Quote:
Originally Posted by ADKing 
I do not think this is accurate. Biblical theology is simply a theological discipline. Overdoing it would be like "overdoing systematic theology" or "overdoing exegesis". The problem is not with the discipline itself, it is with the presuppositions and the philosophy and (to be honest) the agendas with which people do it. Consider the radical difference between the "timid Vos" who emphatically defends supernatural divine revelation beginning with the life of God against all forms of criticism on the one hand, and works like Enns'. They are radically dissimilar.
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Well, it is not quite so simple.
Vos believed in a Biblical Theology constructed on the model of Systematic Theology. It was just that the doctrines of the Systematic Theology were studied chronologically in their development through the history of revelation. Behind this is the assumption that there is a single theology that can be extracted objectively and harmoniously from the Biblical writings as a whole, that it can be arranged systematically, and THEN studied chronologically.
With the failure of the neo-orthodox Biblical Theology Movement in the 1950s, liberal faith in any unitary Biblical Theology, even a liberal one was ended. From then on, the hermeneutical assumption in Biblical studies is that there there is no center, no unifying theology. There are only the perspectives of each author, and those even change over time.
Anyone going to get a PhD in Biblical studies in a major university (the type of degree you need to be a seminary professor) has to give up Vos's idea of Biblical Theology and buy into the multiple perspectives thinking in order to be considered worthy of a degree. Once they have such a degree, a seminary, Westminster for instance, can be sure of one thing: These people no longer hold to Vos's idea of Biblical theology, and their hermeneutical assumptions have changed to something incompatible with Vos's perspective.
Westminster seminary gave up the Vos ideal of systematic theology long ago.