For the next three days, we welcome to the Aspastor John podcast, a guest, Dr. Don Carson.

He was with us at the end of June with a valuable perspective on the SCOTUS decision to legalize

same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

You can find that special episode in the Aspastor John app.

And Dr. Carson, thank you for coming back.

I want to shift gears from recent events to ancient trajectories.

And for the next two days, I want to talk about Biblical theology, one of your specialties.

Let's start with a definition.

What is Biblical theology and why does it matter for us as Christians today?

The term Biblical theology is used differently by different people.

But as I use it, it has two or three different foesahe.

In one focus, you work really carefully with each Biblical book or corpus by corpus.

I mean something like the John corpus, John for second-third John revelation or the synoptic corpus or the Pauline corpus or something like this.

You work carefully with each particular book or corpus to make sure you understand what God is saying through that corpus at that time in history with what words will

be in the Bible and so on before you ask what contribution it's making to the entire canon.

In other words, Biblical theology is interested in the careful exegesis of individual books and corpora within the canon and their place in the progress of redemption.

Not because it wants to despise systematic theology or canonical theology or big picture stuff.

But it insists that if you don't ask those kinds of questions, you can sometimes blur over distinctions that God himself has placed in Scripture and miss things that are a bit different.

Even the most casual reader of Scripture knows that John's vocabulary is not the same as Matthews.

And Paul's vocabulary is not the same as Peter's in one Peter.

And their embassies are a bit different and so on. They're mutually complementary, they tie together, but if you work only at the canonical or systematic level, then there tends to be a very important set of inferences about what the whole Bible teaches, that's right.

But sometimes at the expense of listening carefully to the particular embassies and particular Biblical books and ideally a good preacher will not only handle the individual text at hand,

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