(upbeat music) - For the next three days, we welcome to the Ask Pastor John podcast, a guest, Dr. Don Carson. He was with us at the end of June with a valuable perspective on the SCOTUS decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states. You can find that special episode in the Ask Pastor John app and Dr.

Carson, thank you for coming back. I want to shift gears from recent events to ancient trajectories and for the next few days, I want to talk about biblical theology, one of your specialties. Let's start with a definition. What is biblical theology and why does it matter for us as Christians today?

- The term biblical theology is used differently by different people, but as I use it, it has two or three different foci. In one focus, you work really carefully with each biblical book or corpus, by corpus, I mean something like the John corpus, John for second, third John revelation, or the synoptic corpus, or the Pauline corpus, or something like this.

You work carefully with each particular book or corpus to make sure you understand what God is saying through that corpus at that time in history with what words, vocabulary, and so on, before you ask what contribution it's making to the entire canon. In other words, biblical theology is interested in the careful exegesis of individual books and corpora within the canon and their place in the progress of redemption, not because it wants to despise systematic theology or canonical theology or big picture stuff, but it insists that if you don't ask those kinds of questions, you can sometimes blur over distinctions that God himself has placed in scripture and miss things that are a bit different.

Even the most casual reader of scripture knows that John's vocabulary is not the same as Matthew's. And Paul's vocabulary is not the same as Peter's in 1 Peter. And their emphases are a bit different and so on. They're mutually complementary, they tie together, but if you work only at the canonical or systematic level, then there tends to be a very important set of inferences about what the whole Bible teaches, that's right, but sometimes at the expense of listening carefully to the particular emphases of particular biblical books.

And ideally, a good preacher will not only handle the individual text at hand, but show how this text at hand, not in every sermon, but in some sermons, is tied to the book or corpus in question, and then it's tied to the whole Christian confessional stance. Now that's one form of biblical theology.

And from this comes New Testament theology and Old Testament theology and so on. The other form of biblical theology tracks themes that run right through the whole Bible. There are about 20 biggies, give or take, and 50, 60, 70 small ones that aren't quite so prominent or don't touch quite so many books.

But the biggies include things like Jerusalem and temple and atonement and sacrifice and priesthood and covenant and kingdom and so on and so on and so on. And they really do run right through much of Scripture and tie it together. And biblical theology makes you alert to those trajectories, those lines, those ligaments that tie together the whole of canon.

And it's helpful for the ordinary Bible reader to be reading, let's say, Ezekiel, and to knowing where you are on the trajectory of what the Bible says about temple to figure out where you are on the storyline. It's part of what ties things together. And so even when it comes to things like preaching Christ in all the Scriptures and Christocentric preaching and things like that, the way you get there is not by some imaginative, topical imposition of later material, but it's by following the trajectories that are actually in Scripture and that do trace the way through Scripture to bring you to Jesus Christ.

And to understand how those work, I think, is hugely helpful. It increases our faith. It makes us see the wisdom of God in unfolding Scripture in these ways. And we sometimes, as we see these things unpacked before our eyes, bow in worship as we begin to glimpse something of the mind of God and putting these things together.

When individual writers along the line themselves could not see all that they were contributing to, even if they could see the current bit where God was using their words to speak to us with infallible truth. - Yes, and amen, it's beautiful. And this is a burden that you feel, and it led you to edit the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, which releases next month.

The major contribution that this Bible seems to make is that it focuses on a whole Bible, biblical theology for personal Bible reading. And as I look at it, the Bible closes with a wonderful collection of essays to this end. So why is a study Bible that focuses on a whole Bible, biblical theology, as you've explained, why is that so important for lay readers?

- Well, it really is important to see that the best study Bibles, even when they're written from slightly different vantage points, have more in common than they have in difference, in contradistinction. A good study Bible devotes its notes to explaining difficult things in the text, explaining what's going on, and trying to keep the language simple and avoiding too many technicalities.

And so that as you read the Bible, there is enough introduction to explain when the book was written and so on. All study Bibles do that. And there are some very good study Bibles out there. So there's no way I want to push this study Bible as if it's the be all and the end all in study Bibles, but it does emphasize biblical theology.

That is to say, not only in the notes, but in, as you mentioned, 28 or 30 essays at the end, we are trying to track out how certain dominant themes run right through the whole Bible to enable readers to see where they are in the Bible at any particular point, and thus put it all together.

Now, another study Bible might use the final pages to build a whole systematic theology, and I won't criticize that. That too needs to be done. And so they rush, as it were, immediately to creating a whole confessional stance out of the Bible. And it is good to read the Bible in such a way as to see how the various parts contribute to the big picture theology.

But on the other hand, sometimes Christians find it hard to see how you move from exegesis of particular chapters all the way to big picture theology without seeing how you get there. And the way you get there is through the tracking out of these particular emphases in biblical books and then in these trajectories or these typologies, these ligaments, these tendons that tie the whole Bible together until you see how the big picture is actually coming together.

And that's what this NIV study Bible is trying to do. - Yeah, well, it's a noble goal, and I don't think anyone is better qualified to lead a team to this end. Thank you, Dr. Carson, for your work on the study Bible. It's officially titled the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, edited by T.A.

Carson, not to be confused with the NIV study Bible. It's the NIV Zondervan Study Bible. And the Bible traces out themes throughout the comments and the text, and then ends with 28 essays on the most important biblical theological themes, including the temple. And we have run out of time, but I want Dr.

Carson and you to come back tomorrow and show us how biblical theology works. We know how it's defined. Now we want you to show us how it actually works in the text. And I want you to show us specifically from the example of the temple as one theme and why it's so central to the Bible and how it develops throughout the Bible.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Don Carson. (soft music) (soft music) (soft music) you