The organization of the traditional theological loci is remarkably stable across the history of systematic theology. Open almost any major volume, from Turretin in the seventeenth century to Berkhof, Erickson, Grudem or Wellum in the twentieth, and you can practically predict the table of contents before turning the first page. Prolegomena sets the stage, then Bibliology establishes the principium cognoscendi, followed by Theology Proper, Anthropology, Christology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, and finally Eschatology bringing up the rear like the closing movement of a long symphony. Some theologians skip formal prolegomena and move straight into Scripture or the doctrine of God, but the overall architecture remains familiar enough that students quickly learn the rhythm.

Every so often, though, someone rearranges the furniture and you suddenly notice the room differently. Thomas Finger’s Anabaptist Christian Theology: An Eschatological Approach famously begins with Eschatology, which at first feels backwards until you realize how deeply Anabaptist theology is shaped by lived expectation, discipleship under the coming kingdom, and the ethics of a people already oriented toward the end. Start with the future, and everything else reads differently. The order becomes an argument.

Yesterday I ran across a Methodist systematic theology that opens with Christology, and I have not quite shaken the idea. There is something quietly compelling about beginning not with method, nor even with Scripture abstractly considered, but with the person of Christ Himself. After all, the New Testament does not introduce theology through epistemological preliminaries. It announces Jesus. The apostles preached a person before they articulated a system. Even the canon’s coherence, one might argue, is discovered christologically before it is defended bibliologically.

The more I think about it, the more the logic presses in. If Christ is the fullest revelation of God, the hermeneutical center of Scripture, and the mediator of all divine knowledge, then beginning with Christology is not a novelty but a retrieval. Calvin hints at this instinct when knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves unfold together through Christ, and Barth, of course, builds his entire dogmatics around the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Different traditions, same gravitational pull.

If I ever summon the courage to finish my own systematic theology, I suspect I may reorder the loci entirely. Not for novelty’s sake. Just to let the structure confess something before a single argument is made: theology begins where the gospel begins, with the living Christ, and everything else learns its place by orbiting Him. Sometimes changing the order is not cosmetic. Sometimes it reveals what we really think stands at the center.