Biblical Theology and Self-Attesting Nature of Scripture

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I have written a few years ago “Quick Thoughts on the self attesting nature of the Bible.”  I thought I add to that discussion on the self-attesting nature of the Bible and how Biblical Theology helps us crystalize how the Bible is itself self-attesting.

 

Apologist Cornelius Van Til in his famous essay on Nature and Scripture said “The Scriptures as the finished product of God’s supernatural and saving revelation to man have their own evidence in themselves” (Source).  

I do think there is something within Scripture that is self-evidencing which I talked about in my Quick Thoughts post.  Yet I also think one can see more of the self-evidencing nature of Scripture with deliberate and intentional study of the Bible.  So we would expect that a discipline such as Biblical Theology would yield insights that has apologetics implications and apologetics dimensions.

What is Biblical Theology?  D.A. Carson define Biblical Theology as the discipline that “seeks to uncover and articulate the unity of all the biblical texts taken together, resorting primarily to the categories of those texts themselves” (D. A. Carson, “Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, 100).  To put it in simple terms I think of Biblical Theology as the study of a topic in the Bible, and tracing how over time in God’s Word there are truth about that topic that is being revealed and developed from Genesis to Revelation.

One example of a Biblical Theology topic would be tracing the teaching of the Messiah from the Old Testament to the New Testament.  I have recently posted Outline Teaching on Messianic Prophecies from the Book of Moses Series and in the past have shared Messianic Psalms: 4 Messages and of course there’s also prophetic books that explicitly talk about the Messiah.

Engaging with the Bible through the lens of biblical theology and also interacting with literature on biblical theology I am always amazed and end up worshipping God for the beauty and marvel of truth that is found in God’s Word.  I am amaze at how God slowly teach doctrines about Himself and other theological areas.  There’s also a marvelous unity while there’s also progression.  I’m struck at all this and can’t help but to see there’s a Divine Author behind the human authors of Scripture.

Apologist Lydia McGrew has written a book called Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts which she described a phenomenon called “undesigned coincidence” which shows agreements among Gospel writers of certain facts but the facts are so subtle and indirect that most careful readers are also likely to miss it.  She focuses on the New Testament but I think there’s something like that not only between writings in the New Testament but Old Testament passages with Old Testament passages and Old and New Testament passages.

Some of the Messianic prophecies I have been going over for my ongoing series on Messianic prophecies are so subtle that it can be missed.  And yet when we consider antecedent theology (truth from God’s revelation before that particular text we are looking at) there’s already an expectation of the Messiah that when we read the passage we suddenly have to pause and ask if the vocabulary, phrases and structure somehow might connect with other passages.  It can be easily skipped over; but further attention to details reveal marvelous insight.  It might not be exactly “undesigned coincidence” as McGrew uses that term but there’s definitely something objectively there in the Word of God about the Messiah.  Yet it can be easily skipped over by most readers.  But when one sees it, we are blown away.  We marvel at how there’s an Author that behind the text have been telling us about the Messiah all along. 

That marvel of an Author with a unified and progressing message behind the books in the Bible can be multiplied for various biblical theological topics, such as Sacrifice, Worship, God’s attributes, the City of God versus the city of man, etc.

 I think Biblical Theology definitely heighten the awareness of the supernatural nature of the Scriptures. Biblical Theology as a discipline that looks at Scripture with an awareness of redemptive history and progressive revelation is so important also for being the “philosophy of facts” that Van Til talks about, that is, the presuppositions that interpret data.  For more on this listen to Revealed Apologetics Interview on The Old Testament & the Philosophy of Evidence

 

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