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We believe that, God himself speaks with power and authority through His living Word! That means that at the heart of our growth in maturity as believers must be personal, faithful, and careful Bible reading and prayer. However, the Bible’s vast size and diversity can make distilling its truth a daunting task. We can all benefit from supplemental resources to help us learn and apply what Scripture teaches.

There are three theological approaches that help us to be better Bible readers.

The first help is Biblical Theology. We need to read every passage in the Bible in its context, and a vital part of that is knowing where this passage is located in the unfolding story of the whole Bible. Biblical theology is the field of Christian thinking that traces the whole revelation of God through the Bible. Two very influential and helpful books that teach Biblical theology in summary form are Gospel and Kingdom by Graham Goldsworthy and God’s Big Picture by Vaughan Roberts. Reading and digesting one or both of those books will be an immense help in the work of understanding and applying any episode in the unfolding story of the Bible. This is especially true in reading the Old Testament, helping us to avoid the tendency to apply the passage directly without thinking about how it ultimately points us to Jesus.

Biblical Theology helps us avoid the tendency to apply a passage directly without thinking about how it ultimately points to Jesus.

The second help is Systematic Theology, which is the fruit of comparing Scripture against Scripture. The theologian seeks to gather together everything God’s Word says about a particular topic on the good assumption that what we read in one passage will be consistent with what we read elsewhere in the inspired Word of God. For example, if the passage you are reading talks about fighting against sin, you need to have a basic grasp of what other parts of the bible say about the nature of sin. Systematic theology will stop you from making mistakes or being too one-dimensional. Simply doing word studies without thinking through broader theological concepts can lead to shallow readings of passages. For example, you do not grasp everything the Bible says about repentance simply by looking up every reference to that word in the Scriptures. You also need to think through places where the concept is used, even where the word is not. Systematic theology can be a great help here. A great place to start would be either Concise Theology or Knowing God by J.I. Packer or Peter Jensen’s The Life of Faith.

The third help is Historical Theology. This arises from the reality that we are not the first generation of believers to receive and read the Scriptures. Many have come before us and have insights that we might miss with our own cultural blinkers. All the important Christian doctrines were argued about and developed over centuries, and understanding that process will help us to grasp why we believe what we believe in contrast to the alternatives. There are some good introductions to historical theology like Gerald Bray’s God Has Spoken (although at 1250 pages it may not feel like an ‘introduction’!).

Of course, each of these helps has accompanying dangers. Biblical theology can lead you to read parts of the Old Testament in a way that too quickly gets to Jesus without wrestling with what the passage meant there and then. Systematic theology can lead you to squeeze every passage into a rigid framework, squashing the refreshing particular focus of each passage. Historical theology can leave you too absorbed in old debates with little to say to the contemporary concerns and issues.

With all that said, we gladly rejoice in the wisdom of the saints who have come before us, knowing that we have great resources to lead us deeper into God’s Word.

Rev Dr Gavin Perkins

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