Geerhardus Vos was born in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, on March 14, 1862, to German parents who had emigrated to the Netherlands, where his father, Jan Hendrick Vos, pastored a Dutch Reformed church. His family emigrated to America in 1881 when his father accepted a call from a Christian Reformed Church congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Geerhardus Vos received theological education from multiple institutions: the Theological School of the Christian Reformed Church (1881–1883), Princeton Seminary (1884–1885), and European universities, first at Berlin and then at Strassburg, where he completed his doctoral studies.[1]
During his European studies, Vos had significant contact with leading continental Reformed theologians, including Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Despite an attractive offer to become the first professor of Old Testament at the newly established Free University in Amsterdam under Kuyper’s leadership, Vos declined. Instead, he accepted a position at the Christian Reformed Church’s Theological School in Grand Rapids (now Calvin Theological Seminary), where he taught for five years, beginning in 1888.[2]
The Move to Princeton
In 1892, Princeton Seminary established the Biblical Theology Chair. They did so in response to the discipline’s expanding significance and impact on biblical scholarship, especially among nineteenth-century liberal scholars, and not because of theological work already being done at the seminary. Two factors support this observation: (1) while A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield held their own conception of Biblical Theology as a discipline, it was neither developed nor prominently featured in their theological methods; and (2) the discipline of Biblical Theology, which originated in rationalism and was dominated by nineteenth-century liberals, was being imported to the United States specifically to provide “a more effective platform from which to disseminate Higher Criticism.”[3] Indeed, just a year earlier in 1891, Union Seminary had created a Chair of Biblical Theology and hired the liberal Charles Briggs to fill it for this express purpose (Briggs would later go on trial for heresy). The Princetonians recognized the need to counteract this development of liberal biblical theologians by appointing Vos—educated in Germany, conversant with Higher Criticism and Biblical Theology, yet an ardent evangelical believer—to fill their own Chair.
Professor William Henry Green, Vos’s former Old Testament mentor, and B. B. Warfield were instrumental in bringing their former student to Princeton. Warfield recognized the need for a professor to teach Biblical Theology as a distinct discipline. He personally encouraged Vos to accept the invitation to Princeton after he had declined an earlier offer. The Charles Briggs heresy controversy at Union Seminary reached its climax at the 1893 Presbyterian General Assembly. As other seminaries went liberal, Princeton was quickly becoming the bastion for defending Reformed Orthodoxy in America, and so Green and Warfield were delighted that Vos joined the Princeton faculty. They believed that he could counter liberal trends in biblical scholarship with rigor, grounded in the authority and unity of Scripture’s organic unfolding of redemptive revelation. His appointment proved significant for establishing Biblical Theology as a discipline of study in the Reformed tradition, and he occupied the chair for thirty-nine years until his retirement in 1932.
Scholarly Contributions While at Princeton Seminary
Vos demonstrated remarkable scholarly breadth, contributing over a hundred penetrating book reviews to The Presbyterian and Reformed Review and The Princeton Theological Review from 1890 to 1919. His multilingual skills served him well in critically reviewing resources written in English, German, and Dutch. While he was developing his magisterial grasp of the redemptive-historical nature of God’s revelation in Scripture, Vos’s book reviews provide a helpful context for understanding how he perceived his work and what critical issues captured his attention. Perhaps because he was more at home working in the Old Testament, he vigorously opposed Old Testament Form Criticism but did not apply his perceptive ability to critiquing Form Criticism pertaining to New Testament studies. He also did not address the rising dialectical theology of Karl Barth. For reasons unexplained, Vos ceased contributing his insightful reviews in 1919. Sadly, Vos’s work was generally neglected by his contemporaries, possibly due to his somewhat ponderous writing style. More than this, his numerous withering critiques of modern criticism prompted liberal contemporaries to dismiss his contributions.
Formative Influences from Fellow Dutchmen
Neither his exposure to Princeton traditions nor his Dutch contacts with Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck adequately explain Vos’s deep interest in the discipline of Biblical Theology. Vos was thoroughly conversant with both Bavinck and Kuyper, for he translated several of their works. Though it seems apparent that Bavinck and Kuyper influenced Vos’s apologetic method, Richard Gaffin rightly suggests,
Vos’s work in biblical theology is largely without direct antecedents and indicates the originality with which he wrestled with the matter of biblical interpretation in the Reformed tradition. It should also be emphasized, however, that he had a strong sense of his own place in that tradition and the thoroughly Reformed character of his work.[4]
Doing Biblical Theology at Princeton
When Vos arrived at Princeton Seminary in 1894 to occupy the Chair of Biblical Theology, he entered a discipline already characterized by four destructive features: (1) rationalistic opposition to supernaturalism, (2) the adoption of historical-critical methods, (3) radical literary criticism, and (4) the abandonment of orthodox views on biblical inspiration. The field had been decisively influenced by Johann P. Gabler’s 1787 inaugural lecture at the University of Altdorf, which, sadly, established biblical theology as a purely historical discipline independent from dogmatic theology.[5] Against this backdrop, Vos undertook the monumental task of forging a truly evangelical Biblical Theology, maintaining the highest view of Scripture. Vos was not naive about the destructive forces. He demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of rationalism’s influence and was perceptive in recognizing the emerging impact of evolutionary philosophy within Biblical Theology.
At the close of his initial academic year as a professor at Princeton, Vos delivered his inaugural address at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton: “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.”[6] The final portion of his address proposes the crucial points to emphasize in the development of Biblical Theology within the curriculum at Princeton Seminary. His first three deserve emphasis: (1) The objective character of God’s revelation means the object of Biblical Theology is not the thoughts and reflections of humans, “but the oracles of God.” (2) The historical nature of the truth is not contrary to its revealed character but always subordinate to it, because God employed the historical setting for the express purpose of revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”[7] (3) Biblical Theology must establish itself firmly “upon the truthfulness of the Scriptures as a whole.”[8] Both the record of God’s redeeming deeds and the interpretive word of those acts by prophets and apostles must be accepted as the informing and infallible source of Biblical Theology. Vos carefully observed this agenda throughout his tenure at Princeton, as evidenced in his published Biblical Theology, which represents his lecture notes and lifelong fulfillment of his inaugural vision.[9]
What is Biblical Theology?
One of the clearest ways to define Biblical Theology is to distinguish it from Systematic Theology, a distinction that Vos made early in his career at Princeton. Prior to assuming the chair at Princeton, Vos had, in fact, been a systematic theologian, and he continued to value the contribution of systematics in his life and work.[10] Vos argued that Biblical Theology considers “both the form and contents of revelation . . . as parts and products of a divine work,” whereas in Systematic Theology “these same contents of revelation appear, but not under the aspect of the stages of a divine work” but “as the material for a human work of classifying and systematizing according to logical principles.”[11]
In other words, the difference between Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology is largely one of structure. Systematics organizes the teaching of Scripture according to logical principles, so that the church can rightly understand all that Scripture teaches on a particular subject (e.g., Christology or gender and sexuality). To ask, “What does the bible teach about x?” is to ask the question of Systematic Theology. Biblical Theology, by contrast, focuses on the progressive unfolding of God’s revelation. Scripture is a narrative unity, and God has revealed himself not simply by unveiling a set of logical principles, but over time as he unfolds his great plan of salvation in history. Biblical Theology is thus the discipline most sensitive to the progressive unfolding of God’s revelation of himself in Scripture.
Methodological Presuppositions
Vos began his work by mapping two realms of revelation. He built on two presuppositions: (1) that God has revealed himself in nature. Natural revelation occurs through the “inner sense of man through the religious consciousness and the moral conscience” and through God’s external works in nature[12] and (2) that human knowledge of God is grounded in humans being made in God’s image. The Bible “never assumes, even in regard to the heathen, that man must be taught the existence of God.”[13]
However, sin’s entrance disrupted natural revelation in two ways, both needing the Creator’s redemptive correction: (1) natural revelation’s structure became distressed, and (2) human religious and moral sense became dull and impaired, subjecting knowledge of God to “error and distortion.”[14] Therefore, on its own, the natural mind cannot access the substance of revelation in the redemptive realm. Only supernatural redemption restores to the sinful human “the normalcy and efficiency of his cognition of God in the sphere of nature.”[15]
Supernatural Revelation as Foundational
For Vos, the biblical theologian’s work was inextricably bound to the supernaturally revealed inerrant Word of God. He preferred designating his discipline “History of Special Revelation” instead of “Biblical Theology,” but conceded the difficulty of altering the established terminology.[16] The starting point for Biblical Theology “consists in the approbation of that supernatural process by which God has made Himself the object of our knowledge.”[17]
Vos regarded his task to be eminently spiritual, requiring dependence and believing receptivity, since Scripture represents the deposit of God’s objective self-revelation as Redeemer. The human mind, enabled by new birth and divine illumination, can apprehend this deposit of truth, “which is but the reflection in the regenerate consciousness of an objective world of divine acts and words.”[18]
Main Features and Tasks of Biblical Theology
Vos conceived of the “History of Special Revelation,” (his preferred designation for Biblical Theology) as consisting of two parts: (1) God as self-revealer, and (2) God as the author of Scripture. The formation of Scripture (God’s words) functions as a means to an end—the disclosure of God’s acts. Biblical Theology’s specific character lies in pondering both the form and the content of revelation from the perspective of God’s revealing activity. It “deals with revelation in the active sense, as an act of God,” seeking to understand, trace, and describe this act within human finite observation.[19]
Vos made it clear that Biblical Theology is concerned with “the process of the self-revelation of God deposited in the Bible,” dealing with revelation “as a divine activity, not as the finished product of that activity.”[20]
As a seminarian, I initially became acquainted with Geerhardus Vos through reading the works of Herman Ridderbos and Richard Gaffin.[21] As I did so, however, I came to realize that many who cherish the works of this trio of scholars had yielded to a subtle and specious shift, contrary to how Vos and Ridderbos, in particular, communicate the task of the discipline of Biblical Theology. Though Vos conceded acceptance of the designation, “Biblical Theology,” he reasonably contended that “History of Special Revelation” is a preferable title because it clearly and precisely expresses the task of the discipline.[22] Thus, he explained, “Biblical Theology, rightly defined, is nothing else than the exhibition of the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity.”[23] Observe Vos’s critical distinction. He distinguishes God’s revelation—“the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity”—from our human exposition of God’s revelation, calling the latter “exhibition.” God’s written Word concerning his revelatory deeds and words entails a progressively unfolding drama that Bible readers must track. Herman Ridderbos reinforces this:
[W]e should attempt to discover the redemptive-historical categories that enable us to discern clearly the nature, the content, and then the inscripturated form of the New Testament, as well as the nature of its authority. And we must learn to do all this in the light of the New Testament itself and according to its own standards.[24]
Thus, our doing of Biblical Theology must strive to trace and represent accurately the historical progression of the biblical storyline of redemption from foreshadowing promise to substantial fulfillment in Messiah Jesus (cf. Col. 2:17). The discipline’s task and procedural method seek to trace and portray as closely as possible the contours and features of the divine progression of revelation. Given this and Vos’s preferred designation for the discipline (History of Special Revelation), a corrective caution is pertinent.
A Dangerous Distortion of Vos’s Approach
Without realizing it, many who welcome Vos’s impact on their understanding of Scripture have displaced Biblical Theology from its proper domain of “redemptive-historical revelation” to an improper realm of “redemptive-historical hermeneutics.” Vos insists that “Biblical Theology” must be understood as the “History of Special Revelation,” properly describing the “redemptive-historical” nature of God’s revealing his redemptive deeds and words. However, it is common to hear Vos’s contemporary students use a misnomer, “redemptive-historical hermeneutics.”[25] We must avoid this sloppiness. “Redemptive-historical” is an adjectival phrase that describes God’s giving of revelation (Scripture), not our interpretation of revelation (hermeneutics). We must avoid transposing the descriptive phrase, “redemptive-historical,” concerning God’s revelation, into a prescriptive phrase concerning our interpretation of Scripture.
Why be concerned with this unwitting replacement of “redemptive-historical revelation” with “redemptive-historical hermeneutics,” also called a “Christocentric hermeneutic”? When pastors, biblical scholars, theologians, and students shift Vos’s adjectival expression, “redemptive-historical,” from describing God’s word to their interpretation of Scripture, without realizing it, they ascribe to their interpretation of Scripture an authority that properly belongs only to the giving of God’s revelation, God’s revealed Word.[26] This invalid shift is consequential because it confuses and ignites interpretive disputes that lead to a theological standoff, especially with those who counter by insisting that Scripture requires their Dispensational “literal-grammatical-historical hermeneutic” to unpack its meaning.[27] In other words, if “redemptive historical” is a way that we approach the text (rather than a characteristic of the text itself), then it has no more right to claim legitimacy than any other kind of hermeneutic—whether grammatical-historical or historical-critical or even allegorical.
To speak of “redemptive-historical hermeneutics” is a species akin to another improper expression, “typological interpretation” or “figural reading.” Just as “redemptive-historical” properly describes the progressively unfolding Scriptures, not our hermeneutic, so we properly ascribe “typological” or “figural” to the nature of God’s revelation, not to our interpretation of biblical types and figures.[28]
Conclusion
Geerhardus Vos is a giant in church history, a man rightly honored as the founder of evangelical Biblical Theology. He taught us that when we read the Bible, we need to acknowledge and account for its “redemptive-historical nature.” Therefore, we should always read the Bible with a sensitivity to the historical progression of God’s redemption through the several sequential biblical covenants and be prepared to be corrected by the Scriptures. Thus, we correctly affirm that the Scriptures entail the progressive unfolding of God’s “redemptive-historical revelation” concerning the Messiah. So, if we interpret the Scriptures properly, we trace the “redemptive-historical” contours of the storyline like a cartographer sketches a map. As no cartographer attributes to a map what belongs only to the sketched landmass, we must never assign to our representation of the unfolding mystery of God’s redemptive-historical revelation, which is always subject to adjustment, what belongs only to Scripture and not our interpretation of it. In so doing, we do what was most important to Vos: we rightly honor God as the author of Scripture and the one who reveals himself, and we receive that revelation with belief and dependence. In this way, we not only receive Scripture in all its narrative glory, but we receive God Himself—the one who, by his wondrous grace, has revealed himself to us in his word.
1. Danny E. Olinger, “Geerhardus Vos: Education in America and Europe, 1881-1888.” ↑
2. During his tenure at what would later be renamed Calvin Theological Seminary (1888–1893), Vos taught systematic theology. During this period, he wrote his recently translated Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 1–5, trans. and ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–14). ↑
3. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 358–59. ↑
4. Richard Gaffin, ed., Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1980), xii–xiii. ↑
5. Johann Philipp Gabler, “An Oration on the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each” (1787), in Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future, ed. and trans. Ben C. Ollenburger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 497–506. ↑
6. Geerhardus Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Richard Gaffin, 3–24. ↑
7. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 19. ↑
8. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 20. ↑
9. Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948). ↑
10. See Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 1–5, trans. And ed. By Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–14). ↑
11. Hermann Ridderbos, Redemptive History, 7. ↑
12. Vos, Biblical Theology, 19. Compare the recently translated Geerhardus Vos, Natural Theology, trans. Albert Gootjes (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2022). ↑
13. Vos, Biblical Theology, 19. ↑
14. Vos, Biblical Theology, 20. ↑
15. Vos, Biblical Theology, 22. ↑
16. Vos, Biblical Theology, v, 14. ↑
17. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 5. ↑
18. Vos, Biblical Theology, 10. His assessment of all Biblical Theology done apart from belief is highly negative: “It was formerly considered a merit to have stressed the importance of tracing the truth historically, but when this was done with a lack of fundamental piety it lost the right of calling itself theology. The rationalistic brand of biblical Theology, at the same time that it stresses the historical, declares its product religiously worthless” (Biblical Theology, 10, emphasis added). ↑
19. Vos, Biblical Theology, 7. ↑
20. Vos, Biblical Theology, 5. ↑
21. Like me, many pastors and seminarians have become familiar by reading these two men, along with George Ladd. For more on George Ladd’s writings and their relation to Geerhardus Vos’s pioneering work in Biblical Theology, see Thomas R. Schreiner, “The World Turned Upside Down: George Ladd on the Kingdom,” Christ Over All, Nov. 11, 2024. ↑
22. Vos, Biblical Theology, 14. ↑
23. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 15. ↑
24. Herman N. Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, trans. H. De Jongste, rev. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., 2nd revised ed., (Phillipsburg, NJ: 1963), 50. ↑
25. “Westminster Redemptive-Historical Hermeneutics,” video by Westminster Theological Seminary. The video advertisement reads: “Scripture’s the history of God’s unfolding redemption. This means that the heartbeat of every passage, Old or New Testament, is Christ crucified and raised. At Westminster, God is the authority on how we interpret his Word. We call this redemptive historical hermeneutics.” ↑
26. For a fuller discussion of this confusion, see Ardel Caneday, “Scripture’s ‘Redemptive-Historical Character’ and Biblical Interpretation (Part 3),” All Things Christian (September 25, 2023). ↑
27. See, for example, Abner Chou, “A Hermeneutical Evaluation of the Christocentric Hermeneutic,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 27.2 (Fall 2016): 113–39. Advocates frequently substitute “Christocentric hermeneutic” for “redemptive-historical hermeneutic.” ↑
28. Regarding the mistake of treating typology as a species of hermeneutics rather than as a species of God’s revelation, see Ardel Caneday, “Biblical Types: Revelation Concealed in Plain Sight to be Disclosed—’These Things Occurred Typologically to Them and Were Written Down for Our Admonition,’” God’s Glory Revealed in Christ: Essays on Biblical Theology in Honor of Thomas R. Schreiner, eds. Denny Burk, James M. Hamilton, Jr., Brian J. Vickers (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic), 135–55; and Ardel Caneday, “Revealed Forward: Figural Revelation of the Messiah’s Suffering and Glory in Israel’s Scripture according to Luke 24:13–35,” SBJT 26.3 (2022): 30–48. My many publications in which I address biblical types have been significantly influenced by Vos, whose brilliant formulations I have endeavored to express with greater simplicity and clarity. See Vos, Biblical Theology, 144–48; and Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956; Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1976), 49–87. ↑
