Biblical theology

Biblical theology is the discipline that traces Scripture’s theological content in the historical, canonical form the biblical writers themselves gave it, following “the gradual evolution of the several elements of revealed truth from their first suggestion through every successive stage to their fullest manifestation in the sacred text.”¹ Where systematic theology arranges Scripture’s teaching topically, biblical theology reads it book by book and era by era, attending to how each writer and period presents God’s self-disclosure. The two disciplines share one subject matter and, on a confessional reading of Scripture, need each other rather than compete.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith predates the term “biblical theology” by roughly a century and does not use it; the discipline in its modern, specialized form was not proposed until Johann Philipp Gabler’s 1787 academic address.² What the confession does state, in its opening chapter, is the shared ground both biblical and systematic theology stand on: Scripture is “the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,”³ and “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture.”⁴ Biblical theology’s premise, that Scripture’s own historical unfolding can be traced on its own terms, and systematic theology’s premise, that the same Scripture yields a coherent topical system, both rest on this same confessional commitment to Scripture’s sufficiency and internal coherence, rather than on any confessional statement about method.

Historical Development

Gabler and the founding of the discipline (1787)

Reading Scripture in terms of its own historical unfolding is not itself a modern invention. Parkison notes that a theologian as early as Irenaeus of Lyons (A.D. 130-200) articulated a redemptive history “remarkably similar to contemporary biblical theologies,” and cautions that calling Gabler the “founding father of Old Testament theology” is, strictly speaking, a misnomer: “for nearly two millennia Christians were doing theology with their whole Bibles, which included the OT.”⁵

What Gabler did found was biblical theology as a separate, independent discipline from dogmatics. In his 1787 oration “On the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology,” Gabler proposed prying biblical theology loose from systematic (or “dogmatic”) theology entirely.⁵ Parkison, quoting Gerhard Hasel’s summary, gives Gabler’s method as three moves: “(1) Inspiration is to be left out of consideration… . (2) Biblical theology has the task of gathering carefully the concepts and ideas of the individual Bible writers… . (3) Biblical theology as a historical discipline is by definition obliged to ‘distinguish between the several periods of the old and new religion.’”² “Ground zero for Gabler was Enlightenment rationalism,” Parkison writes, “a prioritization of the self-authenticating authority of human reason, which brought with it a rejection of dogmatic authority from Scripture, the church, or anywhere else.”² Hasel’s own assessment, as quoted by Parkison, was that biblical theology could now “become the rival of dogmatics and turn into a completely separate and independent discipline.”⁶

Vos and the Reformed reclamation

Later Reformed theologians took up “biblical theology” as a discipline while rejecting Gabler’s rationalist premise. Craig Carter writes that “Geerhardus Vos is an example of a theologian who did understand that biblical theology needs to make use of systematic theology in order to be faithful.”⁷ According to Carter, Vos’s own introduction to his Biblical Theology traced the term’s changing definitions through Protestant scholasticism, pietism, and Gabler’s Enlightenment rationalism, and identified the naturalism built into the nineteenth-century “philosophy of evolution” that had come to shape the discipline. Vos is quoted describing that naturalism directly: it “teaches that nothing can be known but phenomena, only the impressionistic side of the world, not the interior objective reality, the so-called ‘things in themselves.’ Such things as God, the soul, immortality, a future life, etc., cannot enter into human knowledge, which in fact is no knowledge in the old solid sense. Consequently all these objective verities come to be regarded as lying beyond the province of Theology. If the name Theology is still retained, it is a misnomer for a classification and discussion of religious phenomena.”⁷ Vos went on tracing the same historical unfolding of revelation Gabler’s method covered, but without bracketing inspiration.

Opposing Views

Two broad approaches to the discipline have run alongside each other since Gabler. The historical-critical stream, descending from Gabler and carried forward by writers such as Wellhausen, treats biblical theology as a purely descriptive, historical enterprise: it catalogs what each biblical writer believed without a prior commitment to the truth or inspiration of what is catalogued, and Parkison notes that much of the discipline’s subsequent history “has been an effort to build off of, and in many cases redeem, early works by men such as Gabler and Wellhausen.”⁸ The confessional stream represented by Vos instead treats the Bible’s own inspiration and canonical unity as data the discipline works from rather than brackets, and reads the same historical unfolding of revelation as God’s own self-disclosure.

Objections and Responses

Bracketing inspiration is what makes biblical theology a genuinely historical, scholarly discipline; readmitting it collapses biblical theology back into dogmatics. This is Gabler’s own premise, and it continues to shape the discipline’s historical-critical stream. Carter responds that reducing theology to a description of “religious phenomena,” in Vos’s phrase, is not theology at all but a change of subject: theology proper concerns “God, the soul, immortality, a future life,” precisely the things Gabler’s method rules out of consideration.⁷ Carter argues instead that “theology should be primarily exegetical and contemplative and should lead first and foremost to worship,”⁷ a task that requires treating Scripture’s own claims about God as claims to be believed, not merely described.

Related Doctrines

References

Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 21-22. ↩
Samuel G. Parkison, “Irresistible Beauty: Beholding Triune Glory in the Face of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), chap. 2, “The Metaphysics of Divine Beauty,” excursus “Metaphysics and Hermeneutics,” 77. ↩ ↩² ↩³
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, para. 6. ↩
Parkison, 75. ↩ ↩²
Parkison, 76. ↩
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Parkison, 78. ↩