Norm’s popular “in one volume” edition of his Systematic Theology is available for sale in a hardback printed edition. If you’re in the USA, you can now order a copy from Amazon:
If you’re interested in making an in-bulk pre-order at a significant discount, please contact us here to let us know.
Contents
Please click here to view its table of contents as a PDF file
Overview
With a brilliant mind and a Christ-intoxicated heart, Norm Geisler devoted his life to understanding the God who revealed himself indirectly in the natural order (Rom. 1:19-20; Ps. 19:1-6; Acts 14:17), powerfully in human history (Ex. 6:7, Josh. 4:23-24, Acts 17:26; Gal. 4:4), propositionally in the God-breathed Scriptures (Lk. 24:27), personally through the incarnated Word (Jn. 1:1-12; Col. 1:15; Hb. 1:1-3), and spiritually through his Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10-16). This book is arguably the greatest fruit of his seven-decade long quest to know God and make him known. It is his magnum opus and his λογικὴν λατρείαν. This is a matured work of a veteran theologian. Its contents were refined for over sixty years (1959-2019) in the classroom crucibles of some of the finest evangelical seminaries and colleges in the United States. Adding to its uniqueness and value is the fact that it was written at the pinnacle of his long career as a defender of the faith who powerfully “destroy[ed] arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:3-5). Some of that power is stored in this book. This material also flowed from the shepherd’s heart; Norm sincerely wrote and worked to help present the church to its redeemer as a bride both “pure in devotion” and “undeceived in thought” (2 Cor. 11:1-3). We at Bastion Books are very pleased to bring it back into print.
This 1,664-page systematic theology is divided into nine parts: a unique introduction that explains the preconditions of theology, a rigorous bibliology, theology proper, creation, humanity and sin, salvation, ecclesiology, eschatology, and various appendices. At the risk of oversimplification, the perspective from which the book is written is generally Thomistic, mild-Augustinian, mild-Calvinist, baptistic, premillennial, dispensational, and non-denominational. Norm was transparent about the fact that his theology being influenced significantly by Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, C.S. Lewis, Erich Sauer, and countless others. Standing on the shoulder of giants allowed him to see much further, he insisted. But he also disagreed with them all at various points and proceed to construct his own unique system of theology that was remarkably—but not radically—original. So, while in one sense he was a scholar who interacted with thousands of books, in another sense, he was ultimately a man of one book—the Bible. He insisted, “Only one book, the Bible, I read to believe. All other books I only consider.”
History & Disambiguation
Between 2002 and 2005, Norm published a four-volume set of systematic theology books through Bethany House / Baker Books. In 2011, Bethany/Baker produced a slightly-abridged and lightly-updated amalgamation of the four-volume set into a new one-volume, 1,664-page edition. Both the one-volume and four-volume editions went out of print in 2019 and the rights to both were returned to the Geisler estate. Other than a few minor typos being fixed, the contents of this 2021 one-volume edition are the same as the original one-volume edition by Bethany House in 2011. No new content was added.