An interview with Paul Helm

Our good friend Guy Davies the Exiled Preacher has posted an interview with professor Paul Helm here.

The interview deals with philosophy, systematic theology, Barth, Edwards, Calvin and the much maligned Charles Hodge.

Here's a snippet:

"The content of systematic theology should correspond with the label on the jar; it should be systematic, that is, connected up, coherent, consistent, contemporary, and as clear as can be, and it should be about God and his ways. In view of these requirements, the Hodge-Berkhof tradition of systematic theology is indispensable.

What I have chiefly complained about in print (in my usual cantankerous way) is that Hodge and co. have been dismissed in a shamefully unscholarly manner by various evangelical theologians...who should have known better – he is allegedly ‘foundationalist’, an ‘Enlightenment’ thinker, ‘inductive’, ‘scientific’, as a result of which he and his kind have been rubbished.. These epithets have been hurled at the poor man from ignoramuses who do not seem ever to have bothered to open the first pages of volume I of his Systematic Theology to see how he actually operates. What kind of scholarship is that?"