Systematic Theology Class

I will be interested to see what responses you get. 

I don't have a recommendation, at least not at the moment. I would certainly want to have read said book before using it. I also think it is important that the book be readable and inexpensive, unless the group is well read and able to drop $50+ for a book study. 

I took a quick look at Vyrso and found this, but have not read it: https://vyrso.com/product/39069/an-introduction-to-christian-theology 

Thanks for those reviews Floyd! [:)]

alabama24 said:

I will be interested to see what responses you get. 

I don't have a recommendation, at least not at the moment. I would certainly want to have read said book before using it. I also think it is important that the book be readable and inexpensive, unless the group is well read and able to drop $50+ for a book study. 

I took a quick look at Vyrso and found this, but have not read it: https://vyrso.com/product/39069/an-introduction-to-christian-theology 

I really like Justo Gonzales, and did not know about this one, 'bama.  I would think this to be a good book to use, except that it doesn't cover (overtly) some basic, classic, doctrines (the Holy Spirit, for one).  

David Taylor Jr said:

What is a good resource to introduce a group at church to systematic theology in a neutral manner? Any suggestions?

For example, one that gives multiple sides of an argument, has a Logos edition, but still available in hard copies for the class as well.

I'm excited for you, David, sounds like an interesting class!  I like Erickson for a good overview.  I am not Reformed as he is, and his views will skew toward his theology, for sure--but that said, I do find his tone pretty irenic, his offerings balanced, and his scope thourough.  AND I gave a copy of it to my best man in my wedding.  [8-|]

I'd think the abridged Introduction to Christian Theology would be the route vs. his Christian Theology.  The former is a third the size, at 440ish pages.

Maybe use Beliezikian as a basic, readable text and cast Logos on the screen for side by side comparisons of Erickson, Grudem, and Geisler.  

Not mentioned here, and probably not as accessible for the common learner, I still think Oden has a good set.  You might find it useful for his many references (and links to) historical works, many in Logos.  He shows the unity in theology across many denominational streams.  I have copied a big chunk of his opening chapter on Jesus Christ to get a feel for his narrative.  the further one reads, the more he highlights theological subpoints and ties them to scripture and theological/historical development.  This opening portion has more flowing prose (?):

CHAPTER 1

Why Christ?

AN UNFORGETTABLE LIFE

Christianity arose out of a particular human life ending in a disturbing, terrible death—then, resurrection. The meaning of Christianity is undecipherable without grasping the meaning of Christ’s life and death and living presence.
“Christ is the central spot of the circle; and when viewed aright, all stories in Holy Scripture refer to Christ” (Luther, Serm. on John 3:14, WLS I, p. 148; WA 47, 66). Luther compared the Scriptures to “A lute player who always plays only one little song”—Christ, promised and sent (Pentecost Serm., John 3:16 [1532], WLS I, p. 147; WA 36, 181). It is from Christ that Christianity derives its name, its mission, its identity, its purpose, its very life (Acts 11:26; John 15:1–5; Augustine, Hom. on the Epist. of John I, NPNF 1 VII, pp. 460–68).

Christian Teaching Is Personally Grounded

Christianity is a relation to a person. It is not essentially an idea or institution. It has defined itself in canon and tradition as a relation to Christ. He is the one to whom faith relates and in whom faith trusts. Gustavo Gutiérrez writes: “Being a Christian does not mean, first and foremost, believing in a message. It means believing in a person” (PPH, p. 130).
Christian teaching is therefore personally grounded. It lives in response to a personal life yet alive. Christian teaching only serves to show the way that leads to faith in this person. That the Christian community emerges and lives out of personal trust in this person is simply a fact (John Chrysostom, Hom. on John LVII, NPNF 1 XIV, pp. 204–206).
A consequent discipline—Christology, the study of Christ—has emerged in the attempt to understand this fact. Such an attempt to understand the identity and activity of Christ cannot be incidental to Christian teaching. It is central and specifically required if one is to reflect upon Christian worship, Christian community, or the Christian life. If one remains mute or inattentive at this point, it means that one has elected not to inquire into Christianity. We must try to understand why this person is so important in this religion and why he is finally attested as nothing less than God (Athanasius, Incarn. of the Word 15–21, LCC III, pp. 70–75). That is what Christology is all about. Christian teaching and the study of Jesus are inseparably bound.
Christians know God as the One revealed in Jesus. Other ideas of God are measured in relation to that idea of God known in Jesus. The approach to that idea of God knowable only through the history of Jesus must begin with the study of Jesus himself. This is distinguished from the view that assumes that Jesus is not knowable and that therefore one can only begin with the study of others’ proclamation about Jesus.

His Uncoercive Influence

It would be difficult to think of a single person who has affected human history more profoundly than Jesus of Nazareth. This alone would make the study of him significant. Yet this is not the primary reason he is studied. He is not studied as Alexander and Napoleon would be studied, for their enormous power or political sway over millions. His influence is not outwardly measured in terms of worldly power (John 18:36) but remains uncoercive, person-to-person, spiritual, subtly transforming, inconspicuous (Martyrdom of Polycarp, LCC I, pp. 152–57; Athanasius, Incarn. of the Word 46–57, NPNF 2 IV, pp. 61–67; Clare of Assisi, Testament of St. Clare, Francis and Clare, CWS, pp. 226–32).
The modern spirit of historical inquiry could not ignore the history of Jesus. His footprints are all over the Western literary, moral, and social landscape, and on every continent. Who has affected history more than he? No other individual has become such a permanent fixture of the human memory. He has been worshiped as Lord through a hundred generations.
Through the centuries Jesus has been memorialized in architecture, painted on frescoes, embedded in stone by mosaic designers, prayed to by opposing armies, praised in conflicting ways by poets, and interpreted diversely by philosophers. Western history would not be Western history without him. It would be strangely unhistorical if the historians accidentally ignored him or decided to study all figures except the one who has affected Western history most. Indeed it is puzzling when his name is carefully avoided in high-school history texts.
The intellectual and moral struggle that has ensued from his life has penetrated every corner of Western intellectual history, psychology, politics, and literature. One cannot understand human history without asking who Christ is and what he did and continues to do. No one is well educated who has systematically dodged the straightforward question of Christology—a question that committed Jews or Muslims may ask and study as seriously as Christians or agnostics or hedonists—Is Jesus the Christ?
Historical inquiry into Jesus cannot avoid at some point overhearing the question Jesus asked to Peter: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” remains the concise pattern for subsequent Christian liturgy and confession (Moltmann, ICT, pp. 175–78). In saying this, Peter stood in a personal relationship with another person, Jesus Christ—not with an idea, abstract system, or institution, but an actual you in a real relationship. The confession was not about Christ, but to him. Peter did not say: “I am willing tentatively to trust the hypothesis that you are the Christ” or “The historical evidence seems to lead to this probable conclusion.” One says “You are the Christ” only to one who is alive. If Christ is not alive, forget about Christian confession—there is no one to whom to confess.
The meaning of Jesus’ life and death has never been a permanently dead issue to any generation since his appearance. It remains even today a matter of intense debate as to who Jesus was and what his life and death mean. Deeper even than the mystery of his astonishing historical influence is the simpler, starker question that rings through Christian reflection: Cur Deus homo? Why did God become human?

The Question Required by the Facts

The Facts Briefly Stated

Date of birth: between 5 B.C. and A.D. 4. Place: Palestine. Ethnic origin: Jewish. Vocation: probably first a carpenter, then a traveling preacher of the coming rule of God. Length of ministry: three Passovers (John 2:13; 6:4; 12:1). Date of death: Friday, 14 Nisan (the first month of the Jewish year), probably, by our calendar, April 7 A.D. 30 (or by some calculations 3 April, A.D. 33). Place of death: Jerusalem. Manner of death: crucifixion. Roman procurator: Pontius Pilate (A.D. 27–33). Roman emperor: Tiberius.

The Decisive Question

Christology focuses not simply upon bare facts, but upon what this life meant and how these events have been interpreted—especially as they come down finally to a single, pivotal question: whether Jesus is rightly understood as the expected Messiah of Israel, Son of God, Lord—or not. There is no way to dodge artfully this question so as to conclude that Jesus might be partially Lord or to a certain degree the Christ or maybe in some ways eternal Son or perhaps truly God (Perpetua, Passion of the Holy Martyrs, Perpetua and Felicitas, ANF III, pp. 704–706; Justin Martyr, First Apology 35, FC 6, p. 72). Finally, he must either be or not be the Messiah. He must either be or not be lord.
There is no middle way or golden mean. This is the startling question that his life constantly asks. The nearer one comes to him, the more clearly he requires that decision. It is the unavoidable issue that the observer of Jesus’ life must finally come up against, for Jesus himself presses and requires that decision. To avoid that issue is to avoid him. To avoid him is to avoid Christianity altogether (Kierkegaard, TC, pp. 66–71).

The Incongruity of an Apparent Failure

The portrait of his life among us, as offered by presumably honest eyewitness rememberers, is poignant, simple, and stirring. The closer we come to examine it the more we are likely to be profoundly moved by it.
He was born of a poor family, of a destiny-laden but powerless nation that had long been humiliated and stripped of national pride. The earliest traditions report that he was born in a squalid stable among animals in an out-of-the-way village, a refugee baby of a fleeing family seeking to escape political tyranny and violent religious persecution. He grew up in another obscure Galilean town having the unenviable reputation that “nothing good could ever come from there.” He learned to speak a language that has long been virtually forgotten and that never produced a widely read literature. He is never said to have written anything except with his finger in the sand. He was obedient to his parents. He followed the law. He worked with his hands as a common laborer.
He became an itinerant preacher, and was called “rabbi.” He had few possessions. He lived constantly among the poor and identified with their lowliness, recognizing them to be uniquely blessed with promise. To them he preached the good news of the coming governance of God. His disciples were not brilliant leaders or worldly-wise strategists. They were simple folk, mostly involved in the fishing trade, a variety of ordinary people, including some reprobates, whose lives were stunned and reshaped by their unforgettable meeting with him.
Even in the face of angry criticism, he did not cease to dine and converse with sinners, to mix with the lowly and disinherited. His closest associates followed him everywhere but often resisted whom they followed. He intentionally took the form of a servant. He washed the feet of his followers. He reached out for other cultures despised by his own people and valued their gifts.
In his company were women who had suffered wrenching social rejection. He considered it an incomparably memorable event that he was anointed with oil by one who was viewed as a woman of ill repute. Of all the people who might have been able to grasp the fact that he was to be anointed to an incomparable mission, it turned out to be a harassed “woman who was a sinner”!
Remarkable things were reported of him. He touched lepers. He healed the blind. He raised persons from the dead. These events pointed unmistakably to the unparalleled divine breakthrough that was occurring in history—the decisive turnaround in the divine-human story of conflicted love. He taught by parables—often simply, sometimes enigmatically. He heralded a new age. He called all his hearers to decide for or against God’s coming reign. He called for a high ethic of accountability. His behavior was radically consistent with his teaching.
Unscientific and lacking the advantages of advanced education, he became a controversial teacher. His coming was not publicly celebrated except in one brief ironic moment (his entry into Jerusalem). His ministry was constantly misunderstood by those closest to him and especially by those who had vested interests in the managing of power. He was born to a racial group widely despised and rejected; but he himself became even more despised and rejected by many of his own people.
His enemies plotted to trap him and finally came to take his life. His closest friends deserted him when his hour had come to die. He knew all along that he would be killed. He agonized in a garden. Sweat poured from his face as he approached death. He was betrayed by one of his closest associates. He submitted to a scurrilous trial with false charges.
His end was terrible. His back felt the whip. He was spat upon. His head was crowned with thorns. His wrists were in chains. On his shoulders he bore a cross. Spikes were driven through his hands and feet into wood. His whole body was stretched on a cross as he hung between two thieves. He felt completely forsaken. All the while he prayed for his tormentors, that they might be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing.
This is a sketch of the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus. It is this one whom the disciples experienced as alive the third day after his death. This is the incomparable person we are trying to study, whose extraordinary life we try to understand. The closer we make him the object of our study, the more we become aware that he is examining us.

Is There a Plausible Explanation?

How is it plausible that two thousand years ago there lived a man born in poverty in a remote corner of the world, whose life was abruptly cut short in his early thirties, who traveled only in a small area, who held no public office, yet whose influence appears greater than all others? How is it that one who died the death of a criminal could be worshiped today by hundreds of millions? This is the surprising disjunctiveness of his life, but not its deepest mystery. Why are people willing to renounce all to follow him and even die in his service? How is it plausible that two thousand years later his life would be avidly studied and worshipers would address their prayers to him? What accounts for this extraordinary influence?
Classic Christian teaching answers without apology: what was said about him is true—he was the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the one Mediator between God and humanity, who as truly God was truly human, who liberated humanity from the power of sin by his death on the cross. That hypothesis better explains what his life is and means than any alternative. It is theoretically possible for the study of Jesus to function without that hypothesis, but in practice it is exceptionally difficult, for one is forced to stretch and coerce the narratives to make any sense of them at all without that decisive premise. The documents give dogged resistance to the discarding of that hypothesis, because they think they know about his true identity. There is no other or better way to explain his extraordinary life. According to Christian confession, Jesus is either Messiah or nothing at all.

The Subject

Christology is that study that inquires critically and systematically into this person, Jesus the Christ. In him the fitting and true relation between God and humanity is alleged to be knowable. What that means is the subject of Christology.

The Unimportance and Importance of Christology

The systematic study of Jesus’ life is less important than trusting in the efficacy of his death. One may be saved by faith without passing an examination on Christology.
Yet his life and death remain the central interest of Christian piety and education. The events surrounding this individual are alleged to stand as the supreme truth of the history of revelation. The study of Christ implies the study of the divine plan for which humanity was created and the purpose anticipatively revealed toward which history is moving. In Christ God actively embraces fallen humanity and enables humanity to respond to God’s active embrace.
This is not a study that can be rightly undertaken by those who remain dogmatically committed to the assumption that nothing new can happen in history or that no events are knowable except those that can be validated under laboratory conditions.

The Study Occurs in Relation to a Worshiping Community

Christology is studied within the context of a worshiping community, just as Islamic theology occurs within the community of Islam. One cannot rightly study basketball and never see a basketball game. The “game” in this case is a living person, Jesus Christ. Where that person is regarded as dead, the game is not being played.
The New Testament itself frequently disavows that it contains an entirely new idea or understanding of God, for the one known in Jesus was already revealed in history before Jesus and in the Law and Prophets (Heb. 1:1–5). Yet in Jesus the reality of God is brought home and relationally received in an unparalleled way. The same God of Israel is experienced in an incomparably personal way through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Our purpose is to understand and teach Jesus the Christ as he has been understood and taught by those whose lives have been most profoundly transformed by him. If we were studying Hasidism or Sufism, we would hope the same of a Hasidic or Sufist interpreter. We would want to learn about the hasidim from those whose lives most profoundly embody their teaching. Christians also do well to study honestly the Vedics, Tao, Mishnah, Gemara, Tosefta, and Quran, while others are asked to take seriously the New Testament, and let the evidence be fairly presented.
There can be no denying that out of a two-millennia history in which Jesus’ life has been at times partially, wrongly, or self-interestedly remembered, vexations for humanity have also flowed—wars, divisions, inequities, and systemic injustices. A poorly developed, ill-formed understanding of Jesus Christ can limit our experience of Christ and collude with social sin. Hence it is imperative to think clearly about him if such distortions are to be avoided.

Ethical Consequences of Christology

Ethical Demands upon Christology

The incarnation is above all God’s own act of identification with the broken, the poor, with sinful humanity. God did not enter human life as a wealthy or powerful “mover and shaker” but came in a manger, amid the life of the poor, sharing in their life and identifying himself with the dispossessed. Liberation theology is poised to be profoundly strengthened by dialogue with classic exegesis.
There is embedded deeply in the best of early ecumenical teaching a pungent critique of sexual inequalities and of the propensity of male users of power to abuse that power. Gregory the Theologian argued in the fourth century that “the majority of men are ill-disposed” to equal treatment of women, hence “their laws are unequal and irregular. For what was the reason why they restrained the woman, but indulged the man, and that a woman who practises evil against her husband’s bed is an adulteress, and the penalties of the law for this are very severe; but if the husband commits fornication against his wife, he has no account to give? I do not accept this legislation; I do not approve this custom. They who made the Law were men and therefore their legislation is hard on women” (Gregory Nazianzen, Orat. XXXVII.6, NPNF 2 VII, pp. 339–40, italics added). When modern secularists assume that only they are capable of providing a critique of the dynamics of social oppression, it is well to be reminded of this powerful history of Christian social criticism.

Christ and Social Reality

Post-Marxist critics were not the first to ask about social location of interpreters or for an ethical clarification of the meaning of Christianity. There have been numerous times when the ethical consequences of the gospel have taken first place in the minds of those inquiring into Jesus Christ (notably Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Francis of Assisi, Menno Simons, Grotius, Zinzendorf, and the Blumhardts).
In certain periods of Christian reflection, it has become clear that it is not enough to speak of God’s own redemptive coming as if it lacked social consequence, but to spell out what that means for the increase of love and justice in society (as did Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Hooker, and Wesley). This was especially an excellence of nineteenth-century Christianity (notably in such figures as W. Wilberforce, Phoebe Palmer, F. D. Maurice, W. Rauschenbusch, and W. Gladden).
P. T. Forsyth has argued that the moralizing of theology is an essential feature of all modern Christian thought (PPJC, chaps. 7, 9). This plea for ethical accountability in speech about God is justified. It is a test that much classical Christianity passes better than modern Christianity (Athanasius, Incarn. of the Word 46–57, NPNF 2 IV, pp. 61–67). But it also runs the risk of reducing the Word of Life to moralism (cf. Allison, The Rise of Moralism).

The Tradition of Voluntary Poverty

Some imagine that a high Christology necessarily tends to be neglectful of moral responsibility. Those who buy into the Marxist view of history tend repeatedly to sound this alarm. Insofar as such a distortion occurs, it is inconsistent with classical Christian teaching, where the assumption prevails that the confession of Jesus Christ as Lord has insistent moral meaning and social implications. Christians who call for an identification with the poor do so out of a long tradition of voluntary poverty, which follows from Christ’s willingness to become poor for our sakes.

On Not Confusing the Kingdom of Christ with State Power

Pope John Paul II, having been himself a pastor who struggled under fire against totalitarian regimes, has written of those who “claim to show Jesus as politically committed, as one who fought against Roman oppression and the authorities, and also as one involved in the class struggle. This idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive man from Nazareth does not tally with the Church’s catechesis. By confusing the insidious pretexts of Jesus’ accusers with the—very different—attitude of Jesus Himself, some people adduce as the cause of His death the outcome of a political conflict, and nothing is said of the Lord’s will to deliver and of His consciousness of His redemptive mission. The Gospels clearly show that for Jesus anything that would alter His mission as the servant of Yahweh was a temptation (Matt. 4:8; Luke 4:5). He does not accept the position of those who mixed the things of God with merely political attitudes (Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; John 18:36). He unequivocally rejects recourse to violence. He opens His message of conversion to everybody, without excluding the very publicans” (Puebla Address [1979], CF, p. 196).
Out of the cauldron of the Nazi struggle, the Barmen Declaration similarly pleaded for a distinction between the gospel and the political order and rightly rejected a political fixation that would assume “that the Church might be permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions” (II.4, BOC 8.18). Barmen’s warning still needs to be heard: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State” (II. 4, BOC 8.24; cf. R. Shinn, D. Soelle, P. Berger, “A Politicized Christ,” Christianity and Crisis, 39 [1979]: 50–57).

A Word To Doubters

A central strength of the fiber of liberal faith has been that it has become difficult for liberals to raise the question of God apart from Christ and impossible to raise the question of Christ without probing its moral implications. Some who clearly recognize that Jesus is an excellent teacher and moral example have been unable to grasp, even when they tried, the reasons why Christianity still continues to speak of him as God, Messiah, Son of God, Lord, and Redeemer. Many morally concerned liberal Christians can honestly understand the church’s speech about the Father and the Spirit more readily than about the incarnate Son.
This study respects those whose integrity requires that they raise these ethical questions earnestly. To those who look for a time-tested clarification, this study reaches out. Two principles quietly prevail. First, some who wonder despairingly about the mystery of Christ have nonetheless already been deeply affected by him and may by study come to that recognition. Even those who may hate him (however difficult that is to imagine) can by stages move toward recognizing his hidden presence in their lives. Often those who most doubt his claims have been already addressed by those claims or they would not be so earnestly inquiring and doubting. Hence it is rightly said that doubters may be nearer to salvation than those still morally asleep.
Second, some who have been most actively engaged in social justice and political change who deny Christ’s deity nonetheless may remain profoundly affected by his continuing presence. Many are struggling for justice because they have first undergone the pedagogy of his meekness, peacemaking, and hope.
This principle, aptly stated by John Knox, remains applicable to a secularizing culture that is once again turning to the study of Christ: “Whether we affirm or deny, the meaning of ‘God’ is the meaning which Christ has given to the name” (MC, p. 7). H. R. Mackintosh remarks in the same vein: “The name of God has the final meaning that Jesus gave it.… He is an integral constituent of what, for us, God means” (PJC, pp. 290, 292).
Few understood better than Wordsworth how deeply the spiritual affections outdo the reasoning of secularizing humankind:

Pious beyond the intention of your thought;
Devout above the meaning of your will …
The estate of man would be indeed forlorn
If false conclusions of the reasoning power
Made the eye blind and closed the passages
Through which the ear converses with the heart.
(“The Excursion,” Book 4)

THE GOSPEL

Jesus Himself Is the Good News

Jesus did not come to deliver a gospel, but to be himself that gospel. The gospel is the good news of God’s own coming. The cumulative event of the sending, coming, living, dying, and continuing life of this incomparable One is the gospel.
The gospel does not introduce an idea but a person—“we proclaim him!” (Col. 1:28, italics added) The “him” proclaimed is one whose life ended in such a way that all before and after has become decisively illumined.
What was written about him was not written simply as biography, for biographies are written of persons who are dead and quite deactivated. A biography is a written history of a person’s whole bios (“life”). A biography of a person still alive is by definition incomplete. Rather the gospel is the account of a person who remains quite active, palpably present, whose heart still beats with our hearts, one who died who is now alive (Augustine, CG XIII.18–24, NPNF 1 II, pp. 254–61; Bonhoeffer, Christology).

The Gospel Defined

The Gospel a Summary of the Person and Work of Christ

Reflections on Jesus are often divided into discussions of his person and work, that is, who he was and what he did. The gospel unites these two: the person of the Son engaged in the work of the servant-messiah. These are one in the good news of human salvation. “Gospel” is the unique term that concisely summarizes and unites the person and work of Christ. Only this person does this work, which constitutes God’s good tidings to human history.
“Gospel” (euag̃gelion) is a distinctive New Testament theme, occurring over one hundred times. The term was embedded in Jesus’ preaching from the outset. His coming was announced as “good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10; Cyprian, Treatises XII.2.7, ANF V, p. 51). “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent” (Luke 4:43; Tertullian, Ag. Marcion IV.8, ANF III, p. 355). The medieval Anglo-Saxon root (god-spell) meant “good news” or “glad tidings” (Anglicizing the Latin bonus nuntius). The gospel, Luther thought, is to be sung and danced (Intro. to NT, WLS II, p. 561, commenting upon David bringing the ark to the City of David, 2 Sam. 6:14).
The Second Helvetic Confession sparely defined the gospel as “glad and joyous news, in which, first by John the Baptist, then by Christ the Lord himself, and afterwards by the apostles and their successors, is preached to us in the world that God has now performed what he promised from the beginning of the world” (XIII, BOC 5.089, italics added; cf. Ursinus, CHC, p. 101). God is now fulfilling what had been promised all along (Origen, OFP IV.1, pp. 259–64).

The Gospel Expected by the Prophets

The good news of Jesus’ coming was understood as fulfillment of prophetic expectation, as in Isaiah: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation” (Isa. 52:7; Irenaeus, Ag. Her. III.13, ANF I, pp. 436–37). In Isaiah’s setting the good news referred to the return of Israel from exile, yet it prefigured Jesus’ proclamation of deliverance of all humanity from sin (Augustine, CG XVIII.29, NPNF 1 II, p. 376; cf. Calvin, Comm. III, pp. 99–101).

The Gospel of God

Paul defined the subject of his letter to Rome as the “gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1). Mark probably entitled his narrative “the gospel of Christ” (Mark 1:1). Both thereby stressed the transcendent origin of the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth.
Various modifiers of the term “gospel” suggest different angles of vision upon the same series of events, viewed as the gospel of the coming of God’s righteousness (Rom. 1:17), or the gospel of grace (Acts 20:24), or of power (Rom. 1:16; 1 Thess. 1:5), or of truth (Gal. 2:14; Col. 1:5), or of hope (Col. 1:23). Yet in all these angles of vision it remains the singular gospel of Christ, the good news of God’s own coming (John Chrysostom, Hom. on First Cor. XV.1–2, NPNF 1 XII, pp. 226–28; Melanchthon, Loci Communes, LPT, pp. 141–49; Barth, CD IV/2, pp. 180ff.).

The Earliest Christian Preaching

The Kerygma of Acts

The earliest interpretations of the meaning of Jesus’ life are found in the oral traditions that fed the preaching reported in Acts (M. Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity). That preaching has been sparely summarized (Dodd, APD, pp. 21–24) in these six points:
(1) “God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer” (Acts 3:18; 2:16; 3:24).
(2) This has occurred through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, of Davidic descent (Acts 2:30–31), “a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs” (Acts 2:22).
(3) “God raised him from the dead” (Acts 2:24; see 3:15; 4:10), making him Lord and Christ (Acts 2:33–36), and “exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel” (Acts 5:31).
(4) God has given the Holy Spirit to those who obey him (Acts 5:32). “Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear” (Acts 2:33).
(5) Christ “must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything” (Acts 3:21; 10:42). Having suffered as Messiah and having been exalted as Messiah, he would return as Messiah to bring history to a fitting consummation. So:
(6) “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).
These points summarize the earliest Christian preaching. Subsequent creedal confession would generally adhere to this sequence and build upon it (J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds; SCD; CC; COC I).

Thomas C. Oden, The Word of Life: Systematic Theology, Vol. II (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 1–13.

Friedrich said:

BriM said:

Also, I note that Grudem's Systematic Theology has almost every sentence highlighted in the Logos community highlighting so I guess that is very popular.

lol!  . . . that's got to be helpful . . . 

In addition to that: Popular Highlights only counts what has been highlighted at all, not the details of the highlight or the user's intention: I tend to use grey highlighter for dubious passages, maybe some others mark up bad logic, faulty arguments or heresy (e.g. with bold double strikethrough on a warm orange glowing fire...) [;)] .

Grudem is very popular, since he writes on a lower level of "theologese" and is a good communicator. And the layout of his ST, with hymns, references to other STs from around the theological spectrum and annoated bibliographies per chapter is really great. That said, the heavy tome with its several pounds weight for several dozen chapters is surely not the right thing for the participants of the course - and in all topics that are relevant for Grudem, he is everything but balanced or even neutral (as a charismatic neo-calvinist with strong gender-compatibilism convictions he forcefully tries to push his ideas in these areas, much less conciliar than in the chapters unrelated to those topics). Btw you won't find my highlights popular in it, since I only own the paper version.

For a neutral and more lay-friendly ST (saturated in scripture but not prooftexting like older works), I'd strongly suggest "Practicing Christian Doctrine" (currently locked in a bundle not yet shipped from Logos, I own the Kindle edition) by Dr. Beth Felker Jones, who also features on Faithlife's new TH200 mobile Ed course (which seems to be even further away from shipment).