Given the popularity of resources like The Bible Project and Sally Lloyd Jones’s The Jesus Storybook Bible, it’s hard to remember that biblical theology wasn’t always such a common approach to Scripture among evangelicals. We owe biblical theology’s popularity, in part, to the work of Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949), who’s often referred to as the father of Reformed biblical theology. As distinguished professor of biblical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, Vos culminated his career by systematically articulating his understanding of biblical theology as a distinct discipline.
Vos’s endeavor to promote biblical theology drew on years of teaching and preaching the Bible. His magnum opus was published in 1948 as Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments. Though dated in some ways, this work and the approach established by Vos in it have unmistakably influenced contemporary evangelical biblical theology. This book is a classic that deserves rediscovery by every generation.
Confessional Coherence
Vos envisioned a method where biblical theology occupies a unique space between exegesis and systematic theology. This helped give shape to biblical theology as a discrete discipline.
While exegesis deals with the granular details of specific texts and systematic theology presents a logical, organized overview of biblical teachings, biblical theology focuses on the historical unfolding of the truths of Scripture. For Vos, the discipline’s subject matter is best characterized as the “history of special revelation” (v). Accordingly, he structures his study around significant historical epochs like the patriarchal period, the Mosaic era, and the time of prophetic revelation, culminating in the New Testament’s “new dispensation” (302).
Through biblical theology, we see the coherence of the Bible’s message. Vos presents God’s action in the world as a unified and organically unfolding revelation of God’s redemptive plan rather than as a collection of disjointed stories. With Scripture’s narratives serving as an authoritative source for his reconstruction, Vos illuminates the interconnectedness and coherence of God’s redemptive work in history.
Vos illuminates the interconnectedness and coherence of God’s redemptive work in history.
A helpful feature of Vos’s method is his engagement with critical scholarship. Throughout Biblical Theology, he summarizes the historical-critical consensus about specific periods of Israel’s history. He then shows both the inadequacy of the critical construct and the reasonableness of the biblical narrative’s witness as summarized by traditional Christian confessions.
This confessional instinct serves an apologetic function but also an exegetical one. Vos uses the insights raised by critical questions even as he rejects the answers that critical scholars give. For example, against critics who doubt the historicity of the Abraham narratives, Vos observes that “according to the Bible they are real actors in the drama of redemption, the actual beginning of the people of God” (67). The account of the patriarchs isn’t only a historical data point but also a foundational feature of the Bible’s redemptive message.
Redemptive History
Vos balances the striking unity of the Bible’s message with its diversity across the history of redemption. For Vos, divine revelation unfolds progressively in the saving events and covenantal relationships recorded in the biblical narrative. Each stage builds on the previous one. In this view, revelation is a dynamic divine activity unfolding within a providentially guided timeline. This perspective allows the biblical theologian to trace key themes like covenant, law, kingdom, and salvation from their initial forms in the Old Testament to their fulfillment in Christ.
Vos also speaks of the “organic” nature of special revelation. Redemptive history has a profound theological unity, yet God’s people grow in understanding of God’s work across time.
According to Vos, the progress of revelation is like “a tree whose root system and whose crown spread out widely, while the trunk of the tree confines the sap for a certain distance within a narrow channel” (79). This word picture illustrates the relationship between the nature of God’s actions during the patriarchal period (the growing root system), the Mosaic era (the narrow trunk), and the time of the New Testament (the outwardly expanding crown of revelation).
Divine revelation unfolds progressively in the saving events and covenantal relationships recorded in biblical narrative.
Most significantly, Vos argues that the focal point of special revelation and the history of redemption is Jesus Christ. After the revelation of God in “a son” (Heb. 1:1–2), “no higher speech [is] possible” (302). Indeed, “Jesus does not represent himself anywhere as being by his human earthly activity the exhaustive expounder of truth. Much rather he is the great fact to be expounded” (302).
Just as Israel’s history involved mighty acts of God (like the exodus) alongside interpretation of those acts (like God’s speech to Moses), so too the person and work of Jesus as the Christ is interpreted by the apostles’ preaching. The contemporary church must find its bearing within this interpretive framework. As Vos notes, “The New Testament revelation, being the final one, stretches over all the extent of the other things Christ came to inaugurate” (303).
Continuing Legacy
Biblical Theology is worth engaging on its own terms. Yet the book also has a continuing legacy.
Key ideas within contemporary Reformed approaches to biblical theology trace back to Vos’s work. For example, the redemptive-historical hermeneutic developed by Herman Ridderbos in Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures builds on Vos’s foundation.
Vos’s emphasis on tracing themes across redemptive history is echoed in evangelical biblical theology projects such as the New Studies in Biblical Theology series edited by Don Carson and works like A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New by G. K. Beale.
Furthermore, Vos’s ideas have been both used and interrogated in the biblical studies field more broadly. For example, in Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, Brevard Childs affirms the importance of redemptive history but seeks to prioritize the portrayal of this biblical history in light of the canonical context. In Introduction to Old Testament Theology: A Canonical Approach, John Sailhamer pursues the unity of the Bible’s narrative shape but does so with a special focus on the compositional strategies of biblical authors.
These kinds of interactions are some ways that Vos’s work has been productively received. Whether as an explicit theological resource or as an implicit dialogue partner, Biblical Theology continues to play a role in contemporary discussions among evangelicals.
Above all, as we navigate the complexities of our own time, Vos’s work reminds us that the Bible isn’t merely a collection of ancient texts. Scripture is living and active. It speaks with authority and clarity to the questions and challenges of every generation. Biblical Theology shows us how to discover the richness of the biblical story as we’re drawn ever closer to the heart of God’s redemptive purposes.