Lesson 6: Using The Four Branches of Theology

Unpacking the Principle

1. Biblical Theology: Interpret the Bible through its storyline—understand where a text lies in the story of redemption through Christ.
2. Locate your passage on the Bible’s storyline.
3. Ask, how should its place on the storyline guide interpretation?
4. Ask, are there any key themes, patterns, or symbols in this passage that connect to other points on the storyline?
5. Systematic Theology: Interpret the Bible by what the whole Bible teaches—collect a number of texts and conclude how they cumulatively answer a theological question.
6. Identify key theological topics in your passage.
7. Collect Scripture references from the whole Bible.
8. Summarize their truth into a single, unified point.
9. Interpret your passage in light of that point.
10. Historical Theology: Interpret the Bible with others—learn from teachers, dead and alive, testing what they say by Scripture.
11. Talk to your pastors and other mature believers.
12. Talk to believers from church history.
13. Practical Theology: Interpret the Bible for obedience—apply a text to the way you should think, feel, and act.
14. Apply the passage to your head (the way you think).
15. Apply the passage to your heart (the way you feel).
16. Apply the passage to your hands (the way you act).

Lesson Resource

The Four Branches of Theologypdf

This reference page summarizes the lesson content on the four branches of theology.

Theology and Doxology

For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

—C.S. Lewis, from “On the Reading of Old Books,” quoted in Theologians You Should Know, by Michael Reeves, 18.