Geerhardus Vos is a giant in church history, a man rightly honored as the founder of evangelical Biblical Theology. He taught us that when we read the Bible, we need to acknowledge and account for its “redemptive-historical nature.” Therefore, we should always read the Bible with a sensitivity to the historical progression of God’s redemption through the several sequential biblical covenants and be prepared to be corrected by the Scriptures. 

Editor’s Note: This article is the first installment of a two part series. Part one introduces Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) and Biblical theology, and part two provides Vos’s four insights on biblical theology, and it also provides four features and four errors of biblical theology.

Geerhardus Vos was born in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, on March 14, 1862, to German parents who had emigrated to the Netherlands, where his father, Jan Hendrick Vos, pastored a Dutch Reformed church. His family emigrated to America in 1881 when his father accepted a call from a Christian Reformed Church congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Geerhardus Vos received theological education from multiple institutions: the Theological School of the Christian Reformed Church (1881–1883), Princeton Seminary (1884–1885), and European universities, first at Berlin and then at Strassburg, where he completed his doctoral studies.[1]

During his European studies, Vos had significant contact with leading continental Reformed theologians, including Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Despite an attractive offer to become the first professor of Old Testament at the newly established Free University in Amsterdam under Kuyper’s leadership, Vos declined. Instead, he accepted a position at the Christian Reformed Church’s Theological School in Grand Rapids (now Calvin Theological Seminary), where he taught for five years, beginning in 1888.[2]

The Move to Princeton

In 1892, Princeton Seminary established the Biblical Theology Chair. They did so in response to the discipline’s expanding significance and impact on biblical scholarship, especially among nineteenth-century liberal scholars, and not because of theological work already being done at the seminary. Two factors support this observation: (1) while A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield held their own conception of Biblical Theology as a discipline, it was neither developed nor prominently featured in their theological methods; and (2) the discipline of Biblical Theology, which originated in rationalism and was dominated by nineteenth-century liberals, was being imported to the United States specifically to provide “a more effective platform from which to disseminate Higher Criticism.”[3] Indeed, just a year earlier in 1891, Union Seminary had created a Chair of Biblical Theology and hired the liberal Charles Briggs to fill it for this express purpose (Briggs would later go on trial for heresy). The Princetonians recognized the need to counteract this development of liberal biblical theologians by appointing Vos—educated in Germany, conversant with Higher Criticism and Biblical Theology, yet an ardent evangelical believer—to fill their own Chair.

Professor William Henry Green, Vos’s former Old Testament mentor, and B. B. Warfield were instrumental in bringing their former student to Princeton. Warfield recognized the need for a professor to teach Biblical Theology as a distinct discipline. He personally encouraged Vos to accept the invitation to Princeton after he had declined an earlier offer. The Charles Briggs heresy controversy at Union Seminary reached its climax at the 1893 Presbyterian General Assembly. As other seminaries went liberal, Princeton was quickly becoming the bastion for defending Reformed Orthodoxy in America, and so Green and Warfield were delighted that Vos joined the Princeton faculty. They believed that he could counter liberal trends in biblical scholarship with rigor, grounded in the authority and unity of Scripture’s organic unfolding of redemptive revelation. His appointment proved significant for establishing Biblical Theology as a discipline of study in the Reformed tradition, and he occupied the chair for thirty-nine years until his retirement in 1932.

Scholarly Contributions While at Princeton Seminary

Vos demonstrated remarkable scholarly breadth, contributing over a hundred penetrating book reviews to The Presbyterian and Reformed Review and The Princeton Theological Review from 1890 to 1919. His multilingual skills served him well in critically reviewing resources written in English, German, and Dutch. While he was developing his magisterial grasp of the redemptive-historical nature of God’s revelation in Scripture, Vos’s book reviews provide a helpful context for understanding how he perceived his work and what critical issues captured his attention. Perhaps because he was more at home working in the Old Testament, he vigorously opposed Old Testament Form Criticism but did not apply his perceptive ability to critiquing Form Criticism pertaining to New Testament studies. He also did not address the rising dialectical theology of Karl Barth. For reasons unexplained, Vos ceased contributing his insightful reviews in 1919. Sadly, Vos’s work was generally neglected by his contemporaries, possibly due to his somewhat ponderous writing style. More than this, his numerous withering critiques of modern criticism prompted liberal contemporaries to dismiss his contributions.

Formative Influences from Fellow Dutchmen

Neither his exposure to Princeton traditions nor his Dutch contacts with Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck adequately explain Vos’s deep interest in the discipline of Biblical Theology. Vos was thoroughly conversant with both Bavinck and Kuyper, for he translated several of their works. Though it seems apparent that Bavinck and Kuyper influenced Vos’s apologetic method, Richard Gaffin rightly suggests,

Vos’s work in biblical theology is largely without direct antecedents and indicates the originality with which he wrestled with the matter of biblical interpretation in the Reformed tradition. It should also be emphasized, however, that he had a strong sense of his own place in that tradition and the thoroughly Reformed character of his work.[4]

Doing Biblical Theology at Princeton

When Vos arrived at Princeton Seminary in 1894 to occupy the Chair of Biblical Theology, he entered a discipline already characterized by four destructive features: (1) rationalistic opposition to supernaturalism, (2) the adoption of historical-critical methods, (3) radical literary criticism, and (4) the abandonment of orthodox views on biblical inspiration. The field had been decisively influenced by Johann P. Gabler’s 1787 inaugural lecture at the University of Altdorf, which, sadly, established biblical theology as a purely historical discipline independent from dogmatic theology.[5] Against this backdrop, Vos undertook the monumental task of forging a truly evangelical Biblical Theology, maintaining the highest view of Scripture. Vos was not naive about the destructive forces. He demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of rationalism’s influence and was perceptive in recognizing the emerging impact of evolutionary philosophy within Biblical Theology.

At the close of his initial academic year as a professor at Princeton, Vos delivered his inaugural address at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton: “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline.”[6] The final portion of his address proposes the crucial points to emphasize in the development of Biblical Theology within the curriculum at Princeton Seminary. His first three deserve emphasis: (1) The objective character of God’s revelation means the object of Biblical Theology is not the thoughts and reflections of humans, “but the oracles of God.” (2) The historical nature of the truth is not contrary to its revealed character but always subordinate to it, because God employed the historical setting for the express purpose of revealing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”[7]

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1. Danny E. Olinger, “Geerhardus Vos: Education in America and Europe, 1881-1888.” ↑

2. During his tenure at what would later be renamed Calvin Theological Seminary (1888–1893), Vos taught systematic theology. During this period, he wrote his recently translated Reformed Dogmatics, vols. 1–5, trans. and ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012–14). ↑

3. Jack B. Rogers and Donald K. McKim, The Authority and Interpretation of the Bible: An Historical Approach (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 358–59. ↑

4. Richard Gaffin, ed., Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation: The Shorter Writings of Geerhardus Vos, (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1980), xii–xiii. ↑

5. Johann Philipp Gabler, “An Oration on the Proper Distinction Between Biblical and Dogmatic Theology and the Specific Objectives of Each” (1787), in Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future, ed. and trans. Ben C. Ollenburger (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 497–506. ↑

6. Geerhardus Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology as a Science and as a Theological Discipline,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Richard Gaffin, 3–24. ↑

7. Vos, “The Idea of Biblical Theology,” 19. ↑