Biblical theology

Reading the Bible as one story

In a broad sense ‘biblical theology’ simply means theology faithful to the Bible. As a branch of theology it means reading Scripture along the line of its story. The Bible is not a dictionary arranged by topic. It runs from creation and fall, through Abraham and the exodus, David and the exile, to Christ and the church and the new heavens and earth, and along the way God makes himself known ever more clearly. Hebrews says that after speaking through the prophets in many different ways, God in these last days "has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:2).

Jesus himself taught his disciples to read this way. On the day he rose, walking with two of them on the road to Emmaus:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself.

Luke 24:27

Biblical theology first listens to what a passage said in its own time and place. Then it traces how that word grows along the covenants until it reaches Christ. God's dwelling with his people, for example, runs as one thread from the tabernacle and the temple, to the Word who "became flesh and made His dwelling among us" (John 1:14), to the church in which the Spirit lives, and finally to the new creation. When earlier persons and events foreshadow a later fulfilment, the church speaks of typology; the principles of reading Scripture rightly belong to hermeneutics.

How it became a discipline

The church read Scripture as one story from the start. Late in the second century Irenaeus taught that God led humankind on step by step, and that in Christ he gathered up and renewed the whole history that began with Adam Irenaeus, Against Heresies. But biblical theology as a distinct discipline is modern. In 1787 Johann Philipp Gabler, in his inaugural address at the University of Altdorf, proposed distinguishing biblical theology, a historical account of what the biblical writers taught in their own times, from dogmatic theology, in which the theologian sets out teaching for his own day Gabler, On the Proper Distinction between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology.

Many later scholars treated biblical theology as historical study cut off from faith, and some read the Bible as a collection of voices that do not agree. In 1894 Geerhardus Vos, in his inaugural address at Princeton Theological Seminary, defined biblical theology as the study of the process by which God's special revelation unfolded in history, stage by stage, alongside his work of redemption Vos, The Idea of Biblical Theology. He liked to compare that growth to a seed becoming a tree.

Different ways of drawing the story

Evangelicals draw the Bible's storyline in different ways. Covenant theology reads the Old and New Testaments as the one covenant of grace unfolding through successive eras, and sees the church as the one people of God inheriting the promises made to Israel. Dispensationalism sees God revealing himself and governing in a series of distinct dispensations, and reads the promises to Israel and the church as distinct. New covenant theology stresses more strongly the difference between the old and new covenants. All of them hold that the whole Bible is one and leads to Christ; they explain differently how Israel and the church, and law and gospel, are related.

Biblical theology and systematic theology, which gathers Scripture's teaching by topic, keep each other honest. See the lessons Biblical and systematic theology and Law and covenant.