By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
The one thing that now seems clear is that there is no overlap between the respective tasks of historical, systematic, and practical theology. Thus, if one can speak, as I have spoken, of a "historical" phase and task of systematic theology, this is not any phase or task properly belonging to historical theology as well as to systematic theology. So, too, if there is a "hermeneutical," or "exegetical," task of systematic theology, it is distinctively different from any such task belonging to properly historical theology—in the way in which the interpretation of systematic theology differs from the interpretation of historical theology. (I.e., whereas historical theology interprets how Christian witness has in fact been formulated, systematic theology interprets how it by right should be formulated, whether or not anyone has ever so formulated it.) And so on.
Whether or not this will require, in effect, retracting things I've said I do not know—or care. The point is simply that the tasks of the three disciplines are not the same, but different, and this no matter how closely they may be related.
Spring 1991
3/16/1
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