Overview
The term “biblical theology” means different things to different people. DA Carson once said that, “like apple pie, biblical theology is something most people find difficult to oppose… unlike apple pie, biblical theology is rather difficult to define.” Some take it be only about doing an overview of the biblical story or history, others take it to be about the theology of the particular biblical authors, but the biblical theology we’re interested in at Faith Seeking Understanding is about doing theology in the way the Bible as a whole does theology.
The biblical story is a complex thing, made up of many interconnected themes and built upon ideas that may seem foreign to us today. So, we can divide our overarching biblical theology into sub-“biblical theologies”, one for each of these themes. Each of these biblical theologies is built by reflecting upon a theme and then tracing its development across the biblical story. Each of them will give us an incomplete picture, but if we collect enough of them they will serve as “contours lines” for the story that underlies them and connects them all together.
Now, themes can have different structures from one another, and if we don’t keep this in mind then we will fall into the trap of trying to squeeze and square theme into a round biblical theology! So, for this module, even though each biblical theology we cover has something to do with God living with humanity, we’ve made sure to cover three different structures: snapshots, cycles, and convergences.
With a snapshot biblical theology we pause at various points in the biblical story and notice how an idea develops between these “snapshots”. Using this we can piece together the progression of the themes connected to it. We used this structure for our lesson on The Temple.
With a cyclic biblical theology we notice a high-level cycle in the biblical story, and pay attention to how the two iterations of this cycle are similar to one another (which gives repetition) and how they differ from one another (which gives progression). We used this structure for our lesson on Sanctification.
And with a convergent biblical theology we trace the development of two or more ideas across the biblical story. These ideas will start out as separate and loosely connected, and over the course of the story become intertwined with one another. We used this structure for our lesson on God’s Spirit Among His People.
Lessons
Intro to Biblical Theology
Biblical theology is about studying the biblical story as a whole, rather decomposing it into isolated bits. This brings with it a number of challenges, as well as questions about how this approach to God’s word relates to other kinds of theology. In our inaugural lesson we discuss the progressive nature of the biblical story and what that means for how we tackle the project of biblical theology, we compare it to exegetical and systematic theology, and we lay the ground for future lessons by doing an overview of the entire bible.
Types and Other Tools
Now that we know what biblical theology is as well as how it relates to other forms of theology, the next question is how we actually go about doing it. In this lesson we go through a number of tools that can help us analyze the connections between parts of the biblical story, and thereby start piecing together a picture of the biblical portrait of a particular theme.
The Temple
After two lessons of introduction, we finally start with our first worked example of biblical theology: the temple. In this “snapshot” biblical theology we see how the temple is a theme that starts right at the beginning in the garden of Eden, and finishes right at the end in the new creation where God’s have no need for a temple. Along the way we see how the picture of the temple is unpacked as God’s people meditate more on what it means for the God of the universe to live among them.
Sanctification
You’ve probably heard of sanctification before, and been told it is all about our moral progress as God’s people. In this lesson we see that the biblical authors have something much deeper in mind, and that throughout the biblical story sanctification has to do with the presence of the holy God among his people. We see that the entire biblical story is a “cyclic” biblical theology of the sanctification of God’s people, and how Jesus drastically changed the shape of our sanctification.
God’s Spirit among his people
In our last lesson we study a “convergent” biblical theology, by looking at how God’s people and God’s Spirit start out as completely separate ideas, and as the biblical story unfolds we see how they converge on to one another. What does this mean for us now, as we wait for the day when God’s Holy Spirit will constitute our bodies?