"Conversion to Christ, then, must affect the way people view the Bible. They may have come out of militant atheism, unreflective agnosticism, self-centred postmodernism, or just plain ignorance of all things Christian. But conversion will mean that the word through which Christ is made known to us will take on a growing coherence and authority. Unfortunately, it is true to say that in many evangelical congregations, while the authority of the Bible is usually asserted or implied, the coherence of the canon, its inner unity, is left largely to chance.
What, then, are the driving forces for doing biblical theology, and when did the discipline emerge? Craig Bartholomew, commenting on the frequently-made claim that Johann Philipp Gabler started it all with his inaugural address at Altdorf in 1787, says: “But biblical theology, in the sense of the search for the inner unity of the Bible, goes back to the church fathers.”1 That is undeniable, but where did the church fathers get this sense of inner unity from? Obviously, they were responding to what they perceived in the Scriptures themselves. I suggest that the emergence of biblical theology is a feature of the dynamic of revelation within Scripture itself, and it is in evidence the moment the prophetic word in Israel begins to link previous prophetic words and events into a coherent pattern of salvation history. This happens in the way the prophets, beginning with Moses, speak a “thus says Yahweh” word into the contemporary events and link it with what has preceded it. A case in point would be the unfolding of the significance of the covenant with Abraham as it governs subsequent events. The events of Genesis 12-50 cannot be properly understood apart from the initial promises to Abraham and their frequent reiteration. The narrative of Exodus is in the same way taken up under this covenant. The whole course of salvation history in the Old Testament from Moses onwards is an expansion of the words in Exodus 2: 23-25.
- Graeme Goldsworthy in The Necessity and Viability of Biblical Theology
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