Lesson 6: The Covenantal Horizon
A Healthy Heart and Lungs
Now that we’re moving away from the Contextual Horizon, I want to talk more specifically about the discipline of theology. We have focused mostly on doing exegesis so far (a careful reading of the text), and now we will turn to a focus on doing theology.
We have to be careful here: you can’t do sound exegesis without sound theology, and sound theology is built upon sound exegesis! So there is no hard line separating exegesis from theology when you are studying a text: both disciplines integrate and inform each other.
But even though they can’t be separated practically, they should be separated theoretically in the learning process. This will help you learn to think in an orderly way.
Ultimately, though, the two disciplines of exegesis and theology function together in a healthy Bible student, just like the human heart and lungs must function together in a healthy body. You can’t do sound exegesis while ignoring biblical theology, or sound biblical theology while ignoring exegesis.
So before we enter these four new horizons, let’s talk about theology as a whole so we can understand its relationship to exegesis.
Simply put, theology is the study of God. And Christian theology is a flower growing out of the soil of Scripture, which is the only perfect and inerrant source of revelation about God. Thus Scripture is our authority when talking about God, and about everything he has made.
But the very nature of Scripture necessitates the work of theology because, as Jared Wilson puts it, “[t]he Bible is a big book with lots of words.”¹ If we want to wrap our minds around God’s written truth, its huge size means that we must compare passages and summarize doctrines. This is theology.
So, whereas exegesis seeks to understand a specific passage, theology is “the work of human beings trying to understand Scripture” as a cohesive whole.² There are four basic disciplines of theology: biblical theology, systematic theology, historical theology, and practical theology, which we introduced in Lesson 3.
Both exegesis and theology are crucial for understanding the Bible. Both exegesis and theology should work together in interpretation. But what does this look like in practice?