Program / Course 25: Theological Synthesis / Lesson 1.2
What you will learn
- Retell the Bible’s storyline in five movements: creation, fall, promise and covenant, Christ, and new creation.
- Explain how the Old and New Testaments are connected through promise, type and fulfillment.
- Identify three recurring themes that run through the whole canon.
- Describe how Christian traditions differ in how they read the unity of the Bible.
The big idea
The Bible is a library of many books, yet Christians have read it as telling one story. That story begins with God making a good world, moves through human rebellion and God’s promise to put things right, centers on Jesus Christ, and ends with a renewed creation. Biblical theology traces this storyline and its recurring themes, such as covenant, kingdom and temple. It gives the other disciplines a shared frame, because every worldview claim in this course is meant to answer to the story.
Key terms
- Canon
- The list of books that a community accepts as Scripture. Christian traditions agree on the New Testament but differ somewhat on the Old Testament.
- Covenant
- A binding relationship between God and a people, with promises and obligations. Examples are the covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses and David.
- Type
- A person, event or institution in the Old Testament that Christians read as pointing ahead to something greater in Christ, such as Adam, the exodus or the temple.
- Fulfillment
- The New Testament claim that promises and patterns in the Old Testament reach their goal in Christ and his people.
- Kingdom of God
- God’s rule, announced and embodied by Jesus, which Christians believe has begun and will be completed.
- Metanarrative
- A large story that claims to give the meaning of all smaller stories. Some scholars distrust the idea, others defend it.
- New creation
- The Christian hope that God will renew heaven and earth, not abandon the material world.
Background
A reader who opens the Bible meets laws, poems, histories, letters, riddles and visions, written over many centuries in several languages. Scholars rightly stress this variety. Yet from the earliest Christian writers onward, the church has also read Scripture as having a unity. Irenaeus, in the second century, compared the Bible to a mosaic: the pieces make a picture of a king only when they are set in the right order. Biblical theology is the study of that order, using the Bible’s own terms.
This kind of reading is not accepted without question. Some scholars hold that the different books contain different and sometimes conflicting theologies, and that any single storyline is imposed from outside. Christians who defend the unity point to the way later biblical writers repeatedly cite and build on earlier ones. This lesson sets out the classic outline and notes where readers differ.
Step-by-step explanation
Step 1: Creation
The Bible opens with God making the world by his word and calling it good (Genesis 1). Human beings are made in God’s image and given a place of responsibility (Genesis 1:27). The creation is not an accident or a conflict among gods. It is ordered, dependent on God and meant for relationship with him.
Christians differ on how to read the details of Genesis 1 and 2, including how they relate to the findings of science. They agree that the chapters teach that God is the source of all that exists and that the world is good.
Step 2: Fall
Genesis 3 tells of humanity turning from God’s word. The result is broken relationships: between people and God, between man and woman, and between humanity and the earth. The chapters that follow show the spread of violence and pride, ending in the scattering at Babel (Genesis 11).
Traditions explain the effects differently. Western Christianity, following Augustine, has often spoken of original sin as an inherited condition of guilt and weakness. Eastern Christianity has stressed inherited mortality and the damage to human nature more than inherited guilt. Both agree that the problem is real and universal.
Step 3: Promise and covenant
God answers the fall by calling Abraham and promising that through his descendants all nations will be blessed (Genesis 12:3). The promise is developed through the covenant at Sinai, which gives Israel the law, and through the covenant with David, which promises a king whose rule will not end (2 Samuel 7). The prophets announce judgment for unfaithfulness and a hope of restoration, including a new covenant written on the heart (Jeremiah 31:33).
This long section of the story is also a story of unfulfilled hope. Israel returns from exile, yet the promised kingdom has not fully arrived. The New Testament begins at that point.
Step 4: Christ
The four Gospels present Jesus as the one in whom the promises are gathered. He announces the kingdom, calls disciples, is crucified and is raised. Paul writes that he passes on, as of first importance, that Christ died for sins and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3). The New Testament writers repeatedly read the Old Testament as pointing to him, through types such as Adam, Moses and the temple.
Christians hold that in Christ the human problem is met and that God’s own presence has come among people (John 1:14). They differ on how the saving work is best described, and later courses study those differences.
Step 5: Church and new creation
The story continues in the church, which the New Testament describes as called to carry the news of Christ to all nations. It ends in Revelation 21 and 22 with a new heaven and a new earth, where God dwells with his people. The ending is not an escape from the material world but its renewal. Paul in Romans 8 says that creation itself will be set free.
Notice how the beginning and end correspond: a garden and a city, a tree of life and a tree of life, God walking with humanity and God dwelling with humanity. This pattern is one reason many readers find the Bible a single story.
Step 6: Recurring themes
Three themes help hold the story together. Covenant: God binds himself to a people. Kingdom: God’s rule over creation, resisted and then established. Temple or presence: the place where God dwells with humanity, from Eden to the tabernacle to Christ to the church to the final city.
Other themes could be added, such as exile and return, sacrifice, wisdom and justice. A good biblical theology tests any proposed theme against the texts and does not use it to flatten differences.
- Can I retell the whole Bible in five minutes without leaving out a major movement?
- Which part of the story do I know best, and which least?
- Does my picture of salvation include the renewal of the material creation?
- Where does the New Testament cite the Old, and does the citation fit the original context?
- Which parts of Scripture seem not to fit the storyline, and what should I do with them?
- Which theme, covenant, kingdom or presence, do I understand least?
Examples
Adam and Christ
In Romans 5 Paul sets Adam and Christ side by side: through one man sin entered the world, and through one man grace came. Christians call Adam a type of Christ. The reading depends on seeing the Bible as a single story in which a later figure answers an earlier one.
The exodus pattern
God rescues Israel from slavery, leads it through water and gives it a law and a land. Later writers use the same pattern for the return from exile and, in the New Testament, for Christ’s work. Passover and the Lord’s Supper are linked in the Gospels.
A reader who skips the Old Testament
A reader who begins at the Gospels will meet terms such as Messiah, kingdom and sacrifice without their background. The story seems to start in the middle. (A constructed example.)
Different perspectives
Catholic
Catholic teaching holds that the whole of Scripture is one book because God is its author, and that its unity is seen in the light of Christ. The Catechism speaks of reading the Old Testament in the light of Christ and of a fourfold sense of Scripture used by earlier writers, literal and spiritual. The Catholic canon of the Old Testament includes the books Protestants call the Apocrypha.
Orthodox
Orthodox Christians read Scripture inside the liturgy and with the fathers, who often found Christ foreshadowed in the Old Testament. The Orthodox canon is the broadest of the three traditions. Scripture is understood as part of the church’s living tradition, not as a separate source.
Protestant
Protestant traditions have stressed the plain sense of the text and the unity of the Bible’s message of grace. Covenant theology, common among Reformed churches, organizes the whole Bible by covenants, while dispensationalism, common among some evangelicals, divides history into periods and reads Israel and the church more separately. Both claim to be biblical, and they disagree.
Critical scholarship
Many historians study each biblical book in its own setting and are cautious about a single storyline. They note differences among the authors on matters such as monarchy, law and the afterlife. Some critical scholars accept a limited unity, such as shared themes and the way later writers reuse earlier ones, without accepting a theological claim of one divine author.
Why it matters
Every large claim in a worldview depends on how the Bible is read. If a student sees only a pile of rules, ethics becomes legalism. If a student sees only private inspiration, the story’s shape is lost. Knowing the storyline gives a way to place any verse in its setting and to ask what part of the story it belongs to. It also shows why Christians hold that the material world matters.
Common misunderstandings
Misunderstanding: Biblical theology means that every verse says the same thing.
Correction: The unity claimed is a unity of story and theme, not of sameness. The books differ in genre, date and emphasis, and good biblical theology respects those differences.
Misunderstanding: The Old Testament is only background, and the New Testament is the real Bible.
Correction: The New Testament writers treat the Old as Scripture and cite it constantly. Christians have also rejected the second-century teacher Marcion, who tried to separate them.
Misunderstanding: The Bible’s ending is that believers go to heaven and leave the earth behind.
Correction: Christians do hope to be with God after death, but the final scene of the Bible is a renewed heaven and earth, and the creed confesses the resurrection of the body.
Misunderstanding: All Christians read the storyline in the same way.
Correction: They agree on the main movements but differ on the canon, on the relation of Israel and the church, and on the reading of Genesis.
Knowledge check
Name the five movements of the Bible’s story.
Creation, fall, promise and covenant, Christ, and church leading to new creation. The story begins with a good world, moves through human rebellion and God’s promises to Abraham, Israel and David, centers on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and ends with a renewed heaven and earth.
What is a type, and how does it work?
A type is a person, event or institution in the Old Testament that the New Testament presents as pointing forward to Christ or the church. Adam, Moses, the exodus and the temple are examples. The reading depends on seeing the Bible as one story in which later events fulfill patterns set earlier.
Why does the ending of the Bible matter for the Christian view of the material world?
Because the Bible ends not with the destruction of the world but with a new heaven and new earth in which God dwells with his people. This supports the Christian belief that matter is good, that bodies matter and that the creed’s hope is the resurrection of the body.
How do Reformed and dispensational readers differ?
Reformed covenant theology organizes the Bible around covenants and generally sees one people of God across both testaments. Dispensationalism divides history into distinct periods and tends to keep Israel and the church more separate. Both are Protestant approaches, and each claims to be faithful to the text.
Think it through
- Which part of the five-part story would your own tradition emphasize most? Is anything underemphasized?
- Does it change your reading of a familiar passage to ask where it sits in the storyline?
- What might a scholar who doubts that the Bible has one storyline say against the outline given here, and how would you answer?
Independent assignment
The story in one page
In your own notebook, write one page (about 400 words) retelling the Bible’s story from creation to new creation in your own words, with one Scripture reference for each of the five movements. Then add three sentences naming one text that does not fit your retelling easily and how you might handle it. Keep the page; you will use it in the final synthesis.
Further study
- Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies Read the passage in which Irenaeus compares Scripture to a mosaic of a king and speaks of the rule of truth.
- Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth A practical guide to reading each kind of biblical writing.
- Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament On how the New Testament canon took shape.
- Genesis 12:3 The promise that all nations will be blessed.
- Romans 5:12 Adam and Christ.
- Romans 8:21 Creation set free.
- Revelation 21:1 A new heaven and a new earth.
- Jeremiah 31:33 The promise of a new covenant.