For most of my adult life I have held the conviction that the Christian Church needs to move away from systematic theology to what I have thought of as ‘biblical theology’.
By ‘systematic theology’, I mean theology that derives a few basic principles from scripture and then goes on to deduce from those principles a theological system. Once the system is created, other scriptures are interpreted, re-interpreted, or even counter-interpreted to fit the system.
By ‘Biblical theology’ I meant simply discovering what the Bible teaches and constructing it into a theology – without forcing scripture into a preconceived theological system.
I have since learned that the term ‘Biblical theology’ is already in use. It may or may not correspond to my views on how to do theology. I debated using the title “Inductive Biblical Theology” for this blog – since it more clearly describes my thinking, but I discarded it. While my project involves theology, I am not a theologian. I am simply a student of the Bible.
So I have decided instead to use the term ‘Inductive Biblical Thinking’ as both the title of this blog and as a way to describe this process of constructing theology inductively.
– SSXG