Dr Paul Allen

Systematic theology is a method that pulls Scriptures from across the Bible into organized topical categories.  Biblical theology seeks to summarize the teaching of a biblical author or text without imposing systematic categories on the text of Scripture by allowing it to speak for itself in its’ original context separate from contemporary concerns.  Christian students of the Bible will use both theological methods. The question is: Which should hold precedent? We hold biblical theology in higher regard than systematic theology and have tried to come to these convictions by studying books of the Bible in detail and examining Scriptures in their context. Admittedly, a biblical-theological method will result in systematic theological convictions. The problem with every systematic theological tradition is that the Bible does not neatly fit our categories and each team has to emphasize some Scriptures, and minimize or explain away others, to make everything fit because the Bible i...

The Holy Spirit depicted as a dove, surrounded by angels, by Giaquinto, 1750s. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit , whom the Father will send in my name,  he  will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” The  Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal  (volume 16, 2011) includes an article written by Andrew David Naselli and Philip R. Gons titled “Prooftexting the Personality of the Holy Spirit: An Analysis of the Masculine Demonstrative Pronouns in John 14:26, 15:26, and 16:13-14.” Sounds like a journal article title doesn’t it? The article is an update by Gons of a paper that Naselli presented at an ETS ( Evangelical Theological Society ) conference in 2010. A standard argument for the personality of the Holy Spirit has been that John (the writer of the Gospel of John ) uses a masculine pronoun when referring to the Holy Spirit which goes against the grammar of the Greek. The word for  spirit ...

English: Israel's Escape from Egypt, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Biblical Theology is the practice of developing one’s theology by studying the Bible ’s progressive revelation, and seeing how truths were revealed chronologically, throughout redemptive history. It means more than deriving theology from a certain book of the Bible, but rather stresses the importance of reading the Bible in chronological order, and seeing how God ’s revelation progresses through time. This approach to theology is different from systematic theology, which develops theology by building principals across scripture, without regard to what revelation was in existence at the time. In Biblical Theology, one starts reading at the book of Genesis and traces the story of God’s revelation until Revelation. This means that the Bible points forward in history, usually finding its fulfillment in the person of Jesus Chr...

Image via Wikipedia In a theology debate with the religious PhDs of the day, Jesus told those who claimed Moses as their granddaddy, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:46).  Is that how you read the Old Testament ? Biblical theology shapes our Bible reading by aligning it with that of Jesus himself—namely, reading the Word of God as historically-rooted good news about the grace of God through the Son of God for the people of God to the glory of God.  Place it in the big story  A biblical theology lens trains us to place any given passage in the sweep of the single story. This way of reading the Bible gladly acknowledges the various genres in Scripture—narrative, poetry, prophecy, letters. Yet while the Bible is not uniform, it is unified.  Biblical theology reads the Bible as an unfolding drama, taking place in real-world time and space, that culminates in a man named Jesus—who himself said that “everything...