I recently discovered that my classroom arrivals have become something of an urban legend. I arrive at my courses at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dragging two carts, each one full of books.[1] And while the massive number of books I tote around draws a few chuckles behind my back, many students have found it to be an invaluable resource. When I teach at Southern, I do the entire course in less than a week. In that week, I want the students to become oriented to the whole conversation around our subject matter—and so, I bring the best books. During the lecture, I’ll pull each book out and explain where it fits historically and the contribution it made to our topic. Students leave equipped to continue their study with a mental map of the field—knowing which sources matter and why, rather than facing an undifferentiated bibliography. This article provides the same orientation for Biblical Theology, offering a brief historical overview of the discipline through the most important books and articles, traced through my own journey in discovering them.[2]
1. The actual number of books varies, but two carts full is a popular number reported in the rumors around campus (this introduction was suggested by a student editor, and these are the numbers he’s heard).
2. For more modern sources and contemporary debates, see my previous article, “The State of Biblical Theology Today.”
Twenty-seven years ago, having not yet finished my dissertation, I was assigned to teach a course on “Biblical Theology” for the first time. As I remember, there was no existing syllabus when I took over the class. So, in the summer before the course began I started putting together a syllabus and reading list and sketching out this new course. At the time—1998—only a few initial volumes in D.A. Carson’s “New Studies in Biblical Theology” series (IVP) had been published. And the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (IVP, 2000) was still a few years away.
But I had stumbled upon that tradition of biblical theology which still nourishes me today—the tradition of Geerhardus Vos. I got to him indirectly, by way of a very fine book by Richard Lints, The Fabric of Theology: A Prolegomenon to Evangelical Theology (Eerdmans, 1993). Lints’s book is worth remembering, for a part of Lints’s goal in that book was to show the relationship between systematic theology and biblical theology.
In particular, Lints turned to the work of Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (an intellectual descendant of Vos), and Gaffin’s work on the relationship between systematic theology and biblical theology. Gaffin had written a seminal essay, “Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology,” in 1976.[3] Gaffin was himself building on the work of John Murray, who also depended on Vos. Of note was Murray’s 1963 article, “Systematic Theology: Second Article.”[4] And fifteen years before him, Eerdmans released Vos’s Biblical Theology (1948).[5] This volume, plus Vos’s essay, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline” set the direction for Murray, Gaffin, and Lints—as well as Vern Poythress, who addressed many of these issues recently. Following in the tradition of Vos, Murray, and Gaffin, Poythress contributed a taxonomy of ‘biblical theologies’ to the discussion with his 2008 article, “Kinds of Biblical Theology.”[6]
3. Richard Gaffin, “Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 38 (1976): 281–99.
4. John Murray, “Systematic Theology: Second Article,” Westminster Theological Journal 26 (1963): 33–46.
5 . Vos’s Biblical Theology is also included as a section in Richard Gaffin, Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2001).
6. Vern Poythress, “Kinds of Biblical Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 70 (2008): 129–42.
This is not the place to give a detailed history of every twist and turn in the development of what we generally call “biblical theology” today. But it is important to see how persons like Vos, Murray, Gaffin, and Poythress are central to the field of biblical theology as it has developed in the last roughly 130 years.[7] Today, we can note the significance and importance of these men in the development of the kind of biblical theology we see in more conservative, and especially Reformed, circles.
This flowering of biblical theology can be seen in the multitude of works of someone like Australian Graeme Goldsworthy. From his According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible (originally published in 1991) to his most recent work, In These Last Days: The Dynamics of Biblical Revelation (2024), he has been joined by numerous scholars at Moore College in Sydney, Australia, to continue a tradition of Biblical Theology form a distinctively Reformed position. And the fruit of this biblical theology movement can be especially seen in series like the New Studies in Biblical Theology, which began under the editorship of D. A. Carson and is now led by Benjamin Gladd.[8]
7. Vos became the inaugural Professor of Biblical Theology at Princeton Seminary in 1893.
8. This series, affectionately known as the “silver series” for its silver covers, now boasts some 65 published titles.
Most of us who have come of theological age during this renaissance of biblical theology, and have found ourselves attracted to the Vos/Murray/Gaffin/Poythress “school” of biblical theology never would have really seen a contradiction between “systematic theology” and “biblical theology.” I have taught biblical theology for twenty-seven years, and I generally spend a good bit of the first part of the semester working through fundamental questions: What is biblical theology? What is systematic theology? How to do they relate? Are they really different disciplines—or the same fundamental project seen from a different angle?
These questions become all the more interesting, and perhaps perplexing, when we see that the “father” of biblical theology, Geerhardus Vos, also wrote a Reformed dogmatics—somewhat recently translated into English by none other than Richard Gaffin (and published between 2012 and 2014).
I suspect that the discussion between biblical theology and systematic theology is, in one sense, just beginning. I suspect it will be a much longer conversation, and it will take time to continue to think through some very challenging issues. How do we move from the Bible to doctrinal construction? How does the biblical language that speaks of God “hearing,” or “reaching down,” etc., really work? I wonder if in a few thousand years (one-hundred thousand? five-hundred thousand) seminary students will be saying things like: “I have read somewhere that back in 2025 Evangelicals were really thinking through how biblical theology and systematic theology relate.” Some might even scratch their head and wonder why such a discussion even took place. We shall see.
Conclusion
Those two carts I drag into class aren’t just about showing students what books exist—they’re about helping students they’re about helping students locate themselves within a living tradition, so that they can address the present issues they face grounded in the past. The genealogy traced here from Vos through Murray, Gaffin, and Poythress to contemporary scholars like Goldsworthy and the NSBT series reveal that biblical theology, at least in its Reformed expression, has never been a rebellion against systematic theology but a framework for it. And Reformed systematic theology, for that matter, has never been a flight away from the grounding of biblical theology, but a deeper exploration of its realities.
My previous article dealt with the state of biblical theology today—the live debates and controversies surrounding its ongoing use both in the church and the academy. But the best way to address today’s questions is with an awareness of where we’ve been. Anyone seeking to address the debates today would do well to root themselves deeply in the best of sources the tradition has to offer. In this short essay, I’ve sought to provide you with a road map to do exactly that.
The historical trajectory I’ve sketched here—this particular tradition of books and thinkers—represents only one stream in the broader river of biblical-theological studies. But it is the stream that has proven most fruitful and faithful to Scripture, not only for me and my students, but for the church.
