What is Biblical Theology? (Definition)

Biblical Theology – A discipline of Biblical studies concerned with doing theology according to and stemming from the contours and categories presented within the Bible itself (i.e., attending to scriptures diachronically rather than synchronically, tracing its themes, and considering the unique contributions, perspectives, and voices of particular Biblical authors and corpora).

There then seem to be three major forms of Biblical theology that stem from these general concerns (as defined above):

  1. Systems of redemptive-history — how the Bible fits together (“whole-bible” Biblical theology).
  2. Tracing themes across scripture, e.g., a Biblical theology of temple or land.
  3. Studying the particular theology of a given author, book, or set of books, e.g., a Pauline theology, a theology of Romans, an Old Testament Theology, etc.