What is Biblical Theology?

What is Biblical Theology?

There are many ways to read the Bible. You can read it pastorally, applying it to concrete practical issues in life and culture. You can read it exegetically, parsing through the text word by word to see the nuances of what it says. You can read it systematically with an eye to construct a meta-framework of what the Bible says on various topics.

All of those are helpful ways to read the Bible, but if you can’t read it in terms of biblical theology, you are missing a vital piece.

Biblical theology is not just “theology based on the Bible.” It is a discipline that seeks to shed light on the way the writers of the Bible looked at parts of scripture that preceded them and wove them into what they were writing, and how God himself unfolds his plan of redemption across time and across the pages of the Bible. It is about tracing key themes, and unpacking them to see how the whole Bible hangs together.

Think of the Bible as a tapestry of interconnected threads. Biblical theology follows the threads to see where they lead, where they double back on themselves and tie into what came before, where they converge en masse at key passages, where the former threads foreshadow and promise the latter, and the latter threads look back and relate to what came before. Once that work is done, biblical theology stands back to see the whole tapestry in all its complexity and beauty.

Case Study: The Theme of Kingship

The Bible is not a loose collection of disconnected ancient texts. Rather, it is a cohesive whole telling one large story. However, it tells that story by telling hundreds of smaller stories that tie into the larger meta-story and reenact it in miniature over and over again.

Take the theme of kingship. If you wanted to tell the story of the Bible with the broadest brush strokes, you could tell it as a journey from creation, through the Fall, into redemption, and the new creation. However, if you wanted to be more specific, you could tell the story using one of the scripture’s themes, such as kingship, which parallels and mirrors the shape of the larger story of God’s redemption. If you wanted to be even more specific, you could zoom in on the theme of kingship to study all the micro-narratives of the individual kings in the Bible. Moses’s conflict with Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, would be part of that story. David’s rise to the throne is part of that story, as is the fall of his son, Solomon. The tales of all their descendants (both good and bad) make up part of the theme of kingship too.

Yet, even once you understand how all these kings fit into the theme of kingship, the work of biblical theology isn’t done because all the stories point beyond themselves toward an Ultimate King. The earthly kings’ brightest moments hint at the goodness and power of the True King. Their foibles and failures express a longing and need for an Ultimate King to come. Biblical theology surveys all those micro-stories of kings and traces out how the trajectories they set and the longings they develop culminate and are fulfilled in the True King, Jesus.

Fundamentals of Biblical Theology

What are some tools in the biblical theology toolbox? If you want to read the Bible this way, what do you have to believe about the Bible first? I can think of four things:

1. The Bible is a divine book.

2. The Bible is a human book.

3. The Bible references itself.

4. The details matter.

Just click on the links here to read the different posts in the series.

Andy Patton is a worker at English L'Abri (podcast) and is the co-editor of the Three Things Newsletter. 

If you'd like to dig deeper into Biblical Theology, why not check out the books below as a starting point!