Part 2
Geerhardus Vos’s Biblical Theology: Four Features, Four Insights, Four Errors
Many readers, as children, first heard the unfolding story of the Bible told faithfully by Catherine F. Vos from parents who read to them The Child’s Story Bible.[1] Yet Catherine Vos may not have been the most important writer in her family—that distinction belongs to her husband, Geerhardus Vos, the father of evangelical Biblical Theology. Over the years, many of Vos’s exegetical insights have been disseminated throughout the evangelical world thanks to the excellent work of scholars such as Richard Gaffin, Herman Ridderbos, and George Eldon Ladd, as well as many modern scholars. Yet as helpful as these authors are, nothing is quite like going to the source. In Vos’s writings, one finds a nearly unparalleled depth of insight into the nature of the biblical text. Let’s rediscover the glory of Scripture, God’s progressive revelation of himself, with Geerhardus Vos as our guide.
A Pioneer Biblical Theologian
Geerhardus Vos’s work at Princeton represents a unique and paradigm-shifting contribution to evangelical scholarship. While he was brought to Princeton to counter critical developments in Biblical Theology, which he did admirably, his enduring reputation stems from pioneering efforts to forge a genuinely evangelical and Reformed Biblical Theology derived from Scripture itself within a dogmatics-dominated institution. His emphasis on Scripture’s divinely revealed, inerrant character, combined with a sophisticated understanding of revelation’s progressive historical and organic nature, provided a robust alternative to rationalistic biblical criticism.
Against the biblical critics, Vos successfully demonstrated that historical consciousness governed by Christian faith properly serves orthodox rather than critical views of Scripture. Although his influence initially seemed restricted to Princeton colleagues, Vos’s creative and original work began to garner appreciation when his Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments became more accessible in 1948, a year before his death, first published by Eerdmans and later by other publishers.[2] Other publications enhanced Vos’s influence, such as The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Eerdmans, 1956, reissued by P&R, 1975), The Kingdom of God and the Church (P&R, 1972), The Pauline Eschatology (Baker, 1979), and Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos (P&R, 1980). These and many more publications established Vos as a pivotal figure in evangelical biblical scholarship, influencing many seminarians throughout the second half of the twentieth century and since. In what follows, I will introduce the four distinctive features of biblical theology along with Vos’s four major insights into the discipline.
The Task of Biblical Theology Consists of Four Distinctive Features
(1) God’s revelation entails historical progression. God’s inscribed revelation is not abstract propositional knowledge, but a growing truth that unfolds in the history of God’s redemptive deeds. God’s progressive revelation encompasses both the objective level (redemptive acts toward humanity, such as incarnation, atonement, and resurrection) and the subjective level (individual redemptive acts, including regeneration, conversion, and sanctification). God progressively unfolds his revelation through his redeeming deeds within covenantal relationships and authorizes his holy prophets to record them in the biblical narrative for the instruction of his covenant people.
(2) History itself incarnates God’s revelation. The process of God’s revelation is not merely connected with history but becomes “incarnate in history.”[3] Thus, God’s revelatory acts in history are inherently consequential. This is true because Scripture places God’s revelation acts adjacent to his revelation words, where God’s redemptive and revelatory acts coincide. This means “the facts of history themselves acquire a revealing significance” in epoch-making acts such as the redemptive exodus of God’s covenant people from Egypt or the most prominent of all, Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.[4]
These are undeniable historical events, which God enacted primarily with reference to himself to satisfy his justice and reveal his character. Therefore, history itself, not only Scripture, embodies God’s revelation.[5] God thoroughly imbued these redeeming events with his signature, marking them as critical historical epochs that continue to shape the course of history long after the events took place.[6] Though God indelibly imprinted his redeeming actions with revelatory import as part of history, unfolding in a clear and purposeful sequence, God does not leave them to “speak for themselves.”[7] Instead, God accompanies his revelatory deeds with “verbal communication of truth.”[8] God’s words always accompany his acts in this usual order: (1) predictive word, followed by (2) act, then (3) interpretive word.[9]
(3) The historic process of supernatural revelation is organic in nature. Vos’s use of “organic” shows continuity with Reformed theology, particularly with Warfield’s concept of divine inspiration, but Vos expands its range.[10] The progression of revelation is not uniform but organic and epochal, like the growth of a tree from seed to maturity, which depends on seasonal factors. Thus, when God’s redemptive acts proceed slowly and sparingly, his revelatory Word follows the same pace. Likewise, when God’s “great epoch-making redemptive acts accumulate,” God’s revelatory Word through his prophets correspondingly accelerates and increases in volume.[11] God’s Word revelation is no mere announcement of his epoch-making redemptive acts, for “God has not given us His own interpretation of the great realities of redemption in the form of a chronicle, but in the form of the historical organism of the inspired Scriptures.”[12]
The organic quality of God’s revelation explains the multiformity of Scripture. Rather than variation and diversity undermining absoluteness and infallibility, organic nature establishes it since God shapes both the instrument and the product. Infallibility does not require “dull uniformity,” nor does progression exclude absolute perfection at all stages. This organic quality must guide the biblical theologian’s work, as the History of Special Revelation poses tension between maintaining the perfection of revealed truth at all stages while demonstrating gradual development in fullness and clarity.[13]
This tension finds resolution not in hypothesizing correctives to time-conditioned factors, but in “assuming that the advance in revelation resembles the organic process, through which out of the perfect germ the perfect plant and flower and fruit are successively produced.”[14] Vos summarizes Biblical Theology as “nothing else than the exhibition of the organic progress of supernatural revelation in its historic continuity and multiformity.”[15]
(4) God makes himself known through a progressive sequence of covenants that climax in Christ Jesus, who established the New Covenant, revealing his character, words, and deeds within the context of a sinfully fallen human history. Everything God has revealed about himself through his covenants has been given in response to the real spiritual needs of his people as those needs arose throughout history.[16] Simply stated, Vos insists that the objective of Biblical Theology is to instruct God’s people, leading them to worship God who makes himself known covenantally to us.
Thus, it follows that God suffused his revelatory acts—events, persons, institutions, and places—with self-disclosure, imprinting all his redemptive deeds to function as earthly shadows that foreshadow things to come along two axes: spatial and temporal.[17] Spatially, they are earthly shadows revealing heavenly realities for the immediate recipients of God’s revelation, for example, the Tabernacle, constructed in keeping with the pattern revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exod. 25:40). Temporally, the earthly copies that reveal heavenly realities foreshadow the revelation of heavenly realities that come with the promised Messiah in the latter days (cf. Heb. 8:5).
I use “spatial” and “temporal” to correlate with what Vos calls “symbol” and “type.”[18] Throughout the Old Testament, God assigned symbolic functions to events, persons, institutions, and places that spatially shadowed heavenly realities on earth. Concerning persons, God’s Son, who is the image of God, formed Adam to resemble himself, bearing his image (Gen. 1:26; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). Likewise, Melchizedek, a king and priest, is presented with no ancestry, an earthly resemblance of God’s Son (Gen. 14:17–20; Heb. 7:3).[19] In the same way, the portable wilderness tabernacle, later replaced by the stationary temple, with all its symbolic trappings, priests, and rituals, portrayed heavenly realities to the Israelites. The tabernacle’s function was not only a symbolic shadow spatially representing God’s presence in the earthly atonement, but it was also temporally prospective, operating as a foreshadowing type, prophetically anticipating the heavenly reality yet to come down to earth with the Coming One, the promised Messiah.[20] Thus, the temporary earthly things God infused with religious symbolism of heavenly truths for the faith of his ancient people, he invested with typological, foreshadowing, and prophetic roles concerning the heavenly realities yet to come in the latter days with his Son. Thus, no type could ever function “independently of its being first a symbol,” and earthly shadow of heavenly realities cast down to earth for the people to whom it was first given.[21] The Apostle Paul assures us that God’s Son cast the Old Testament types as earthly shadows to foreshadow all that would arrive with the Coming One. The body that cast those shadows was Christ Jesus (Col. 2:16–17).[22]
Vos’s Four Major Insights Concerning Biblical Theology
Vos’s insights concerning Biblical Theology are numerous and influential. The following four insights should significantly prompt Evangelicals to recognize that the work of the biblical theologian is to replicate as accurately as possible God’s progressive revelation of himself in harmony with his redemptive deeds, as portrayed for us in the Bible’s storyline from Genesis to Revelation.
1. Biblical Theology Traces the Progress of Redemption, which is the “History of Special Revelation.”
Vos’s definition of “Biblical Theology” as the “History of Special Revelation” obligates us to follow his lead to do the same by acknowledging Scripture’s organic progression of God’s redemptive and revelatory acts as the focus and definition of the discipline, which is not an end in itself but terminates upon God in all our acts of worship, whether privately or corporately. Biblical theologians need to abandon the notion that we bring a redemptive-historical hermeneutic to the text of Scripture. Instead, the biblical text compels every biblical theologian and every Christian to acknowledge that Scripture is God’s special revelation, given redemptively and historically, with God’s word clarifying his deeds.
2. Because God’s revelation correlates with his redemptive acts, from beginning to end, God’s saving deeds and revelatory words are eschatologically oriented to the new heavens and earth.
From Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, Scripture confronts every Christian, without exception, with its redemptive-historical revelation, compelling us to trace and represent accurately the historical progression of Scripture’s storyline of God’s redeeming acts. Scripture constrains us to do this from the absolute beginning of God’s created order with its numerous types and foreshadows that climax with the arrival of Christ Jesus, whose advent as an incarnate infant presages a second advent when, as conquering King, he defeats and destroys every evil enemy, bringing redemption to its culmination, the consummation of all things in Christ Jesus (Col. 1:15–20).
3. The Already-but-Not-Yet Nature of God’s Redemptive Acts and Revelation—God’s Kingdom.
Vos did not use the now-familiar shorthand expression, “already but not yet,” to capture the New Testament’s presentation of the present and future aspects of God’s coming kingdom. Nevertheless, he surely laid the exegetical and theological groundwork for the concept, especially in The Kingdom of God and the Church (1903) and The Pauline Eschatology (1930). Vos expressed this concept more in terms of the “present and future aspects of the Kingdom,” or the “overlap of the ages.” It was George E. Ladd (1911–1982) who popularized Vos’s eschatological insights and coined the phrase “already and not yet” to describe the Bible’s tension of inaugurated eschatology, which he learned from Vos. Thus, the coined expression captures the concept of prophecy fulfilled without consummation in The Presence of the Future: The Eschatology of Biblical Realism (1974).[23]
4. Biblical Types are Prophetic Prefigurations as Features of God’s Redemptive-Historical Revelation.
Admittedly, it is with difficulty that one grasps Vos’s understanding of earthly shadows of heavenly things God infused with both a symbolic function for God’s ancient people and a typological foreshadowing of the future arrival of those heavenly realities at the end of the ages (1 Cor. 10:11). Careful reading of his presentation would guard contemporary biblical scholars from falling into four regularly observed common errors.
- Wrongly claiming that biblical types were not prophetic, leading to the error of insisting that types are discerned only retrospectively.
- Mistakenly locating the discussion of biblical types in hermeneutics rather than in divine revelation, contributing to the error of speaking of typological interpretation or figural interpretation.
- Incorrectly ascribing to the Israelites of old our comparative ease of understanding Old Testament types from the vantage point of fulfillment. Such an error fails to apprehend the redemptive-historical progression of God’s unfolding revelation, which culminates in this: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48, niv).
- Improperly falling into the opposite error of sustaining the Old Testament earthly shadow form of worship (requiring the keeping of food laws, circumcision, and holy days) by fixating on the symbolic, thus robbing Christ, the reality, of his due glory. This is the error the Preacher counters in Hebrews, and Paul exposes and condemns in his Letter to the Galatians.[24]
Conclusion
Among the numerous theological works I have read since I was a seminarian, the most scripturally instructive, spiritually transformative, and exegetically influential have been Vos’s biblical-theological insights, which fill the pages of each of his publications. It has not been Vos himself but Holy Scripture, which he expounds with the Spirit’s imbued grace of clarity, that has been incrementally reshaping my total world and life view in keeping with God’s redemptive-historical revelation. I pray that many more will take up and read the work of this faithful servant of Christ, and in doing so discover the extent of the immeasurable riches available in God’s Word.
Originally published at Christ Over All.
[1] Catherine F. Vos, The Child’s Story Bible, first published 1934 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1972).
[2] Wipf & Stock published a reprint in 2003, and the Banner of Truth Trust published it in 2014.
[3] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 6. By “incarnate in history,” Vos does not refer only to the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14), but the process of God’s revelatory word becoming incarnate in history itself and captured in Scripture through the prophetic writings. Cf. Ardel B. Caneday, “A Theology of Language: From Creative Word Spoken to the Word Incarnate,” Christ Over All, (May 23, 2025).
[4] Vos, Biblical Theology, 6.
[5] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 9.
[6] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 9.
[7] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 9.
[8] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 9.
[9] Vos, Biblical Theology, 7.
[10] Vos, Biblical Theology, 7.
[11] Vos, Biblical Theology, 7.
[12] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 20.
[13] Vos, Biblical Theology, 7–8.
[14] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 10–11.
[15] Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology, 15, emphasis original.
[16] Vos, Biblical Theology, 8–9. Vos decisively distances his definition and practice of Biblical Theology from its rationalistic roots. The ‘rationalist’ strand of biblical theology was clearly laid out by Johann P. Gabler more than a century earlier in his inaugural address, “On the Proper Distinction between Biblical Theology and Dogmatic Theology,” at the University of Altdorf on March 31, 1787. This can be found in Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future, ed. and trans. Ben C. Ollenburger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 497–506.
[17] See Ardel B. Caneday, “God’s Parabolic Design for Israel’s Tabernacle: A Cluster of Earthly Shadows of Heavenly Realities,” SBJT 24.1 (2020): 103–24. See also Geerhardus Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Nutley, NJ, 1975), 49–87.
[18] Vos, Biblical Theology, 145.
[19] See Ardel B. Caneday, “The Significance of the OT’s Silence in the Case of Melchizedek’s Ancestry and Progeny in Genesis 14,” in Appropriating Hebrews’s Scriptural Hermeneutic for the Twenty-First Century, eds. Dana M. Harris and J. David Stark (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2025), 109–29 (forthcoming).
[20] Vos, Biblical Theology, 145. “When the Epistle [of Hebrews] speaks of shadowing this means shadowing down (from heaven to earth), not shadowing forward (from Old Testament to New Testament).” What came with God’s promised Messiah “is not merely a reproduction of the Heavenly Reality, but its actual substance, the Reality itself come down from heaven, the aute eikon or very image.” Thus, the tabernacle was “not a shadow projected or thrown forward (into the future), but a shadow cast down from heaven to earth. . . . The true [sanctuary in heaven] is the real archetypal representation. . . . The Old Testament things, therefore, were a parable; that is, they were things called a parable in relation to the reality of the things of the New Testament” (Vos, The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 58–59).
[21] Vos, Biblical Theology, 145. Vos states, “This is the fundamental rule to be observed in ascertaining what elements in the Old Testament are typical, and wherein the things corresponding to them as antitypes consist. Only after having discovered what a thing symbolizes, can we legitimately proceed to put the question what it typifies, for the latter can never be aught else than the former lifted to a higher plane. The bond that holds type and antitype together must be a bond of vital continuity in the progress of redemption” (145–46).
[22] See Vos, Biblical Theology, 147, where Vos expresses the essence of Colossians 2:17, “The types are shadows of a body which is Christ. If the body called Christ was an organism, then also the shadows of it, that came before, must have borne the same character.”
[23] Also see Thomas R. Schreiner, “The World Turned Upside Down: George Ladd on the Kingdom,” Christ Over All (Nov. 11, 2024).
[24] Vos correctly states, “This the Romish Church does on a large scale. And in doing so, instead of lifting the substance of the types to a higher plane, it simply reproduces and repeats. This is destructive of the whole typical relation” (Biblical Theology, 148).