from knowing all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. And with her on my lap or in my arms, I am reassured that it will.”

“The biblical narrative quickly makes it clear that divine speech is to be a fundamental aspect of the special relationship that exists between God and those made in his image. Genesis 1:28-30 establishes the basic status and duties of humanity in relation to the created world, with God speaking to the man and the woman and telling them what they are to do, what authority they have, what they may eat, and what they must not eat. The arrangement is articulated using words; it is linguistic in its basic form” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 53).

Plain was it made and published abroad among men that an avenger to succeed their foe live yet long while after that woeful strife — Grendel’s mother, ogress, fierce destroyer in the form of woman. Misery was in her heart, she who must abide in the dreadful waters and the cold streams, since Cain with the sword became the slayer of his only brother, his kinsman by his father’s blood. Thereafter he departed an outlaw branded with murder, shunning the mirth of men, abiding in the wilderness (J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, 49).

“Modern culture has not really rendered creeds and confessions untrue; far less has it rendered them unbiblical. But it has rendered them implausible and distasteful. They are implausible because they are built on old-fashioned notions of truth and language. They make the claim that a linguistic formulation of a state of affairs can have a binding authority beyond the mere text on the page, that creeds actually refer to something, and that that something has a significance for all humanity. They thus demand that individuals submit, intellectually and morally, to something outside themselves, that they listen to the voices from the church from other times and places. They go directly against the grain of an antihistorical, antiauthoritarian age. Creeds strike hard at the cherished notion of human autonomy and the notion that I am exceptional, that the normal rules do not apply to me in the way they do to others. They are distasteful for the same reason: because they make old-fashioned truth claims; and to claim that one position is true is automatically to claim that its opposite is false. . . . Truth claims thus imply a hierarchy whereby one position is better than another and where some beliefs, and thus those who hold those beliefs, are excluded” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 48).