I just came across this quote and I found it to be quite thought provoking.

I thought others might find it thought provoking as well.

It’s a quote by John Sailhamer in “The Meaning of the Pentateuch” on page 104.

The ability to fill out the biblical picture is at the heart of the problem. Using modern historical tools, we have the same ability to fill in the historical details of scriptural narratives as we have of painting intricate details of seventeenth-century life over the shadows of a Rembrandt painting. By painting shadows, Rembrandt deliberately left out many historical details that would have given us much information about the events he recorded on canvas. Historians who understand the culture and life setting of seventeenth-century Europe could easily replace Rembrandt’s dark shadows with historically accurate details of the world around him. In the same way, historians of the ancient world could fill in many historically accurate details about the events recorded in the biblical narratives. They could, for example, help us to better understand the nature of biblical covenants by comparing them with ancient treaty documents. There is no end to the amount of material now available to “fill in” the biblical picture. The problem is that this would have the same effect on the biblical(OT) narratives as on Rembrandt’s paintings. Filling in the biblical narratives with additional historical material may teach us things about the events of which the biblical writers were speaking, but the evangelical’s goal in interpretation and biblical theology is not an understanding of those events as such. The goal, as evangelicals must see it, is the biblical author’s understanding of those events in the inspired text of the Bible(OT). We should not seek to know what lies behind or beneath Rembrandt’s shadows. It is the shadows that are a central part of the paintings, not the historical details that lie behind the shadows and are thus not in the painting. Rembrandt’s meaning lies as much in what is not seen in his painting as in what is seen. The shadows, by blocking out the irrelevant details, help us focus on what is seen. The effect of our adding more details to the painting would be to lose Rembrandt’s focus. The task for evangelicals is to recover the sense of what the biblical texts intend to tell us about the events they are recounting. We can arrive at that goal only by an exegesis of the text.

The main distinction he seems to be making is between Systematic Theology and Biblical Theology. The former looks at every detail to discover what is. The latter looks at the emphasis made by the author. I think there’s a place for both. What are your thoughts?