Welcome Faith Seeking Understanding! This is first ever module ever, and our hope is that we’ll get better over time, as we get feedback from you and iterate. Our vision here is this: to equip you develop a biblical worldview, grounded in the Bible as a whole, and integrated with knowledge from his creation, to know and serve him better.

Our plan is to meet like this in modules of five or so weeks every six months, with each of these modules touching on a different aspect of that vision. The first three modules will be the following:

• Intro to biblical theology: how we read the Bible as a whole

• Systematic theology on God: how we can combine scripture and philosophy into a coherent picture of God

• Practical theology on ethics: what it is, how to think about the good life, the different approaches taken in philosophy and the Bible, and then two weeks of particular issues and topics

Tonight we’re starting with biblical theology.

What is Biblical Theology?

Theology is “the study of God”. Christians break up our theology into different categories. Examples: exegetical theology, natural theology, biblical theology, systematic theology. I guess you could even talk about meta-theology. Biblical theology is the study of God's plans and purposes as they are revealed progressively in his dealings with humanity. We may ask, Why do we distinguish biblical theology, when all Christian theology presumably involves the Bible in some way?

Let’s take a take a step back. Is the Bible one thing or many things? Well, it depends.

It’s helpful to think about the answer at three levels:

At the lowest level, the Bible (which just means “books”) is an anthology of diverse literature, written or composed by different people, using different sources, at different times, with different purposes, and different audiences. We can group these into different sections, and they all have different genres.

Moving up a level, we can recognize that all of these books are windows into an overarching story, about God’s plans and purposes in history, involving his people, that culminates in Jesus. And like any story it is a progression, being a single story that develops and changes over time. A progression implies both unity and diversity: unity because it’s one story, and diversity because it’s made up of different stages.

And finally, at the highest level, we have an absolute unity, where there is no progression but rather eternal truths about God and humanity that are equally true at all times.

We engage in theology at every one of these levels, but our tools and our subject matter will have to accommodate what we’re working with. Consider how we would look at John 1 at each of these levels.

At the lowest level our goal is exegesis, or exegetical theology, which is understanding what each author is trying to communicate in each case. We break texts into sections and study them, we study the structure and composition of books, their big ideas, and so on. With exegetical theology our main question is, What is the author doing here? At this level, John 1 this functions as a prologue of John’s gospel, that contrasts and themes he’s setting up that will be explored, the allusions to the original creation story and Exodus, and so on.

At the middle level we have biblical theology. Here our aim is to understand the overarching story that all the texts of the Bible are trying to communicate to us, which includes both what the text of the Bible points us to and what it presupposes behind the scenes. There is a sort of zig-zagging feature here, where later texts presuppose earlier parts of the story, that earlier texts taught us. With biblical theology we ask, What is the whole Bible doing in this part of it? At this level, John 1 is the next stage in a number of ideas that have been developed through God’s dealing with humanity and Israel: humans as an image of God, God working through humans to bring about his purposes, there is a special person called the Son of God, and so on.

At the highest level we have systematic theology. Here our aim is to combine what we know from the Bible with anything we can know from creation, to build a system of thinking about God and humanity as they are in themselves, not as they progress in a story. Of course, there is a recognition of progression, as when we talk about the incarnation, but it’s studied from an abstract perspective rather than as a progression. With systematic theology we ask, What is God revealing about himself and humanity? At this level, John 1 answering questions about whether Jesus is both human and divine, whether having two natures means you need two persons, what importance the humanity of Jesus plays in his atoning death, whether God died on the cross, and so on.

Thus, it is called biblical theology not because it’s the only one engaging with the Bible, but because it’s the one that tries to study God in the way he’s revealed himself to humanity. That is, it studies God's plans and purposes as they are revealed progressively in his dealings with humanity.

Why do biblical theology?

We might wonder why biblical theology is important. What’s missing if we just focus on what this or that passage says (exegetical theology) or whether this or that doctrine is correct (systematic theology)?

First and foremost, it’s because biblical theology corresponds most closely with the way God has chosen to reveal himself, namely through his plans and purposes in history. Clearly, he thought it was important to work in this way, and the more we work at building tools and frameworks for working with this the better.

But secondly, failing to give the proper attention to biblical theology has negative effects on both on how we read the Bible and our systematization of the truth it contains. If our exegesis does not pay close enough attention to the overall unity of the biblical story, then we will divorce the Old Testament from New Testaments, so that sometimes it feels like we have an Old Testament reading at church only because we have to. Reading the New Testament without the Old Testament is like opening a book and reading the last chapter and trying to understand what’s going on. On the other hand, when we try to do systematic theology without biblical theology, then we will routinely read technical terms back into the Bible, when in reality the biblical authors didn’t have those in mind at all. We’ll see this in detail in our later talk on sanctification.

How do we do biblical theology?

So far we’ve outlined what biblical theology is and why it’s important. Now the question becomes, how do we do it? With exegetical theology we use the tools and techniques we’d use to study and text, like structure, context, repetition, linking words, and so on. Systematic theology can get quite complicated, incorporating insights from different fields of study, particularly philosophy. But we’re familiar with the task of systemization, since it’s what we tend to do with all sorts of knowledge. And we nailed the general structure of systematizing theology back in the 1100s with a theologian called Peter Lombard.

Biblical theology deals with a long history, involving many different aspects, and so things are a lot more messy than we’d like. But there are two general principles that can help us in our task.

First, we decompose the biblical story into “themes” or “ideas” that develop as the story progresses. Studying these themes gives us an idea of the underlying—and more complicated—biblical story, sort of like how studying contour lines on a map can give us an idea of the terrain it represents. Studying everything in one go would be too much for us to keep in mind, but if we pick the right themes then they can each be manageable. There are general approaches and tools that we might use, but I’m inclined to think we need to determine for each theme the best tools to use when studying it, rather than trying to fit everything into one big framework.

Second, as far as is possible we should try to study the progression of a theme across the whole biblical story in one go rather than in a piecemeal fashion. The more themes we do the more we will understand the biblical story, so it is tempting to do a bunch at a time, stopping at each point in the biblical story to see how each theme has developed. But really this just prevents us from seeing any of these themes develop over the whole biblical story. There’s just too much information to keep in our heads, and it is better to get use one theme to get a feel for the whole story before moving onto the next one.

As a short worked example of these two principles, we’re going to do our first biblical theology tonight. Following the example of Graeme Goldsworthy, we will trace the theme of God’s Kingdom throughout the biblical story. At each stage of the biblical story we can ask about God’s kingdom: who are his people, where is his kingdom, and how does he rule over his people in that place? Between stages we can ask what changed things from one to the next. The table below summarizes the stages and transitions with notes and references on the right. You can also look at our Bible timeline for a visual summary of the biblical story.