The Relation of Biblical to Systematic Theology

Abstract

It is not many years since the term theology, used without qualification, was, in this country at least, understood to mean systematic theology. If there existed here and there a chair of biblical theology, this title did not designate a different discipline from that which elsewhere was called systematic theology, but only indicated a desire to put emphasis upon the Bible as the great source for theology. In more recent years, however, following the Germans in this as in many other things, we have adopted the term biblical theology to designate a branch of study distinct from systematic theology. To many no doubt the distinction between the two fields of study is perfectly clear, and any discussion of their interrelation wholly superfluous. Yet one constantly encounters evidence that the relation is still hazily defined in some minds, even in quarters where one would least expect to find it. It is probably not an instance of such haziness that the veteran Berlin theologian, Professor Bernhard Weiss, who published years ago his work on The Biblical Theology of the New Testament, has recently issued an entirely new volume bearing the title The Religion of the New Testament, in which he endeavors to set forth the unity underlying that diversity of doctrine which his previous volume had exhibited. But in the publication of such a book, which is neither biblical theology in the modern sense, nor systematic theology proper, the general reader is likely to find occasion of stumbling and confusion of thought as to where the line is drawn between biblical and systematic theology. Moreover, to fix a boundary is not always to define relations, as diplomats have often had occasion to discover. The present article has been written in the hope of contributing somewhat to clearness of thought on both these points: the line of demarcation and the relation between the two fields of study, biblical theology and sys418