How to Read the Bible Theologically

Our main mission here at Olive Tree is to “inspire people to connect with God and study the Bible using technology.” This is why we exist as a company. We exist to help you connect with God by reading and studying the Bible with technology. Pretty simple, right? But have you ever considered how this happens? How do you connect with God by studying the Bible?

We’ve adapted this article from the ESV Systematic Theology Study Bible to help answer that question. You do so as you read and study the Bible with a mind set on seeing the God of the Bible. The article calls it, “reading the Bible theologically.”

Reading the Bible Theologically

To read the Bible “theologically” means to read the Bible “with a focus on God”: his being, his character, his words and works, his purpose, presence, power, promises, and precepts. The Bible can be read from different standpoints and with different centers of interest, but this article seeks to explain how to read it theologically.

A Quest for God

Reading Scripture theologically starts by acknowledging these truths:

1. The Bible is a God-given guide to sinners for their salvation, and for the life of grateful godliness to which salvation calls them;
2. The Bible is equally the church’s handbook for worship and service;
3. It is a divinely inspired unity of narrative and associated admonition, a kind of running commentary on the progress of God’s kingdom plan up to the establishing of a world-embracing, witnessing, suffering church in the decades following Christ’s ascension and the Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit; and
4. The incarnate Son of God himself, Jesus the Christ, crucified, risen, glorified, ministering, and coming again, is the Bible’s central focus, while the activities of God’s covenant people both before and after Christ’s appearing make up its ongoing story.

Theological reading follows these leads and is pursued theocentrically, looking and listening for God throughout, with the controlling purpose of discerning him with maximum clarity, through his own testimony to his will, works, and ways. Such reading is pursued prayerfully, according to Martin Luther’s observation that the first thing one needs to become a theologian through Bible reading is prayer for the illumination and help of the Holy Spirit. And prayerful theological Bible reading will be pursued in light of three further guiding principles, as follows.

Revelation was Progressive

Its progress, in its written form, was not (as has sometimes been thought) from fuzzy and sometimes false (OT) to totally true and clear (NT), but from partial to full and complete. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days [the concluding era of this world’s life] he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2). In the Gospels, the Epistles, and the books of Acts and Revelation, readers are now faced with God’s final word to the world before Christ comes again. Theological Bible reading maintains this perspective, traversing the OT by the light of the NT.

The Bible’s God-language is Analogical

Today’s fashion is to call it “metaphorical,” which is not wrong, but “analogical” is the term that makes clearest the key point: the difference involved when everyday words—nouns, verbs, adjectives—are used of God. Language is God’s gift for personal communication between humans and between God and humans. But when God speaks of himself—or when people speak to him or about him—the definitions, connotations, implications, valuations, and range of meaning in each case must be adjusted in light of the differences between him and his creation. God is infinite and flawless; people are both finite and flawed.

So when everyday words are used of God, all thought of finiteness and imperfection must be removed, and the overall notion of unlimited, self-sustaining existence in perfect loving holiness must be added in. For instance, when God calls himself “Father,” or his people in response call him their “Father,” the thought will be of authoritative, protecting, guiding, and enriching love, free from any lack of wisdom that appears in earthly fathers. And when one speaks of God’s “anger” or “wrath” in retribution for sin that he as the world’s royal Judge displays, the thought will be as free from the fitful inconsistency, irrationality, bad temper, and loss of self-control that regularly mars human anger.

These mental adjustments underlie the biblical insistence that all God’s doings, even those that involve human distress, are glorious and praiseworthy. This doxological, God-glorifying tone and thrust marks even books such as Job and Lamentations, and the many complaint prayers in the Psalter. The Bible writers practice analogical adjustment so smoothly, unobtrusively, and unselfconsciously that it is easy to overlook what they are doing. But the theological reader of the Bible will not miss this point.

The One God of the Bible is Trinitarian and Triune

God is three persons in an eternal fellowship of love and cooperation within the one divine Being. Each person is involved in all that God does. God is a team no less than he is a complex entity. In the NT this concept is apparent, but in the OT, where the constant emphasis is on the truth that Yahweh is the one and only God, the truth of the Trinity hardly breaks the surface. God’s triunity is, however, an eternal fact, though it has been clearly revealed only through Christ’s coming. Theological Bible readers are right to read this fact back into the OT, following the example of NT writers in their citing of many OT passages.

The Quest for Godliness

Theology is for doxology, that is, glorifying God by praise and thanks, by obedient holiness, and by laboring to extend God’s kingdom, church, and cultural influence. The goal of theological Bible reading is not just to know truth about God (though one’s quest for godliness must start there) but to know God personally in a relationship that honors him. So, three questions must govern readers of the inspired Word:

First, in the passage being read, what is shown about God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What does it say about what the holy Three are doing, have done, and will do in God’s world, in his church, and in lives committed to him? What does it reveal about God’s attributes, that is, God’s power and character, how he exists and how he behaves? One reason, no doubt, for God’s panoramic, multigenred layout of the Bible is that this variety provides so many angles of illumination on these questions for theological Bible readers’ instruction.

Second, in the passage being read, what is shown about the bewildering, benighted world with all its beautiful and beneficial aspects alongside those that are corrupt and corrupting? Discerning the world’s good and evil for what they are, so as to embrace the world’s good and evade its temptations, is integral to the godliness that theological Bible reading should promote.

Third, in the passage being read, what is shown to guide one’s living, this day and every day? The theological logic of this question, through which the reader must work each time, is this: since God, by his own testimony, said that to those people in their situation, what does it follow that he says to readers today in their own situation? The Holy Spirit answers prayer by giving discernment to apply Scripture in this way.

Learn More with the ESV Systematic Theology Study Bible

If this resource intrigues you and you want to learn more about it, check out this blog post for a look inside. Or you can visit the store and see all that it has to offer. This resource works alongside any translation of your choice, so get your copy and start reading theologically today!