In 1519, a Swiss student by the name of Thomas Platter (1499–1582) attended a sermon given by the recently installed Zurich minister, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531). He would later describe the experience, “I felt as if someone had pulled me up into the air by the hair of my head.”[1] Upon hearing Zwingli’s exposition of John 10, Platter, who had previously intended to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood, would conclude, “a priest I will never be!”

In the summer of the same year, the German Reformer, Martin Luther (1483–1546) engaged in a debate with the Roman Catholic theologian, Johann Eck (1486–1543), in the city of Leipzig. Having embraced the doctrine of justification by faith two years earlier, Luther’s dispute with Eck centered on the legitimacy of the authority of the papacy and church councils. Whereas Eck continuously appealed to tradition to confirm Rome’s authority, Luther based his arguments upon the Bible. As the debate went on, his confidence that Holy Scripture stood as the final source of authority solidified. Eventually, the German Reformer would emphasize to Eck, “I am bound, not only to assert, but to defend the truth with my blood and death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to no one, whether council, university, or pope. I will confidently confess what appears to me to be true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic.”[2] Luther held God’s Word, not the teachings of men, to be the ultimate standard of truth.

Reformation was underway in Europe, and at the heart of that Reformation stood a new way of seeing and understanding Scripture. As Luther would write years later, “The Word of God should establish articles of faith—and no one else, not even an angel.”[3] Zwingli, Luther, and numerous others would lead the church to recover an “ecclesial biblical theology,” as the Word of God alone became the final authority for life and doctrine.[4]

The Authority of Scripture

Central to the Reformer’s recovery of an ecclesial biblical theology stood the conviction that Scripture alone provided the ultimate authority for God’s people. As represented by Luther’s debate with Eck, the late medieval Roman Catholic church put forward Scripture as one of several sources of religious authority, including councils and the papacy. In practice, Rome’s authority overshadowed the authority of God’s Word, since the church’s teaching office served as the Bible’s ultimate interpreter.[5] The Reformers consistently challenged Rome’s claims, placing the authoritative Word of God in the center of the church’s practice.

In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin (1509–1564) sought to defend Scripture’s ultimate authority, reporting that, “a most pernicious error widely prevails that Scripture has only so much weight as is conceded to it by the consent of the church. As if the eternal and inviolable truth of God depended upon the decision of men!”[6] For Calvin, the Word of God preceded the church, since the church itself was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Eph 2:30).” Zwingli would similarly testify, “When I was younger, I gave myself overmuch to human teaching . . . But eventually I came to the point where led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these things and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own Word.”[7]

The Reformer’s belief in the authority of Scripture meant the Word of God ought to become the ready possession of the people of God. As Luther put it, “Let the man who would hear God speak, read Holy Scripture.”[8] To see such a thing come to pass, however, meant both making the Word of God available through mass printing and vernacular translations, and providing God’s people with instruction on how to best understand and interpret God’s Word. As David Steinmetz observed, “The Protestant Reformers were, above all, biblical exegetes; their reform was advanced from the pulpit and the commentator’s desk.”[9] As the Reformers taught, preached, and wrote, the unity and Christ-centered interpretation of Scripture provided the foundation upon which their return to an ecclesial biblical theology was built.

The Unity of Scripture

For the Reformers, Scripture presented a unified narrative of divine revelation across both the Old and New Testaments. Though progressively revealed, Genesis to Revelation echoed God’s promise to his people. While the Reformers would have their own distinct emphases, they presented a unified voice, conveying that God’s Word spoke a unified message that ultimately centered on and found ultimate fulfillment in Christ.

Luther’s reformational principles grew out of his work as a lecturer in sacred Scripture at the newly formed University of Wittenberg. As Timothy George has noted, Luther’s earliest lectures began to evidence a critique of the established methods of Scholastic theology, “insisting that the true theologian would pay attention to God’s distinctive way of speaking in Scripture.”[10] As the German reformer studied the Scripture, he discerned that both the Old and New Testaments contained a mixture of both law and gospel.

As early as his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, Luther had put forward the biblical-theological scheme of law and gospel, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”[11] In his 1520 Freedom of a Christian, Luther would more explicitly connect the themes of law and gospel to biblical interpretation. He writes, “the entire Scripture of God is divided into two parts: commandments [law] and promises [gospel}.”[12] For Luther, the law corresponds with “everything that preaches about our sins and God’s wrath,” while the gospel represents that which “shows and gives nothing but grace and forgiveness in Christ.”[13] As Christopher Brown notes, Luther “significantly did not mean a distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament as groups of books in the Christian biblical canon.”[14] As a biblical-theological tool, distinguishing between law and gospel “became a key to interpreting the entire canon of Scripture.”[15] The Old Testament was full of gospel promises, while the New Testament, including the explicit teaching of Jesus, contained law. The Christian church needed the continual proclamation of both law and gospel, but in such a way that the gospel “had the final word.”[16]

Calvin largely followed Luther’s law-gospel distinction but also developed a more systematic account of the unity of Scripture through his understanding of covenant. For the Genevan Reformer, both the Old and New Testaments represented one covenant, differing in administration but not in substance.[17] For Calvin, “The covenant made with all the patriarchs is so much like ours in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same. Yet they differ in the mode of dispensation.”[18] He went on to explain that the two Testaments were unified by three factors. First, Old Testament saints, just as those of the New, did not aspire fundamentally to “carnal prosperity” but “were adopted into the hope of immortality.” Second, the covenant was “supported, not by their own merits, but by the mercy of God who called them.” As Peter Optiz states, “the covenant was always a covenant of grace, and the continuation of sola gratia spans both Testaments.”[19] Finally, even in the Old Testament, saints “had and knew Christ as mediator” as they trusted in the promises of God while lacking the New Testament clarity concerning the person and work of Christ.

While Calvin underscored a fundamental unity of Old and New Testament as companion testimonies of God’s gracious covenant, he recognized that there were certain differences regarding administration. He went on to suggest five differences, including the Old Testament’s promise of a land for God’s people and the extension of God’s promise to all nations found within the New Testament. Yet, for Calvin, such differences did not “detract from its established unity.”[20] While Calvin’s relationship with the later development of covenant theology is complex, most of the significant components are found within his writings and his work undoubtedly served as a key impetus for one of the most fruitful themes of biblical theology.

Christ-Centered Interpretation

Central to the Reformer’s biblical theology stood the conviction that Christ was the hermeneutical key that unlocked true understanding of God’s Word. Scripture, then, was to be read and preached with Christ at the center. Whereas the fourfold interpretation of the Scriptures that had come to dominate the medieval church too often obscured Christ, the Reformers saw Christ throughout the whole Bible and contended that the purpose of the Bible was to reveal Christ.

For Luther, both law and gospel served to reveal Christ, as the law revealed one’s sinful state and need for Christ, and the gospel presented good news of God’s grace in Christ. Thus, Christ could be found in every passage of Scripture. For the German Reformer, interpreting all of Scripture Christologically was not a fanciful mode of reading Scripture that laid something foreign over the text, but stemmed from a literal reading of the text. To find Christ in all of Scripture was nothing more than taking seriously the words of Christ in John 5:29, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.” This meant interpreting the Old Testament in light of the Christological clarity of the New. As David Dockery emphasized, “In principle, every portion of the Old Testament proclaimed Jesus Christ and anticipated its fulfillment in him. At the same time, everything in the New Testament was understood to look back and shed light on the Old.”[21] Luther’s replacement of medieval exegetical practices with a Christological hermeneutic rooted in a literal reading of the text “profoundly shaped the subsequent history of biblical interpretation in the West” and established Christ-centered interpretation of the whole Bible as one of the foremost concerns of biblical theology.

Calvin, like Luther, interpreted all of Scripture with a Christological focus. For the Genevan Reformer, Christ was both the “Word . . . from which both all oracles and prophecies go forth” and the goal of all Scripture. This was true for both the Old and New Testaments. He explained, “whatever the law teaches, whatever it commands, whatever it promises, has always a reference to Christ as its main object; and hence all its parts ought to be applied to him.”[22] Calvin shared Luther’s concern that Christological readings ought not be offered on the basis of careless allegorizing that overlooked the historical-grammatical context of a text. In fact, Calvin generally offered more restrained readings of biblical passages than Luther.[23] However, undergirded by the biblical-theological category of covenant and the teaching and example of Christ and the apostles, Calvin understood Christ to be the definitive interpreter of the law and the object of prophetic utterances.[24] For Calvin, a Christ-centered interpretation of the Scriptures was true Christian interpretation. “We ought to read the Scriptures,” he would write, “with the express design of finding Christ in them.”[25]

Conclusion

The Reformation was not merely a transformation in theological understanding and church life, but a transformation rooted in a more faithful reading of the Scriptures, resulting in a renewal of ecclesial biblical theology. Moreover, this “hermeneutical revolution”[26] was not for the scholarly elite but meant to transform the people of God as they heard and read the authoritative Word of God through a biblical-theological framework that upheld the unity of the Bible and a Christ-centered interpretation of all of Scripture. The biblical theology movement as we know it today may be rightly considered a proper extension of both the concerns and advances that Reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin pioneered. As twenty-first-century interpreters of Scripture seek to follow the example of the Reformers in the right reading of God’s Word, we do so committed to understanding the Bible as God’s unified message centered on the gospel of Christ. As Luther insisted, “For the gospel teaches nothing but Christ, and therefore Scripture contains nothing but Christ. Whoever fails to recognize Christ may hear the gospel or he may indeed carry the book in his hand, but he lacks understanding, for to have the gospel without understanding, is to have no gospel at all. And to possess Scripture without knowing Christ, is to have no Scripture.”[27]

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[1] Thomas Platter, The Autobiography of Thomas Platter: A Schoolmaster of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Sidney M. Seebohm (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1864), 39.

[2] Martin Luther, quoted in Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950), 91–92.

[3] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 34, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann and Lewis W. Spitz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), 308.

[4] I am employing the language and categories of “ecclesial biblical theology” from Stephen O. Presley, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Early Church: Recovering an Ancient Vision (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2025). Like the early church, the Reformers do not use the language of “biblical theology” but labor to bring a unified vision of Scripture to bear on all aspects of the church’s life and culture.

[5] Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development, trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 188.

[6] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 1:75.

[7] Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, trans. and ed. G. W. Bromiley, Library of Christian Classics 24 (London: SCM Press, 1953), 90.

[8] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 54, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), 165.

[9] David C. Steinmetz, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,” Theology Today 37, no. 1 (1980): 27.

[10] Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 153.

[11] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Career of the Reformer I, vol. 31, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 40.

[12] Luther, Luther’s Works: Career of the Reformer I, 348.

[13] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Church and Ministry IV, vol. 78, ed. Benjamin T. G. Mayes and James L. Langebartels (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2015), 215.

[14] Christopher Boyd Brown, “Martin Luther’s Biblical Hermeneutics,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation, ed. Jennifer Powell McNutt and Herman J. Selderhuis, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 299.

[15] George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, 180.

[16] Brown, “Martin Luther’s Biblical Hermeneutics,” 299.

[17] Pierrick Hildebrand, “Calvin and the Covenant: The Reception of Zurich Theology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism, ed. Bruce Gordon and Carl R. Trueman, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 67.

[18] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2:429.

[19] Peter Opitz, “Scripture,” in The Calvin Handbook, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis, trans. Henry J. Baron et al. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 238.

[20] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2:449.

[21] David S. Dockery, “Martin Luther’s Christological Principle,” in The Reformation and the Irrepressible Word of God: Interpretation, Theology, and Practice, ed. Scott M. Manetsch (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 30.

[22] John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, trans. and ed. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849), 384.

[23] John L. Thompson, “Calvin as Biblical Interpreter,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim, Cambridge Companions to Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 69.

[24] Opitz, “Scripture,” 249.

[25] John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, 2 vols., trans. William Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1847–48), 1:218.

[26] David S. Dockery, “Martin Luther’s Christological Hermeneutics,” Grace Theological Journal 4, no. 2 (Fall 1983): 189.

[27] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works: Sermons II, vol. 52, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 207.