The order of doctrine

In principle I don't think too much ought to be read into the order in which doctrines are treated by various authors.  What matters is the conceptual core, the weight put on different doctrines, the organisational structure.  And that cannot be read off a contents page.  Some people, after all, save the best til last.  You have to actually inhabit a person's thought for some time before it becomes possible to discern the central pillar.  So I wouldn't want to give this little thought more weight than it warrants.

Still, it seems to me that order is not wholly insignificant.  Schleiermacher saved the doctrine of the Trinity for the end, and that is revealing.  More recently I've been reading volume 3 of Bavinck's Reformed Dogmatics, and I think it is somewhat significant that he begins his soteriology with a chapter on covenant before moving on to the Person of Christ.  It seems to me that this formal order affects the material content.  Salvation is a matter of a legal structure, and the importance of Christ is that he makes the legal structure work.  I think that is skewed away from the content of the biblical witness.  It is striking as well that the covenant idea is read back, in this stream of Reformed theology, into the Trinitarian foundation of the economy, something which I think ought to make us all uncomfortable.

So, without making too much of it, I think the order of theological presentation can matter.