You say, “Just because it hasn’t been done yet, who says one can’t think systematically, in a way that is solidly connected with lived experience?” Two reasons: (1) in 1800 years, we’ve not seen one, and (2) what you see in the substance of Clarks remark, (23).

Clark: I think that is a very nice way of putting it, though I’d not thought of it. Heidegger’s use of the everyday is not quite what I mean because it has implications–such as inauthenticity–that I would prefer to avoid. Nevertheless, the language of systematic philosophy, indeed of most philosophy, is technologicall (in a broad sense) and scripture is not.

Are you getting at Heidegger’s notion of averageness or everydayness? That theological talk, by adopting a technical jargon, loses connection to that everydayness and thus in a sense Daesin in its authentic mode?

Why are concepts (in your sense), as human constructs, more unreliable than words (and the thoughts that go with them)?

Meantime, let me try something: Philosophers have a tendency to make up meanings for words that have little to do with lived experience. The words used in the scriptures (bread, fish, father) are firmly embedded in human lived experience. Words firmly embedded in lived experience are more likely to be putting us in touch with something real, as opposed to figments of our imaginations. Philosophers’ words by contrast often merely refer to fictions. If we are trying to be faithful to our experiences of God, then we should stick with words like bread, fish, and father, more than words like omnipotent, or metaphysical substance.

If your thinking is something like that, well, I’m sympathetic. But I don’t see that this has any more than a historically coincidental connection with systematic theology. Just because it hasn’t been done yet, who says one can’t think systematically, in a way that is solidly connected with lived experience? I think our sample size for judging tendencies of systematic theology is too small to make very good generalizations. We have basically one tradition to go by, and there are a lot of other explanations for their mistakes than the fact that they were trying to think systematically.

However, I also think that in philosophy and in philosophical theology we create concepts of various kinds that then have an existence of their own. Ordinary words aren’t human constructs in the same way that philosophical terms are.

You said:
To understand the Divine in terms of concepts and their relations to each other–in other words, in terms of knowledge in the quasi-mathematical terms in which knowledge has been construed since the Enlightenment–is to understand the Divine through a human construct. If I worship the construct, that which I know and understand, then I worship an idol.

The reason you offer for why systematic theology is especially likely to lead to idolatry is that the concepts it works with are human constructs.

But the scriptures are constructed of human words. I don’t see that these words are any less human constructs than the concepts of systematic theology. Also, words are naturally understood as invoking concepts, though not necessarily the same concepts as those used in systematic theology. I’m not sure what to make of the difference between a word and a concept as such (except by recognizing cases of equivocation), or how to understand words without using concepts (e.g. a concept of faith invoked by “faith”).

Could it be that your worry is that certain kinds of concepts are more likely to misrepresent God than others? For example, concepts that are defined by tidy definitions, as contrasted with concepts whose content is filled in by an accumulation and digestion of experience?