This Systematics course is taught by Davenant Teaching Fellow Ryan Hurd, and will run from January 11 through March 20. View the syllabus here.

This course articulates the fundamentals of method and procedure in systematics, in the area of doctrine of God. As such, the course handles what is absolutely common and assumed to actually saying anything at all of God, both with respect to his essence/attributes and the Trinity. In short, the course deals with what one needs to know as a prerequisite in order to speak God in the theological science.

The brief overview of topics covered is as follows (see the syllabus for a full course description). The course covers how we speak of God from our position as creatures, reading the two books of natural and supernatural revelation. We articulate how to “predicate” (attribute) perfections of God, and how there are various types of perfections that must be treated in a way associated with that specific category. We cover how the divine attributes are formally in God and so are said of him literally, “per prius,” and also meaningfully, even though God is simple in every way. We cover univocal, analogical, and equivocal predication, and then begin with relative names of God said from time, where we spend a significant portion of the course. The course concludes with how “qui est” (“He Who Is”) is the most proper name of God, and what this actually means (and what it doesn’t), particularly in expounding what God is in the functional specialty of systematics.

Course readings will be in English, and are centered primarily around Thomas Aquinas’s ST I q 13 aa 1–12, in conjunction with relevant other passages throughout Thomas’s opera. Nonetheless, the lectures will take care to pull from the high medievals (e.g., Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Capreolus, Denis the Carthusian), the neoscholastics (e.g., Cajetan, Ferrara, Banez, Zumel, Vasquez), and of course some of the best of the Reformed orthodox (e.g. Voetius, Polanus, Mastricht, Danaeus, Musculus, Maccovius, De Moor).