All too often, biblical and theological doctrines have been displaced, discarded, or forgotten in favor of therapeutic, relational, or managerial knowledge drawn less from the canonical Scriptures than from the canon of contemporary popular culture. The Kantzer Lectures address the crisis of theology in the church. In particular, they confront the powerful, and not entirely unwarranted, prejudice that theology is irrelevant and unrelated to real life. They do this by showing how the knowledge of God derived from revealed theology is indeed practical.

The special focus of the Kantzer Lectures is on the development of doctrine from Scripture and on the ways in which doctrine gives rise to the lived knowledge of God. Given the increasingly complex world in which the church now lives, there is nothing more practical, yet elusive, than Christian wisdom. Hence the aim of the lectures is not to add to the church’s stock of information – who, what, where – but rather to the church’s wisdom and understanding, and hence to the church’s witness and well-being.

Revealed theology deals not with arcane or obsolete knowledge. Theology is no trivial pursuit. On the contrary, as both Calvin and Kantzer insist, the knowledge of God is intrinsically linked with self-knowledge and with knowing how to live well to God’s glory.

The Kantzer Lectures in Revealed Theology are intended to be the evangelical equivalent of the celebrated Gifford Lectures in natural theology.

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 by a generous provision in Adam Lord Gifford’s will in which he stipulated that the lectures be held alternately at each of the four universities of Scotland. Since their inception, the Gifford Lectures have provided a quasi-institutional, university-based framework for seeking knowledge of God on the basis of science, philosophy, and nature. Taken as a whole, the Gifford Lectures constitute a record of the most important intellectual trends of the twentieth century. However, though Lord Gifford expressed a desire that the lecturers be “sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth,” he also stipulated that they treat their subject “as a strictly natural science … of infinite Being, without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.”