Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on Preaching and Biblical Theology in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
I should tell you right away that the topic that I’m dealing with this afternoon, Preaching and Biblical Theology, is actually the first of four. In one sense this one is not very well balanced unless you hear the other three, so let me at least tell you what the four are.
It was a series I first prepared for Australia: Preaching and Biblical Theology, Preaching and Systematic Theology, Preaching and Historical Theology, and Preaching and Pastoral Theology. The concern in each case was to ask.… How should these various disciplines inform, enrich, and shape our preaching? So there is a danger in only giving you one of these that I might engender the suspicion that I only really believe in biblical theology, and I’m not too interested in historical theology, systematic theology, or whatever. That simply isn’t the truth.
I’m interested in the whole lot, and yet they’re worth distinguishing so that you can see what each of the disciplines ought to contribute to systematic theology. So you are getting only one of those four parts this afternoon. I will try to allow enough time for questions, answers, and personal abuse at the end so that if you want to get back to me on any of these things, there will be time to do it. Let’s pray.
On so many fronts, merciful God, all of us are unprofitable servants, yet we do ask for the grace that will make us workers that do not need to be ashamed as we learn rightly to handle the Word of Truth. We ask in the name of him who is the truth incarnate, our blessed Lord Jesus. In his name we pray, amen.
Let me begin with definition, partly because biblical theology is one of those words that mean a lot of different things in a lot of different camps. Some people use it so generically that any theology that purports to be connected to the Bible is biblical theology, in which case, in can’t be distinguished from any of the others. In that sense, wherever people have tried to think in any sense systemically about the Bible, there’s biblical theology going on.
The expression itself was first coined in 1604, so far as the records have come down to us, in a German book called Teutsche biblische Theologie, German Biblical Theology. That book was merely a series of proof texts, a pamphlet of proof texts to justify Lutheran Protestantism. In fact, the book isn’t extant anymore. We know about just by the descriptions of the book from others.
By the time you get to Spener, the father of Pietism, he spoke of biblical theology over against dogmatic or systematic theology. Basically, what he meant was all the other stuff might have been orthodox, but his stuff was warm-hearted and pious as well, and he called that biblical theology. In other words, biblical theology was his, and everybody else was doing dogmatics. I’m not sure that he quite recognized that he was doing dogmatics too but with a little more warmth.
It’s not until you get to the 1700s, halfway through the eighteenth century, that you have the very famous lecture at University of Altdorf on the distinction between biblical and systematic theology and the proper distinctions of both. That’s the first part of the title, and it goes on and on. Basically, the argument that was advanced at this point was that biblical theology is interested in immediate induction from the text.
From the point of view of the speaker, systematic theology was becoming so finely philosophical, so abstract, so built on inferences upon inferences that nobody could agree with anybody. Everybody was scoring points. It was long removed from the Bible. The argument was if you just get back to the Bible and try and figure out what the theology of the Bible is, at least we have an agreed text, and we can start there. Then maybe we can build some systematics out of that. One of the edges that he had in this argument was: The Bible account is chronological; it’s not abstract. It was only one of the edges, but it was an edge that became important.
By the time you got to the 1800s, the beginning of the nineteenth century, for the first time you had the beginning of publications that were Old Testament theologies and New Testament theologies. Before that it was all biblical theology, but now an Old Testament theology and a New Testament theology.
By the middle of that century, by about 1850, almost all the theologies that were written were Old Testament and New Testament. There were only a few people that were doing whole Bible biblical theologies, what the Germans were calling eine gesamt biblische Theologie, a whole Bible biblical theology.
By the time you get to the beginning of the twentieth century, liberalism had so set in that people were not only making distinctions between Old Testament theology and New Testament theology but between one part of the Old Testament and its theology and another part of the Old Testament and its theology: the theology of P, the theology of D, the theology of the Minor Prophets, and the theology of whatever.
So that a volume on Old Testament theology was not an integrated volume even of the Old Testament, it was really sort of a description of a whole lot of different theologies according to scholars’ assessments of what the different corpora of the Old Testament were.
Likewise, New Testament theology was not a theology of the whole New Testament, it was a theology of the Synoptic Gospels, a theology of the Johannine corpus, a theology of the Paulines. Then as liberalism set in a little further, there was theology of the early Paulines, the Hauptbriefe (the seven that were undisputed), the secondary Paulines, the deuterocanonical Paulines, and on and on. Everything gets shaved a little finer; you keep peeling the onion. Where is the wholeness of it all?
Then in the twentieth century, there were other movements that came along. I’m not going to go through the details; it was a biblical theology in the 1950s that had another set of weakness and so on. Meanwhile, at the same times this was going on, there was a conservative side to some of these movements that showed up in the twentieth century with Geerhardus Vos, but earlier in Germany also with two or three very famous figures. Most of these works have not been translated very much. In the previous century, there was one outstanding figure.
So that today, in broadly-believing circles, biblical theology means something like this (people dispute these definitions, but this is what we’ll work with): biblical theology focuses on the theology of the Bible corpus by corpus, sometimes book by book, but always asking the question.… How does each bit contribute along the temporal axis to the progress of redemption?
In other words, systematic theology tends to be organized atemporally, that is, logically. Now, even if you’re organizing a systematic theology for the whole Bible, everybody has to figure out how you stick together the Mosaic covenant and the new covenant by whatever means you stick it together. Anybody can see that there are some differences. For a start, we don’t have a temple and Passover anymore. You’ve got to do something with these changes.
Nevertheless, the organization of systematic theology is logical and atemporal. Who is God? What is sin? What is the person and work of Christ? Then you go hither and yon throughout all of the Scriptures trying to pull together themes, biblical texts, and so on, with greater or lesser effectiveness and faithfulness.
Whereas biblical theology never asks, “Who is God?” It might ask, “What is the contribution of the prophet Isaiah to the developing doctrine of God along the temporal axis of the progress of redemption?” It might ask what the theology of a particular book is, but then it will also ask where it fits into the whole. Or it might pick up one of the strands that run right through the whole Bible that hold the whole Bible, in some ways, together. There are only about 20 of them.
There are scores of minor strands, but there are about 20 biggies, such as covenant, priesthood, temple, sacrifice, and so on. In fact, one of the assignments that I give to my incoming students.… Starting the MDiv at Trinity, they must all (for the last few years) take an introductory biblical theology course in their first or second semester. One of the assignments I give them very early on is to read Revelation 21 and 22, find every theme in those chapters that is introduced earlier in the Bible, and identify some of the crucial passages.
Then you discover there are all kinds of them that keep running through the whole Bible and end up in Revelation 21 and 22. Do you see? Sonship. That’s a huge one. “I will be his father, and he will be my Son.” The city. The bride. They just keep multiplying and multiplying. So you start asking.… How do these things actually run through the whole Bible and put the whole Bible together?
That’s what I mean by biblical theology. It focuses more inductively using biblical categories on specific books and corpora of Holy Scripture, and it is constantly focused to the temporal axis, that is to the time sequence, to ask how the bits develop across time.
Again, let me repeat the warning I said at the beginning. I do not think that biblical theology is the only thing to bear in mind. I would be more than happy to give another hour on preaching in systematic theology and preaching in historical theology. Nevertheless, most of us need, I think, a little systemic thinking about preaching in biblical theology, about how the discipline of biblical theology ought to inform some of our thinking in this regard. So let me try priming the pump, at least.
1. Biblical theology directly addresses the massive biblical illiteracy now prevalent amongst our hearers.
I’m not referring only to the biblical illiteracy that I find when I’m doing university missions where most of the guys that I’m speaking to don’t know the Bible has two Testaments. They’ve never heard of Abraham. If they’ve heard of Moses, they confuse him with Charlton Heston. They really don’t know beans about anything.
It’s easier to preach evangelistically in a university campus today than 20 years ago because they’re so bone ignorant they’ve got nothing to rebel against. So in one sense, it’s great fun to do it nowadays, but I’m not talking about that kind of biblical illiteracy. That’s another story; it’s an important story, but it’s not the story I have in mind.
I mean that even in our churches, you have relatively few people who are really faithful in personal and family devotions, and who are great Bible readers. I was speaking at a major Reform conference (I won’t tell you which one it was because most of you would know it. A biggie. You know the names.), and somewhere along the fly, I just mentioned in passing Jotham’s fable. I don’t even remember what I was talking about; it just went by, Jotham’s fable.
At the first coffee break after that, I don’t know how many people came up to me and said, “Do you really think Jonah is a fable?” Now it may just be my diction; I don’t think so. I think that most of them hadn’t read Judges 9 for a long time, maybe not ever, and had never heard of Jotham’s fable.
Whatever Jonah is, it’s not a fable in any case because in a genuine fable (that literary genre) you only have nonhuman beings. In fables you have trees and animals. They do all their clever things, and they’re all referring in some symbolic way to human beings, but you don’t have human beings and nonhuman beings. That’s not a fable if you do. Whatever Jonah is, it’s not a fable. I didn’t say Jonah’s fable; I said Jotham’s fable.
If it had been some university crowd that didn’t know Judges 9 too well, and I had thrown out some reference to Jotham’s fable, I wouldn’t be worried if they didn’t pick up the allusion. For a Reform crowd who are supposed to be biblically literate not to pick up an allusion to Jotham’s fable, so I have to go and spend a whole lot of time explaining that by Jotham I don’t mean Jonah, that’s really scary.
So if you preach only from little bitty texts here and there, or if you’re determined to take at least six years to go through Matthew, who is going to teach your people the Bible storyline? The great turning points of redemption history? Now you can reduce those to four or five like creation; fall; coming of Messiah; death, burial, resurrection; consummation; or something like that, but it’s easy to fill in with a little more detail, isn’t it?
You can go from creation and fall to Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant or whatever. Or you can even make it a little finer with flood in there, and then eventually the Patriarchs, the descent into Egypt. Then you’ve got to say something about the Mosaic covenant and the Exodus and what that means.
Then you can slice that up just a little more narrowly: first approach to the Promised Land, second approach to the Promised Land, and so on, but eventually, with these turning points in redemptive history, your people get to know what’s postexilic and what’s preexilic. How on earth can you understand the prophets if you can’t even make a distinction between preexilic and postexilic for goodness’ sake! You cannot do it! How can you understand even the beginnings of typology unless you know what books were written first and second and so on? You can’t do it.
In other words, preaching with a biblical theology paradigm in your head starts making you ask the question.… How do I lay out the progress of redemptive history in such a way that my people have a skeleton on which to hang the various bits? Now there are a lot of different ways of doing that; we can talk about some of them later, but if you don’t do it, in any sense, then nowadays there’s so much biblical illiteracy around, I’m not sure where they’re going to pick it up.
Moreover, as we’ll see, biblical theology, precisely because it’s inductive and works out of the biblical categories, tends to introduce the kinds of terms that are biblical: covenant, faith, tabernacle, sacrifice, kingship, sin, resurrection, and so on. Almost none of these categories are on anybody’s horizon in our culture. They’re just not there. How many people do you know from the secular world that go around thinking deeply about tabernacle or resurrection or covenant? It’s just not there.
Sooner or later, to help people read their Bibles seriously and understand how they’re put together, they’re going to have to be introduced to these categories, aren’t they? Maybe not the first Sunday that they’re converted, but somewhere in there. In my view that takes a higher priority than introducing them to systematic categories that are not biblical. I don’t mean that they’re anti-biblical, I mean they’re synthetic and have come down to us out of the debates in history.
Supererogation, for example. Or supersessionism. Even a term like trinity. I’m happy to use trinity because it is so universally and widely known, but in the first instance I think that I can justify all the turning points in the doctrine of the Trinity from Scripture without introducing the term as my first priority. Biblical theology directly addresses the massive biblical illiteracy now prevalent in our hearers. Systematic theology addressed this too, a slightly different way. If I were having the second address, I would start talking about the differences, but I will let that pass.
2. Correlative of the first point, biblical theology draws attention to the turning points in redemptive history.
In other words, it doesn’t simply describe the progress of redemption as one thing happening after another in a raw series. It does draw attention to the turning points. That’s easier to understand. It’s easier to memorize for a start, isn’t it? It’s easier to keep track of.
Also, this turning point of redemption business shows how the movement thrusts forward, so it is important at some juncture, for example, to recognize the significance of the fall of the temple and then the reconstruction of the temple, until Jesus comes along and claims that he’s the temple.
Now these great turning points in redemptive history are the things on which many, many biblical books turn. If you get those turning points right in your people’s minds, then they have ways of ordering how the entire biblical revelation is put together. It’s not just that you’re unpacking the storyline; you’re unpacking the storyline with crucial bumps along the line that forms a grid on which people can hang almost everything.
3. Biblical theology enriches systematic Bible reading and is in turn enriched by it, and this prepares the way for mature preaching.
In Chicago, where I live, there’s a men’s clothing store called Syms, and one of the tag lines in their advertising is this: “An educated consumer is our best customer.” Oh, it’s such a clever line because they talk about how all of the great lines of men’s clothes are all there, but they’re all at great discounts.
As a result, you can buy all kinds of things from Armani to who-knows-what for a fraction of the price and so on. “You know what all of these things are really worth elsewhere, and you know that you can only get them at this price with us. An educated consumer is our best customer.” It’s quite an appeal, and it must work. They’ve been in business for a long time.
In preaching, a biblically literate congregation constitutes our best hearers. The last think you want is for some preacher to adopt the attitude, without ever being quite so crass as to say it, “Lord, you keep them dumb, and I’ll keep them happy.”
There are some preachers, believe it or not, who are afraid that certain commentaries on which they rely will ever actually slip into the hands of any of their parishioners because then they’ll know where they get all their information. The best preaching is done by people who are serving congregations who are coming along rapidly behind and are reading, thinking, growing, and learning. They also keep you honest.
Many people today, I think, don’t read their Bibles because of a nexus of things. First, many in our population are becoming adept at only reading a digital page or two. Reading a whole book is not done quite so much anymore. It’s the quickness and speed of things that people want. Even more, I think, people are more familiar with reading manuals, romances, and mysteries than they are with serious literature. The Bible, whatever else it is, is serious literature. Serious literature written in quite a lot of different genres.
How many people would actually go out and read a book of wisdom apart from the Wisdom Literature in the Bible? Or apocalyptic literature apart from the Bible? Well, maybe Left Behind. How do you learn to read this kind of stuff? How many of our people in our churches just love to read history? So somewhere along the line, I think that people are finding the Bible today to be a very alien book.
Let me suggest an experiment. If you’ve never picked up a copy of the Qur’an, go and buy one (a paperback), and then set yourself to read parts of it. I’ve done this. I’m not trying to convert you all into Muslims, but I guarantee that one of the things you will feel as you start to read the Qur’an is the complete foreignness of it. It is an utterly alien document. It’s not structured like anything you have ever seen before in your life.
The vocabulary is different, the names are different, the sura (the chapters) are organized differently, the historical sequencing isn’t there. It’s just an exceedingly alien document, but there are millions and millions of people in the world who just love this book and read it faithfully all the time. I think that one of the reasons why you and I most likely wouldn’t (besides the fact that we’re committed Christians) is, quite frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to us until you spend quite a lot of time in it.
Increasingly, that’s the way even nominal Christians are with respect to the Bible. They don’t have their devotions because it doesn’t make any sense to them, but if you can get people learning how the Bible is put together: different genres, different contributions, what the turning points are.… There are a lot of ways you can do that.
I know a pastor in a Reformed Free Church, Colin Smith at Arlington Heights. He went through the whole Bible with Murray M’Cheyne’s Bible-reading scheme, trying to get the whole church reading the Bible. Every Sunday he would choose one of the passages in the Murray M’Cheyne Bible-reading scheme for that week.
As a result, he was trying to encourage people to read their whole Bible over two years while he was correspondently speaking from one of the passages in it in order to give them the shell, the outline, the thrust of the whole thing. Well, that’s one way.… There are a lot of other different ways of doing it.
When I wrote the two volumes For the Love of God using the Robert Murray M’Cheyne Biblereading scheme.… Are you familiar with that Bible-reading scheme? John Stott started using it when he was 16, and he’s been using it every year since then. He’s now 84 or 85. In the M’Cheyne reading scheme, you can do it one of two ways. The way he does it is this: there are four columns. On any day you read about four chapters, but on January 1, you don’t read Genesis 1–4. On January 1 you read Genesis 1; Ezra 1; Matthew 1; and Acts 1.
The whole Bible reading scheme keeps you going such that at the end of one year, if you read those four chapters a day, you’ve read the New Testament and Psalms twice and the rest of the Old Testament at least once. If you cut the whole scheme down in half, then you’ve covered all that material in two years.
So what I tried to do in the two volumes For the Love of God was to have a one-page meditation on one of the readings in the first two columns in Volume 1, and in Volume 2, a one-page meditation on one of the readings in the second two columns. Not just sort of “a verse a day keeps the devil away” kind of meditation, but to explain something of how the passage works, so that with time you’re building up a biblical theology of the whole.
You need to find some expository teaching ways to show people how the Bible works. I don’t just mean how an individual passage gives you encouragement in the latest conflict of life or to explain to them even the atonement, what courage is, or what faith is. All those things have their place, but somehow so to preach that you are explaining how the Bible works because that, in due course, will actually encourage people to read the Bible more systematically too.
As they do that, then it will also be increasing the theological acumen of the congregation which will, in time, pull out the better preaching from you too. To become aware of biblical theological categories and work them into your preaching in one fashion or another, on the long haul, can help increase the whole reading level of the entire congregation.
4. Biblical theology encourages various kinds of integration and diversity in preaching.
I knew Lloyd Jones in his later years. A great man. I’m certainly not going to throw brick bats at him. He had a rare unction. So far, something like 72 or 73 volumes of his sermons have been published. Of those 72 or 73 volumes, guess how many cover narrative parts of the Bible as opposed to discourse parts of the Bible? Wild guess? One. Now when you think how much of the Bible is narrative, that’s an interesting ratio, isn’t it?
In all fairness to Lloyd-Jones, when he was taking his eight years to go through Romans 1 to 8, he inevitably incorporated illustratively a lot of the Old Testament narrative and other kinds of material into what he was doing. When he took however long he took to go through Ephesians, he did the same thing. So in one sense he does cover a lot of these other sorts of texts. Nevertheless, the text that is his primary focus is almost always discourse, and that’s because he lived in that kind of age.
Whereas, when I go to Africa, with the exception of a small but growing group of expositors today, the overwhelming majority of African preachers that I know are pretty good when it comes to narrative and don’t have a clue what to do with Romans because they come out of a narrative culture. The fact of the matter is, if we’re going to be biblically large, expansive, and faithful, we’ve got to learn to handle all the different genres of Scripture, don’t we?
If you really are committed to biblical theology, as opposed to systematic theology, then don’t you want to spend some part of your life preaching from every book in the Canon? Don’t you? Do you really want to go to your grave never having touched anything in the Minor Prophets? Never having preached through Ezekiel? But maybe you’ve covered Galatians six times. Slowly.
I understand why we do this, partly because we’ve come out of seminaries where we’ve been taught Greek and gone cautiously and slowly through 1 Peter or Colossians (small enough and short). That’s where we’re comfortable. Yet, surely, one of the things that we really do need to do, very early on, is learn how to cover the different genres of Scripture, don’t we, if we’re going to preach biblically and theologically?
If we do that, it’s surprising how much we will be enriched. For example, for some reason now, you’re going to preach through Genesis, and you come to Genesis 39. If you have your Bible you might want to look at it. How are you going to preach Genesis 39? This is the account, of course, of Joseph’s temptation by Potiphar’s wife. You remember how the chapter is put together?
The beginning reads, “Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there. The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned.”
In verse 6b: “Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, and after a while his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he refused. ‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?’ And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her.”
You know what happens. He refuses on one occasion, flees, and leaves his garment behind. She changes the story, and he lands up in jail. So in verse 20b: “But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”
Now how are you going to preach this? Well, I suspect that most of us here would focus on the central bits. You can get a lot of mileage out of that, can’t you? “How to beat porn.” “How to fight off sexual temptation.” “Call a spade a spade: ‘How shall I sin and do this evil against God?’ ”
“Don’t flirt with temptation: ‘He refuses even to be with her.’ ” “Recognize that you’re in it for the long haul and avoid as much as possible: ‘She’s nagging him day after day, and he refuses to be with her.’ ” “Understand that your integrity is more important than your reputation: ‘He preferred to be pure and thought guilty than to be guilty and thought pure.’ ”
You can work it all out, can’t you? There are lots of practical lessons you can learn here, lots of ways of applying them, too, in this day of Internet porn. Do you know that today more money is spent on porn in this country than on cigarettes, alcohol, and hard drugs combined? Imagine what that’s doing to our families.
Now ask a different question. Why does the author frame the story the way he does? Why do the beginning of the chapter and the end of the chapter aim in more or less the same ways? “God is with Joseph and blesses him in all that he does, and he’s considered trustworthy whether in prison …” You know? That’s the way the story is put together, isn’t it?
From a literary point of view, from a narrative point of view, that’s an inclusio, an inclusion. You begin something and end something with the same theme, and what you’re really saying is the whole chapter is really under that theme. Why? Then ask a further question. If you’re thinking in biblical theological terms, you can’t help but ask this question.… What does the book of Genesis lose if you drop this chapter? What’s this got to do with the storyline? Why is it in there? Is it just to provide us with a moral lesson?
Well, there are some parts of the Bible that are designed to give moral lessons. Even the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 can talk about what happens to the Israelites and learn some moral lessons from it. There is nothing wrong with moral lessons, but is that the only reason why it’s here, to give you a little lesson about sex?
As soon as you start asking that question, you start seeing a richer array of answers, don’t you? If the story begins and ends the same way, at least in part it’s saying, “Whether God is with you or not and blessing you is measured not by whether you’re a slave or even in jail, but by integrity.” That’s interesting too, isn’t it? Better to be a faithful and honorable slave, better to be a faithful and honorable prisoner, than to be free and a groping sinner, and that is made even clearer when you see what the previous chapter is!
You have to look at the surrounding argument. The previous chapter finds one of the brothers, Judah, who is free, sleeping with his daughter-in-law while Joseph, who’s not free, is preserving his integrity! Judah already has a wife. He’s got sexual release already, but he’s still sleeping around. Joseph doesn’t have a wife, and he’s still preserving his integrity. Talk about “just meeting my needs!” You can’t help but see that one chapter is serving as a foil for another.
Then if you ask, “What’s this chapter doing in Genesis? How does it contribute to the whole?” Well, immediately when you’ve asked the question, you can’t help but see what the answer is. Chapter 39 is a setup for chapter 40 and following. Because he’s in prison, he ends up meeting the butler and the baker. He answers their dreams which two years later gets him to answer Pharaoh’s dreams which makes him prime minister of Egypt.
In consequence of that he saves a whole lot of people alive, including his own family, the family of 70 that come down. His family might well have starved to death if it had not been for the way he was in prison. And because his family doesn’t starve to death, well then in the storyline of the whole Bible, in the storyline of Genesis, the promised messianic seed survives.
Isn’t that what’s given to Abraham in chapter 12 and chapter 15? “In you and in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” Humanly speaking, the family would have been wiped out if Joseph hadn’t kept his zipper up. Now, I know God would have saved his people by some other means, after all that’s one of the great lessons of Esther, isn’t it? Mordechai says, “Who knows what God is going to do here, but understand this: Maybe you’ve come to the kingdom for such a time as this. And whether by you or some other means, God will protect his people.”
Humanly speaking, you and I are Christians today saved by the blood of the lamb because Joseph kept his zipper up! I haven’t made that up. It’s right on the face of the preservation of the line in Genesis, isn’t it? Then Genesis sets the stage for Exodus, the Pentateuch, and the whole rest of the storyline.
Now you have come from Genesis 39 all the way to Jesus very realistically because you’re reading the text as a narrative in the context of the narrative of the book, in the context of the narrative of the Canon. Do you see? It’s not that there are now no moral, sexual lessons to learn; it’s that they have all been set within a much bigger theological visionary stance that is sweeping you through all of biblical history. If I had time I could give you a lot more examples like that, but I press on.
5. Biblical theology demands inductive rigor in preaching biblical books and corpora.
By that I mean, sometimes we run immediately to our systematic theological categories to explain certain texts without recognizing that the biblical categories may not quite be the same as the systematic categories. In other words, the vocabulary of biblical theology, or some corpus in biblical theology, is not always used in exactly the same way as the discourse of systematic theology.
We all know this when we stop to think about it. What’s the theology of the call? Well, in Pauline terms if you’re called, you’re saved. God’s call is effective. In the Synoptic Gospels, the call is the invitation. “Many are called, but few are chosen.” In other words, the word call is not a terminus technicus, a technical term always with the same kind of meaning. It depends on the context.
Biblical theology keeps focusing back on the context and the vocabulary usage, on the tendencies, on the dominant themes, and so on, of each particular book and corpus and each particular writer and starting there.
Now ultimately, there is a place for expanding out to give a synthetic analysis, but one of the things that a teacher or preacher trained in biblical theology does is make sure that the categories that you’re using are the categories of the biblical text or the biblical writer that you’re actually studying and not imposed categories from later developments in systematic theology, as useful as those categories may be in some other discussion. There are a lot of examples about that.
For example, many people explain the “born again” language, “born of water and Spirit language” (John 3:3, 5), by running immediately to Paul or Peter where you have “born again through the washing of water by the Word.” I don’t think they have anything to do with John’s usage. I think that John’s usage is determined by John’s usage. Instead of appealing to a farther away text, there are things within the immediate surrounding context that you’ve got to wrestle with first. I have hinted at the next point; now let me formalize it.
6. Biblical theology not only keeps in mind the great turning points in redemptive history (fall, flood, call of Abraham, Exodus), but it keeps an eye peeled for the inner-canonical connections (tendons) that tie all of Scripture together and which ineluctably point to Jesus Christ.
Now that’s a big one. I’ve indicated already there are about 20 of these.
That means that if you are preaching through, let’s say, lots of chunks of Ezekiel 8–11, this passage in which Ezekiel is transported in a vision 700 miles from the banks of the Kebar River back to Jerusalem. There he is made to see.… And eventually will report back to the elders that are sitting in his house back on the banks of the Kebar River.… He is made to see in this vision as he’s transported (picked up by the hair, if you please!) to Jerusalem all the awful idolatries connected with the priesthood, the temple, and so on.
Eventually, he is made to see how judgment is going to fall from the six watchmen (the six guards, the six executioners of the city) except for those who are protected because there’s a seventh person who goes around and puts on the forehead a mark to mark out God’s own elect people.
A big part of that vision is the glory that is over the temple in the vision moves to the mobile throne chariot; the same mobile throne chariot that is introduced to us in chapter 1 of the book. This mobile throne chariot.… The glory abandons the temple and moves to the mobile throne chariot which then moves to the gate of the city, crosses the Kidron Valley, and goes and parks up on the Mount of Olives. Now in the narrative of Ezekiel, it’s easy to see what’s going on.
That is to say, it’s one of God’s ways of saying, “I am abandoning the city to destruction. When Nebuchadnezzar gets in here four and a half years from now and destroys the place, absolutely flattens it, and the temple is razed to the ground, it’s not because I’m not big enough or strong enough to fight Nebuchadnezzar and his gods. It’s because this is my own judicial decree. I am abandoning the city. I am cursing the city because of its sin. All of this wretched idolatry around the place; this is what’s going to happen.”
So in one sense, that’s easy enough to see, but then in chapter 11, Ezekiel says to the people back home, quoting God, “Don’t you see? The sanctuary is going, but wherever you are scattered, I will be a sanctuary to you.” That’s temple language. The people are afraid to hear of the destruction of the temple because then there’s no home to go back home to. The destruction of Jerusalem? That’s the city of the Great King! That’s the city of the temple! How could God abandon Jerusalem? It’s not conceivable!
Then they’re so attached to the geography and to the masonry that they fail to see that the really important thing about the temple is where God is. The temple is the great meeting place between God and his people, but the most important part there is the fact that God is present. Now God says (to the exiles 700 miles from Jerusalem), “I will be a sanctuary to you.”
In due course, the people do go back (43,000 of them), and then more come. Eventually a small temple is built, and the old ritual system of the Mosaic law is reinstituted. There are times of reform under Ezra and Nehemiah. Yes, yes, yes. But centuries later there is heard on the streets of Jerusalem a voice saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” The opponents didn’t have a clue. The apostles didn’t have a clue. Not a clue.
You can imagine what they’re all muttering under their breath. “Deep. Deep. It’s all enigmatic. Jesus is doing it again. It’s another deep one.” John comments, after Jesus had been raised from the dead, “Then they remembered his words, and they believed the Scriptures.” They had no category yet for understanding that Jesus is the ultimate temple, the ultimate meeting place between God and his people, as he also turns out to be the ultimate priest, the ultimate sacrifice, and so on.
So in the New Testament you get a system of antitypes working out. The ultimate temple is not a church building. I can’t stand names like Temple Baptist Church. Good grief. Don’t people read their Bibles? In the New Testament the antitype of the temple is either Jesus (the ultimate meeting place between God and his people), or it’s the whole church, the church as the gathered people of God. The meeting place between outsiders and God. It’s here. This is the meeting place, or in one or two passages, it’s the actual individual Christian’s body.
Then you get another turn on the whole thing when you come to the final vision, Revelation 21 and 22. There you have the New Jerusalem built like a cube. There’s only one cube in the Old Testament: the Most Holy Place. It’s a way of saying that now everybody is in the Most Holy Place. You don’t need a veil; that was torn, remember? You don’t need a priesthood to go on approach. No, no, no.
The whole city is built like a cube. We are all now forever and immediately in the presence of the unshielded glory of him who sits on the throne and the Lamb, which is why you have then, at the end of chapter 21: “I saw no temple in that city for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Now what I’m saying is that a lot of ordinary readers in our church have never put that together.
I have left out lots of stuff. I haven’t done anything with Ezekiel’s temple. I haven’t done anything with the tabernacle and its connection with the temple. I haven’t done anything with Solomon’s dedication of the temple. I haven’t done anything with the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud. There is a lot of stuff I haven’t dealt with here; nevertheless, you can see that when you butt up against this theme of temple, every once in a while you need to take a five minute excursus and track out what these connections are so that people can see how their Bibles are put together.
That means that whenever they read any part of this line, this tendon that connects all of Scripture together, they will be reading the Bible more intelligently. They will be seeing how it all fits together, and they will be understanding that it begins in the tabernacle … or perhaps even earlier as Beale thinks … and goes all the way to the New Heaven and the New Earth, the city built like a cube to the place where we don’t need a temple anymore for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
Don’t get hung up on the third silver socket from the left. The important thing is: where God is, there is the temple. Do you see? And all of that secured by the Lord Christ who is the temple not by virtue of the incarnation alone but “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” He becomes the temple precisely by his death and resurrection. Now suddenly you’ve got biblical theology being enriched in.
7. Biblical theology helps you avoid anachronism in your preaching by enabling you to develop the biblically warranted interconnections, including the true understanding of different kinds of typological fulfillment.
There are some people who jump from the Old Testament to Jesus, and I’m never quite sure how they’ve made the jump. I mean it’s quite clever, and I’m glad they got to Jesus, but I’m not sure how they got there.
I’d rather they get to Jesus than that they stop, but on the other hand, it’d be nice to see that it was clear how they got there. Biblical theology properly done actually shows you how you legitimately, through the text itself, must get to Jesus. If you’ve never done any reading in this area, start with a little book by Edmund P. Clowney called The Unfolding Mystery.
Then there are two or three books by Graeme Goldsworthy. Three of his best have been put together now that are sometimes printed under the title The Goldsworthy Trilogy. It’s worth reading that. Also worth reading is Bryan Chapell’s book, Christ-Centered Preaching. There are a lot of others that are more complex, but those are the ones to start with.
Questions or comments?
Male: You mentioned 20 different categories in Revelation 21 and 22. Do you think those are the things that put the Scripture together or are there certain themes that connect?
Don Carson: Yeah. I think there are about.… They’re not all in Revelation 21 and 22, but just about all of them are. There are about 20 of these lines that do connect up an awful lot of the Bible and that run right through the Bible from one end to the other. Whether there are exactly 20 … If you said there were 18 or 22, I’m not going to argue.
Another book that will help in this regard is one that four of us edited called A New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. The first part works through the biblical theology of each book, and then the second part works through a lot of these strands and a lot of minor ones as well. That would give you a lot of grist for the mill for your preaching. A lot of them do end up in the Apocalypse all right.
It’s worth figuring out what they are, learning them, studying them, thinking about them, praying about them, and meditating over them so that then when you’re preaching on the texts that butt up against any one of them, you’re automatically thinking in those terms and are prepared to lay them out once in a while. You can’t do it every Sunday; it’d get awfully boring. On the other hand, to do it every once in a while, to teach people how the Bible is put together is just huge.
Male: I have a question about commitment to the expositional style of preaching and doing this very thing you’re talking about, making the connections. Obviously there are certain books that would be natural, like the book of Hebrews, where you can see.… Or even going back, and maybe even taking a hiatus, to explain the temple. Could you give some examples of staying committed to that and yet bringing this alongside, the idea of covenants and all the different things you were talking about?
Don: You’re quite right that there are some books that quote the Old Testament a lot where it’s a lot easier to do this sort of thing immediately from the New Testament, but any of those quotations you can do from the Old Testament going forward. The book that Greg Beale and I edited that came out last year, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, can be used straightforwardly to look at all the New Testament passages that quote the Old Testament.
But you can use the biblical indices. So if you’re preaching anything from the Old Testament, look up the Old Testament indices and see how some of those texts get picked up in the New Testament, either by quotation or allusively. Tim Keller now tells me he never preaches from the Old Testament without consulting the index of that book. There are ways of working both ways even from a resource like that.
Then when you become familiar with some of these themes (and there are other ones as well), those themes can make the organic connections even when there’s not a specific textual quotation or allusion. Then there are bigger.… I would say this now because I’m not here for the other three parts of this series. Likewise, there are bigger systematic themes that are worth picking up.
The nature of idolatry, for example, gets picked up in place after place, so that it’s easy to make some connections through the Bible, not so much in a huge development but for greater clarity, until, eventually, the apostle Paul comes along and says greed is idolatry. That can throw an awful lot of useful theological light on the whole notion of idolatry right through the Scripture, and why God is incensed by it.
The books that I’ve already suggested.… I could give you a lot of examples of specific texts and how I try to handle them, but that would take up another half hour. I gave you one from Genesis 39 and another one from Ezekiel 11, but there is just passage after passage where you can show how to do that if you become familiar with how these strands do fit together.
Male: Is there a danger of connecting, for example, all the instances of the temple? Would it almost be a danger, similar to proof-texting, or is there a way that they do all interconnect?
Don: That’s a fair question, because you do have to recognize that there are many words and many themes that are not what the hermeneutics specialists tell us, termini technici. Each is not a terminus technicus, a technical term that always has exactly the same meaning. You’ve got to see how it works in context.
That’s really what I was saying with respect to the word call, for example. So that call in Paul typically means what we would call God’s effectual call. If you’re called, you’re saved. Whereas, call (the verb kaleo) in the Synoptic Gospels inevitably means invitation. So the term kaleo itself is not a technical term; that is, a term that always has exactly the same significance so that every time you see that it always has that significance. Yeah, you always have to be careful of that.
The question is whether there are not also some terms, themes, and so on that are so rich in theological associations that when you pick them up, inevitably you are calling to mind where this comes from amongst the people of God who are reading antecedent Scripture.
You cannot, for example, in the postexilic period say much about the rebuilding of the temple without remembering Solomon’s temple. You can’t think much about Solomon’s temple without remembering that before that there was the tabernacle, which takes you all the way back to the Mosaic covenant and to sacrifices between God and human beings even before there was a tabernacle.
You can’t forget, if you’re reading the biblical texts at all, that 31 or 32 times in the book of Exodus alone you have this recurrent theme: “See to it that you build it according to the pattern that I showed you on the mount. So Bezalel and Oholiab built everything according to the pattern that God gave Moses on the mount.” It’s mentioned another 20 times in Leviticus. You start seeing that there’s something significant about the fact that God gave this, and God is equally careful with the design that is built in Solomon’s time and the glory comes.… You can’t help but see that there are connections here.
Now the kinds of things I’m talking about are these sorts of things, not just little words. They’re words that depict whole theological structures that are themselves so rich that anybody who comes along a little later in the train is just automatically, if he’s reading antecedent Scripture at all, unavoidably picking up on antecedent material. You cannot not think about it, and then it becomes part of a whole train that runs forward. That’s the beginning of one kind of typology. What I’m saying is that good biblical theology is looking for those all of the time.
Male: Don, could you say something about The Gospel Coalition, please?
Don: Well, I’m always happy to do advertising. If you want to know more about The Gospel Coalition, the easiest way to find out about it briefly is to go to thegospelcoalition.org. Don’t forget the “the.” If you just look up Gospel Coalition, you will find another organization with which, mercifully, we are not connected.
The Gospel Coalition started with a walk in Manhattan. Tim Keller and I have been developing friendship over the years. We worked on a book on worship together a number of years ago. I was in Princeton 10 days before the towers came down and took a fast train into New York City to spend time with him. Any excuse will do. We tend to spark each other. So we went for a walk in Manhattan, myself, Tim, and two or three of his staff people, and we stopped at a sidewalk restaurant.
We were asking the question.… What would it take to try to regain the center of confessional evangelicalism? Now 60 years ago most people in this country would have said that the center of evangelicalism was Carl F.H. Henry and Christianity Today as it then was. Whether you agreed with everything or not, it was robust. It was broadly reformed. It was keyed on the authority of Scripture. It commented on the breath of evangelicalism but was itself defined by the center. It was engaging the culture.
Almost nobody would say that CT does that today. CT covers things even more broadly, but it can produce articles that are really wonderfully good and penetrating, and things that are really sloppy and corny. It can’t tell the difference. It has no editorial voice out of the center, and it’s hard to.… I can think of many ministries and ministers that do but no institution that captures that kind of role.
So we asked if it was worth thinking about and what it would take. The first thing we did then was invited just under 50 ministers. We wanted only pastors, all from Bible teaching, expository churches, all broadly reformed (fairly broadly) from many different denominations: Baptists, paedo-baptists, Free Church, a couple of Anglicans … you name it. We spent quite a lot of time praying together, thinking these things through, talking them over, reviewing the history, and asking if God wanted us to do anything.
In due course we constituted ourselves a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, The Gospel Coalition. We produced a statement of faith that is pretty robust and a theological vision of ministry document which we worked over and all signed off on. Then we had our first small national conference a couple of years ago at Trinity with about 500, although we still met other years. Our first big national conference will be this coming April 21–23 in Chicago where we expect about 4000.
We’ve purposely gone off year to T4G, Together for the Gospel. They do it on the even years; we’re now doing it on the odd years. Virtually all the leaders of these other groups, T4G, ACE, John Piper’s DGM, and so on, are all on our council too. We’re purposely not running competition; we’re trying very hard to build one another up, to hold one another accountable, to pray for one another’s ministries but then to produce more and more material that says, “Listen, this is the biblically faithful gospel.”
You can’t reestablish the center by saying, “We are the center. We are the center. Come and be with us.” It doesn’t happen. The only way that you can even have any hope, humanly speaking, under God’s great kindness, to reestablish the center is to articulate what it is, to live it out in your churches, to provide materials, and so on.
Our website now provides about 12,000 sermons, all expository, from the last 10 years of ministry of our people, all downloadable for free. We’ve taken over the theological journal Themelios designed for pastors and theological students. We’ve made it entirely digital, and that’s downloadable for free.
We’ve become the first site, too, for another organization that Trinity is connected with, Christ on Campus Initiative, where we’re producing four or five papers a year for biblically literate undergraduates. We’ve got five of them out there now, all downloadable for free. Then we send them off to InterVarsity, Crusade, and UCCF in Britain. Anybody who wants them; it’s all free. You can have it. Do whatever you want with it.
We have about 130 video clips now with short answers from a lot of our guys, and we’re hoping to become a clearinghouse for a lot more of these things in the future so that we’ll have our arts and letters type thing. We’ll connect all the most important blogs together with RSS feeds so that if you want to know what’s on a whole lot of feeds that are evaluating things from a confessional point of view, they’ll come through us.
We’re not running competition, so that if you want, for example, one of John Piper’s sermons.… If you hit Romans 3:21–26 (everything is indexed biblically and topically), then you’ll find out all the people in our group that have preached on that passage. If you pick John Piper, and you hit that one, it goes immediately to his site. So if you download it, you actually get it from his site, not from ours. Then as soon as you finish downloading, it comes back to our site.
We’re the index to everybody. We’re not taking over; we’re multiplying everybody’s effectiveness rather than running competition. We’re doing that with blogs and other things as well. Now there’s a Facebook presence and podcasts. The aim is gradually to try to produce curriculum materials, biblical materials, and theological materials that will.… Now a Gospel Coalition network of churches is just beginning to form. The aim is try to provide a safe place that is stimulating, confessional, and encouraging.
Who knows what God will do with it? Our board has just passed 13 projects that we want to tackle of one sort or another. Now we’re beginning to approach foundations. Obviously, there’s a place for donations on there, because we’re making everything free, but that doesn’t mean it is free. It means somebody has to pay for it.
We’re doing things on a shoestring to be as faithful as possible. If you’re interested and this can be of help to you, if the material is usable at all, and if you think the thing is worth supporting in any way, then by all means take a visit (thegospelcoalition.org). Use what you can. Let it be known as you can, and we’ll see what the Lord will do with it. Let’s pray.
We confess, Lord God, that as we look at developments and trends in the Western world, we are sometimes discouraged. We see the growth of the church in China and other parts of Asia. We see the almost incredible numbers in Latin America and parts of Africa. Yes, things are lean on the teaching front, but there is remarkable growth.
We look to our own past, and we remember times when you have visited us with periods of reformation and revival. Our hearts do cry to you, and we beg of you: do it again. We dare to ask, certainly not because we’re good or deserving or because we’re better informed or more faithful. It is shocking how sloppy we often are. We find it very easy to participate in the sins of our culture. We begin to understand what Isaiah meant when he said, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King.”
So enable us afresh with the eyes of faith to see our King: you, our Maker and Redeemer. Whether people will listen or not, whether people will respond positively or hate us, whether we live in a time when there is reformation and revival again, or whether we live in a time like that described by John in John 8, where Jesus says, “Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe.”
Whether we live in a time when the truth itself compels unbelief, Lord God, we pray for faithfulness, a cheerful heart, intercessory prayer, a willingness to be slighted and slammed by the surrounding culture, a deep desire to build up our people in their most holy faith, biblical priorities that define and shape the church in a genuinely New Testament pattern, the unction of your Spirit, already given as the down payment of the promised inheritance so that we live and serve with eternity’s values in view, with the cross and resurrection, the glorious triumph behind us, and with the anticipation of the home of righteousness ahead of us.
Whether you place us in small and discouraging places or in growing and expanding ministries, Lord Jesus, grant that our deepest desire will be to bring glory to your Son and strength to the people for whom he shed his life’s blood rather than anything to do with the expansion of our own names or fortunes.
Even in this small group of pastors, heavenly Father, there are some here, I am sure, who are full of joy and thanksgiving at what is going on in their ministries. Multiply their efforts beyond anything that they now experience, we beg of you, and keep them faithful in those tasks, not willing to cut corners.
There are others here, no doubt, who are going through remarkably discouraging times, maybe some who are planning on quitting. Lord, buoy them up. Remind them that the Master himself said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Give them the kind of brokenness and contrition that dares to seek your face and be faithful even in the face of really debilitating discouragement.
Make all us, we pray, who are charged especially with the teaching and preaching of your Word to be better workers, knowing, increasingly, how not to be ashamed as we rightly handle the Word of Truth. We ask for Jesus’ sake, amen.
