The Best Systematic Theology? Berkhof's Systematic Theology Review
I spent about six months working through Louis Berkhof's Systematic Theology, the expanded edition, and I finished it convinced that it belongs on my list of favorite books. I marked nearly every page. Some weeks I got bogged down and wondered whether I would ever finish, but it was worth every hour.
What's in the book
The expanded edition opens with Berkhof's introduction to systematic theology and dogmatics, about two hundred pages, followed by roughly eight hundred pages of the systematic theology itself, all in one volume. The chapters are short enough to take a day at a time. If you break it up the way I did, you're reading anywhere from five to twenty-five pages a day.
What impressed me most is that nothing is left out. There are larger systematics than this one, but Berkhof covers the whole range: the existence of God, His communicable and incommunicable attributes, and on through to the last things and the various views of eschatology. For each doctrine he gives the history of how it developed, the opposing views and how people arrived at them, the teaching of the Old and New Testaments, and then the application. At the end of each chapter he adds review questions, which is a big part of why my copy is so heavily marked.
Where I landed
There was nothing in it I thought was unbiblical. There were a few positions I don't personally hold, such as his amillennialism and infant baptism, but I could see how he reached his conclusions. Over those six months my own thinking on several of those questions shifted, so I expect a second reading would serve me even better.
Should you read it?
Yes. It's probably not a book you sit down with for light reading, but it isn't hard to follow either. Berkhof writes clearly and cohesively. There's a fair amount of Greek, Hebrew and Latin, but you can keep up. And once you've read it, it becomes a reference you'll come back to for the rest of your life whenever you need to remind yourself what a doctrine means and how the church has understood it.
Soli Deo Gloria!
