Biblical and Systematic Theology - Like Eating Your Own Tail

The Ouroboros is a mythological creature, usually portrayed as a snake or a dragon. What’s particularly interesting about this creature is that it is depicted as always eating its tail, forming a circle, and stands for many things including cyclicality, fertility, and unity. It has been used in many religions and cultures throughout time including the Aztecs, Egyptians, Hinduism, and others.  The idea is that the serpent is eternally eating itself, without beginning or ending.  It is completely circular, giving rise to itself.

The debate between systematic and biblical theology has had many great thinkers on both sides throughout the years. Both sides generally portraying itself as the superior way of looking at theology and doctrine.  Systematic theology is an attempt to “systematize” what the Bible teaches on specific topics, while biblical theology is the attempt to find out what the Bible teaches through the progressive revelation of Himself to people.  In other words, systematic theology looks to define theological ideas through collecting everything the Bible says about a specific topic, say the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Biblical theology, on the other hand, reads the Bible as a narrative which “seeks to understand a certain passage in the Bible in light of all of the biblical history leading up to it and later biblical references to that passage.”

So what does this ongoing debate have to do with a mythological serpent who is insatiably hungry? Of course, I don’t want to give credit to the myth itself, but I think it is an excellent symbol of the unity between systematic and biblical theology.  Instead of pitting them against each other, it seems better to me to see how they arise from, and inform, each other.   Let me give an example:

Systematic theology, by necessity relies on biblical theology, because it attempts to systematize what the meta-narrative (the main story) of the Bible teaches, or what the narratives (the stories that make up the meta-narrative) of doctrine running throughout Scripture teaches. However, it only makes sense to attempt to do this in an authoritative way if we believe that the Bible will never contradict itself in regards to doctrine. This is, of course, one of the ideas behind the doctrine of infallibility, which is itself a systematic idea of Scripture. So, systematic theology is developed through systematizing biblical theology, yet biblical theology finds ideas presented in systematic theology as informing issues such as why we can trust the biblical narrative. Both are absolutely important to understanding what the Bible teaches.

Image courtesy of wikipedia.