Totality Transfer and Systematics

Some decades ago, James Barr criticized biblical scholars for a fallacy he labeled “illegitimate totality transfer.” By this phrase, Barr was referring to the habit of some biblical scholars to pack every possible meaning of a word into every context.

Lane Keister’s ongoing critique of my work on justification charges me with a form of illegitimate totality transfer. He writes, “What illegitimate totality transfer does is to import all or most of the meanings that a word has into a particular text. Now, Leithart is not necessarily doing that with individual texts. Rather, he is doing it with the relevant word-groups as it feeds into doctrine.”

It’s true that I’m not “necessarily” doing this with particular texts. In fact, when I’m dealing with particular texts, I do precisely the opposite: I examine the specific contexts where justification language is used to see what specific nuances are in view.

When Keister attempts to apply Barr’s concept to systematic theology, I don’t know he’s talking about. Systematic theology is precisely the effort to formulate a “total” view of a subject. When we formulate the doctrine of justification, we pay attention to all the passages that use the term, and all the different contexts in which it is used. Some relevant texts, of course, don’t use the term “justify.” The doctrine of justification, at least, should be placed within the larger context of a biblical doctrine of judgment (again, something I’ve been aiming at in my articles on this topic). But taking the texts that use the term into account is at least an important starting point.

That’s how doctrinal construction takes place: We examine the texts that use the word-group (along with other texts), in order to formulate a general concept of justification. If I were to impose this general summary concept on every use of the word “justify” in the Bible, I would be doing what Keister charges. But I’m not doing that.

To criticize me for taking all the texts that use the word “justify” into consideration when formulating the doctrine of justification strikes me as bizarre. Isn’t that what evangelical systematics is about – summarizing what the Bible says about X?