Biblical and Systematic Theology

Biblical theology asks what this writer, in this book, at this point in the story, was saying in his own idiom. It follows the order of the material, which is historical. It expects Amos to sound like Amos and John to sound like John, and it treats the differences between them as data rather than as noise to be filtered out. Its characteristic question is: what does this text contribute, here, at this stage of what God was doing?

Systematic theology asks what the whole Bible teaches on a subject. It follows a logical order rather than a historical one, gathering everything scripture says about God or sin or the church and arranging it into an account a person can hold and act on. It works in conversation with the creeds and confessions and with the philosophical questions that the church's arguments have thrown up over two thousand years. Its characteristic question is: what, then, is true about this, and what follows?

Both questions are legitimate and neither reduces to the other. That should be obvious and is often denied in practice. Preachers trained only in systematics tend to treat every passage as a container for doctrine, so that a psalm becomes an illustration of providence and Ecclesiastes becomes a problem to be solved. Readers trained only in biblical theology tend to produce a rich description of six different theologies of suffering and then find, when someone actually suffers, that they have nothing to say.

The discipline of biblical theology, as a self-conscious enterprise with a name, is usually dated to an inaugural address given by Johann Philipp Gabler at Altdorf in 1787, on the proper distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology. Be honest about what Gabler wanted. His programme was rationalist: separate the historically conditioned parts of the Bible from the universally valid parts, so that dogmatics could be built on the second. Modern biblical theology that is confessionally orthodox has inherited Gabler's question while rejecting his answer, which is worth knowing, because the discipline's founding move was designed to limit dogmatics rather than to feed it.

Geerhardus Vos, born in the Netherlands in 1862 and dying in America in 1949, occupied the chair of biblical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1893 until 1932. His inaugural address in 1894, on the idea of biblical theology as a science and as a theological discipline, and the lectures published after his death in 1948 as Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments, are the fountainhead of what most people now mean by a redemptive-historical approach.

His definition is worth memorising because it packs in the whole programme. Biblical theology, he said, is the branch of exegetical theology that deals with the process of the self-revelation of God deposited in the Bible. Three words carry the weight. Process: revelation came in stages, and the stages are not arbitrary but cumulative, so a text means what it means at its own point in the sequence. Self-revelation: what God gives is himself in word and act together, not a supply of information. Deposited: the record is in the Bible, so the discipline is exegetical and not speculative.

Vos gave the relation between the two disciplines an image that has stuck, and it is his own sentence, in the introduction to Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments, where he compares the two disciplines: 'Biblical Theology draws a line of development. Systematic Theology draws a circle.' The line is history moving from promise towards fulfilment. The circle is the finished account, in which every part is related to every other. Neither drawing is false and neither is the other. Look the sentence up in its own paragraph rather than trusting anybody's quotation of it, including this one, which is what this module has been asking you to do throughout.

Two of his emphases matter for your reading. First, revelation is organic rather than additive: it grows like a seed into a tree rather than accumulating like a pile of bricks, which means an early text is not a defective version of a later one but a whole thing at an early stage. That single idea will save you from a great deal of condescension towards the Old Testament. Second, from The Pauline Eschatology in 1930, Vos argued that for Paul eschatology precedes soteriology: the coming age has broken into this one, and salvation is what it means to belong already to the age to come. Whether you follow him there, the claim shows what biblical theology can see that a topical arrangement tends to miss, because a system with a chapter on last things at the end will not easily notice that its author put them at the beginning.

The line from Vos runs through Herman Ridderbos and Richard Gaffin into much current Reformed writing, and in Britain through Graeme Goldsworthy and the whole industry of books on the storyline of scripture. It is worth saying that this is one tradition of biblical theology rather than the discipline itself. There is a very different lineage, running through Gerhard von Rad's theology of Israel's traditions and through the varied twentieth-century attempts to write a theology of the New Testament, which asks the same historical question with quite different convictions about what the history was. A student who has only read the redemptive-historical stream should know it is a stream.

Systematic theology's characteristic sin is flattening. It happens quietly and it happens to the best. A system fixes the meaning of a term, and thereafter every occurrence of the term in scripture is read in the fixed sense, so that faith in Hebrews 11, which is persistence in the face of unseen promises, gets read as faith in Romans 4, which is trust that receives a verdict. Both are real. They are not the same shape, and a reader who has one definition will hear one of them and not the other. The same flattening turns Qoheleth's voice in Ecclesiastes into an error to be corrected before it can be heard, makes the prophets say in advance what Romans says later, and reduces James to a footnote whose only job is to not contradict Paul. Notice the mechanism: the flattening is not done by bad exegesis of the individual verse but by the prior decision about which verses get to set the meaning.

Biblical theology's characteristic sin is the opposite, and it is less often named because it looks like modesty. The discipline describes; it can be reluctant to prescribe. Carried far enough, every statement is qualified by its point in the history and by its author's distinctive idiom, and the reader is handed a catalogue of theologies with no instruction about what to believe. The mid-twentieth century saw this happen at scale. The so-called Biblical Theology Movement in Britain and America collapsed under criticism, partly from James Barr, whose 1961 book The Semantics of Biblical Language demolished a good deal of its philology, and its obituary was written by Brevard Childs in Biblical Theology in Crisis in 1970. What had gone wrong was not that the movement asked historical questions but that it could not get from its historical results to anything a church could confess.

So each discipline holds the other honest. Biblical theology keeps systematics answerable to what the writers actually said in their own voices. Systematics keeps biblical theology answerable to the question a believer is actually asking, which is not what Paul thought in the fifties but what is true and what she should do.

The classical instrument for getting from one to the other is the analogy of faith, the analogia fidei. The phrase comes from Romans 12:6, where Paul speaks of prophesying according to the analogy of faith (Greek analogia tes pisteos); the BSB renders it 'let him use it in proportion to his faith', and whether Paul means the speaker's own faith or the body of belief is disputed, the later rule of interpretation taking it in the second sense. As a rule of interpretation it has two standard formulations. The Reformation form is that scripture is its own interpreter, sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres, stated at Westminster Confession 1.9: the infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself, and where a place is obscure it is to be read by places that speak more clearly. The Roman Catholic form appears at Dei Verbum 12 and in the Catechism at 114, where the analogy of faith names the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and with the whole plan of revelation. The instinct behind both is the same: a single divine author implies a coherent whole, so a reading that leaves scripture at war with itself is probably a misreading.

Now the question that will not go away. Is the analogy of faith a discovery about the text, or a constraint imposed on it in advance? The case that it is a discovery is strong on its own terms. If the collection really has one divine author, then expecting coherence is not an imposition but an inference from the nature of the object, in the way that expecting a single author's novel to hang together is not an imposition. And the alternative is not neutrality: a reader who approaches the canon expecting contradiction has also brought a prior commitment, and will find what he expects just as reliably.

The case that it functions as a constraint is also strong, and it is strongest at the point of application. The rule says to read obscure places by clearer ones. Who decides which is which? In practice the interpreter's system decides, which means the rule can convert a theological preference into an exegetical result without anyone noticing the conversion. Ernst Kasemann pressed this hard in a 1951 essay on the New Testament canon and the unity of the church, later collected in English in Essays on New Testament Themes. Do not soften his thesis, because the provocation is the point: his claim is not that the canon permits a general diversity of emphasis but that the canon, as such, provides the basis for the multiplicity of the confessions, which means the denominational division of the church is underwritten by its own scriptures. He also insisted that every reader operates with a canon within the canon, a set of texts that governs the rest, and that the honest course is to declare yours rather than pretend you have none. Luther declared his: in the 1522 preface to his German New Testament he ranked John, Romans and 1 Peter highest and put Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation on a lower shelf, calling James an epistle of straw by comparison, a phrase he removed from later editions but a judgement he never really withdrew.

The workable position, held by people across the spectrum, is that the analogy of faith is legitimate as a theological commitment and dangerous as an exegetical shortcut, and that everything depends on when it is applied. Applied after a passage has been allowed to say its own thing in its own words, it is the discipline of a reader who believes scripture is one book. Applied before, it is a filter, and it will produce exactly the theology it was set to produce.

Put the two sentences next to each other and do not flinch. Romans 3:28: 'For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.' James 2:24: 'As you can see, a man is justified by his deeds and not by faith alone.' Both writers reach for Abraham, and both quote Genesis 15:6. The BSB's 'deeds' in James against its 'works' in Paul slightly softens the collision, because the Greek noun is the same in both. On the surface, one man affirms exactly what the other denies, and he uses the phrase faith alone to deny it. This is not a puzzle invented by liberals. It is why Luther reordered the books of his New Testament, and it is why the Council of Trent, in the ninth canon of its sixth session, condemned a form of the formula of faith alone. Be exact if you cite that canon, because a Catholic reader will check it: the canon itself names no scripture, and James stands behind the argument of the decree's chapters rather than inside the canon.

The standard reconciliations, each stated as its defenders state it, with the cost attached.

First, the two writers use the verb in different senses. Paul's dikaioo means to declare righteous before God; James's means to be shown or vindicated as righteous, before God and men. The Greek supports the vindication sense elsewhere: Matthew 11:19 says wisdom is vindicated by her actions, and 1 Timothy 3:16 says He was vindicated by the Spirit (in both, the BSB prints 'vindicated' for the very verb it prints as 'justified' at James 2:24). James's own framing is often said to point that way too, since 2:18 reads, 'Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.' Handle that verse carefully. It opens, 'But someone will say, "You have faith and I have deeds,"' and commentators disagree about where the objector stops speaking; a substantial body of them reads the whole verse, or more of it, as the objector's words, while the BSB's punctuation, which closes the objector's quotation after the first sentence, gives the second half to James. That punctuation is the translators' decision, since the Greek has no quotation marks. If the objector is still speaking, the verse tells you about James's opponent rather than about James's vocabulary, which is precisely where this argument wanted to use it. The cost: that, and James 2:23, which says the Scripture was fulfilled that says Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. That is reckoning language, so James has stepped into Paul's vocabulary and the neat division of senses has to be defended rather than assumed.

Second, they use the word faith differently. James's target in 2:14-19 is bare assent, a creed with no consequences, and he says the demons have that much. Paul's pistis is self-abandoning trust which by its nature acts, which is why Galatians 5:6 says that what matters is 'faith expressing itself through love'. On this reading the two men would agree entirely about the thing itself and are describing two different things with one word. The cost: it requires James to be using a sense of faith he never defines, and it rests on a psychology of faith that Paul states and James does not.

Third, they use the word works differently. Paul's characteristic phrase is works of the law, erga nomou, and on the readings advanced by James Dunn and N. T. Wright this points specifically at the boundary markers dividing Jew from Gentile, circumcision and food and calendar, which is why Romans 3:29 moves immediately to whether God is the God of Gentiles also. James's works are bread and clothing for a brother who has neither. If the two men mean different things, the contradiction is verbal. The cost: Romans 4:4-5 and Ephesians 2:8-9 are hard to confine to boundary markers, and scholars such as Stephen Westerholm and Simon Gathercole argue at length that Paul's target is broader than that.

Fourth, they face different opponents. Paul confronts people adding law to faith; James confronts people subtracting obedience from faith. A writer fighting on one front will say things that sound careless about the other, and neither would have recognised the other's opponent as his own. The cost: this explains the difference of emphasis without quite explaining the difference of wording, because James did not have to use the phrase not by faith alone and he did.

Fifth, they are speaking about different moments. This is N. T. Wright's version, argued most fully in his 2009 book Justification: present justification is by faith alone, while the final verdict at the last day is given on the basis of the whole life lived by the Spirit, which is the judgement according to works that Paul himself teaches at Romans 2:6-16 and 2 Corinthians 5:10. On this account James is describing what Paul also expects at the end. The cost is that it is contested from both sides: Reformed critics hold that it makes works the basis rather than the evidence of the verdict, which is precisely the question the Reformation turned on, while other critics hold that Romans 2 is doing something else entirely in Paul's argument.

Now the view that the tension is real and should be left standing, held to the same discipline as the five above. It comes in three strengths and each has its cost. The historical form: if James is answering Paul, or a slogan drawn from Paul, he is correcting a position rather than talking past one, and Martin Hengel argued that James contains polemic aimed at Paul himself. The cost: the dating is load-bearing and unsettled, and an early James, before about AD 50, which Douglas Moo among others considers possible, cannot be answering Romans at all. The theological form is Kasemann's and Bultmann's: the canon contains genuine diversity, the drive to harmonise is the church's need rather than the text's, and Bultmann in his Theology of the New Testament treats James's statement as a misunderstanding of Paul rather than a complement to him. The cost: calling one writer's statement a misunderstanding requires a canon within the canon to decide which writer sets the standard, and once that is granted it is the reader and not the text who has settled the doctrine. The mildest form is held by many who are not radicals at all: James wrote the words not by faith alone, and any harmonisation whose conclusion is that James meant by faith alone after all has silenced him, so it is better to confess that both writers are true and that no formulation yet makes the tension vanish without cost. The cost of that one: it is an accurate description of the problem which still leaves a congregation without counsel, and that is the failure the next paragraph is about.

Watch what the two disciplines just did, because this is the whole lesson in one paragraph. Biblical theology is what made you read James as James: his own opponent, his own Genesis chapter, his own idiom, his own sentence left standing in its own words. Without it you would have reached the reconciliation first and never heard him. Systematic theology is what makes you answer the frightened woman in your congregation, because she cannot act on a description of two first-century idiolects; she needs to be told what is true about her standing before God and what follows for her Tuesday. Without it you are a historian with a pulpit. The two disciplines are not rivals for the same job. They are two jobs, and a teacher who can only do one of them will fail his people in a predictable way.

At the start of this module you could read a passage on its own terms. That is a real skill and most readers do not have it. What you could not do was say what happens when a whole collection is read as one book, and after lesson 03 you know better than to state the number of books in that collection as though everyone agreed on it. This is the harder half of the discipline, because it is where the church is most divided and where confident people say the most careless things.

You can now face the New Testament's use of the Old without either of the two evasions. You can show a student what is actually difficult about Matthew 2:15 and Jeremiah 31:15 and Galatians 4, state Longenecker's position and Beale's and the sensus plenior proposal in forms their defenders would accept, and say which parts of the question remain open. That is more than most seminary graduates can do.

You can distinguish a typological reading that is arguable from one that is invented, and you can show your working. You have six controls and you know why they are controls and not a formula. You can watch the scarlet cord reading fall over in public without becoming cynical about Christ-centred preaching, because you also know that Hebrews does the same operation on the tabernacle and does it well, and you can say what the difference is.

You can give an honest account of the canon: two orderings of the Old Testament and what each ending does to a reader, three Christian positions on the deuterocanonical books stated as their own defenders state them and each with a fact it has to handle, the fact that there was no Council of Jamnia, the actual shape of the New Testament's formation from Marcion to Athanasius in 367, and the criteria that were really applied. You can explain to a neighbour whose Bible is larger than yours why she has Tobit, and to a neighbour whose Bible is smaller why he does not, without insulting either of them, and you can then say where you stand and on what grounds.

And you can hold James and Paul together in a way that leaves both of them speaking. You know the five standard reconciliations and the cost of each, you know the case for leaving the tension standing, and you know which discipline is doing the work at each stage. More importantly you know what to do when you next meet a tension of that kind, which you will: hear each writer in his own voice first, then ask what a believer should now do, and never let the second step retroactively edit the first.

One thing to carry out of the module. Every question in it was a question about trust: whether you can trust the apostles' method, whether you can trust a reading you cannot fully demonstrate, whether you can trust a collection whose edges were settled slowly by people arguing. The answer this module has tried to model is that honesty is what trust is made of. A student who has been shown the hard cases and the open questions, and who has watched a teacher say plainly which is which, has something a student who was handed tidy answers does not have. He has a faith that has already met the objections, and he knows what it would take to change his mind.