The Old and New Testaments as Pointing to Christ

Here’s a neat quote from Barth on how the Old and New Testaments relate:

As regards handling of Old Testament texts, we maintain that for us the Old Testament is valid only in relation to the New. If the church as declared itself to be the lawful successor of the synagogue, this means that the Old Testament is witness to Christ, before Christ but not without Christ. Each sentence in the Old Testament must be seen in this context. Historical exegesis can and must be done, but at the same time we have to ask whether this exegesis does justice to the context in which the Old and New Testaments stand. Even in a sermon on Judges 6:3 it is possible both insist on the literal sense and also to set one’s sights on Christ. As a wholly Jewish book, the Old Testament is a pointer to Christ. As regards the justification of allegory, we have again to refer to the relation between the Old Testament and the New. In the Old Testament the natural sense is the issue. Preaching must bring out what the Old Testament passage actually says, but in a way that affirms the basic premise on which the church adopted the Old Testament. This does not mean that we will give the passage a second sense — just as we are not to oppose historical and Christian exposition to one another. Instead, we will see that this passage in its immanence points beyond itself. It is a signpost that gives us direction. The Old Testament points forwards, the New Testament points backward, and both point to Christ.
- Karl Barth, Homiletics Translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Donald E. Daniels (Louisville, KY: WJK, 1991) 80-81.

In Jesus Christ is Sinai and Zion, Bethel and Jerusalem

Here’s a nice quote from Barth on the Church’s relationship to “holy places” (i.e., Israel, the temple, tabernacle, etc.):

[. . .] Special places can no longer exist in this sense. If Christianity, for its part, tries to proclaim and accept holy places in this sense, it will mean always a relapse into Judaism, or more correctly, into a pagan self-misunderstanding of Judaism, or even ore accurately, a rejection of the true Judaism of Solomon and Jeremiah. Theologically, then, we cannot expect anything for the Jews from a return to Palestine as the holy land; and recent propaganda for the gathering of all Christian Jew to Palestine as the place of the promise which avails for all who are baptised out of Israel involves a twofold error. Now that Israel’s Messiah has appeared, and has been rejected by Israel, and manifested as the Saviour of believers from both Jews and Gentiles, there does not exist any more a holy mountain or holy city or holy land which can be marked on a map. The reason is not that God’s holiness in space has suddenly become unworthy of Him or has changed into a heathen ubiquity. The reason is that all prophecy is now fulfilled in Jesus, and God’s holiness in space, like all God’s holiness, is now called and is Jesus of Nazareth. This holiness is certainly to be encountered in the created space that can be represented on maps. But in this space it only where Jesus Himself, having entered heaven (in fulfilment of the entering of the high priest into the tabernacle, Heb. 9.24), is now present in the world from heaven and therefore from the throne of God in such a way that He calls and quickens men to faith in Him by His Word and His Spirit, and therefore calls and quickens them for worship in spirit and truth desired by the Father. In Him is Sinai and Zion, Bethel and Jerusalem.
(CD, II.1 p 482)

An Old Testament Abstracted from Christ

I think it was Seitz who said that the issue for the early church was not how to explain the Old Testament in the light of Christ, but how to understand Christ in light of the Old Testament as Scripture. It was impossible for the early church not to understand the Old Testament as being all about Christ. Barth (who is also followed by Childs here) points out that Christ is the true subject matter to which both testaments are witnesses to. Failure to see this necessarily leads to an abandonment and misunderstanding of both the Old and New Testament:

. . . A religio-historical understanding of the Old Testament in abstraction from the revelation of the risen Christ is simply an abandonment of the New Testament and of the sphere of the Church in favour of that of the Synagogue, and therefore in favour of an Old Testament which is understood apart from its true object, and content. [. . .] If Christ has risen from the dead, then the understanding of the Old Testament as a witness to Christ is not a later interpretation, but an understanding of its original and only legitimate sense. Moses and the prophets do not belong only because the New Testament undoubtedly says so, but–when the New Testament has undoubtedly said so on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus–they belong, not as representatives of an earlier religion prior to the Evangelists and apostles, but as the prophetic heralds of Jesus Christ side by side with them. Therefore the Church cannot be released from its task of expounding and applying the Old Testament witness too, and of respecting its authority as the Word of God. (I.2 p 489-90)

Were the Apostles Bad Exegetes?

Upon reading the New Testament, it is quickly apparent to any careful reader that the apostles’ hermeneutic was anything but grammatical-historical. Does this mean that the apostles were lousy exegetes? Maybe. But before we dismiss the apostles for their supposedly arbitrary interpretation of the OT, it is important that we first examine our own modern assumptions in light of Scripture. If we fail to do so we run the risk of telling the Scriptures what to say and how to say it, rather than hearing the voice of God:

Apostolic hermeneutics was driven by a Spirit-initiated intimacy with the crucified and risen Christ. It was their [the apostles'] conviction that Christ was God’s deliverer–a conviction that can come only by God’s gift of illumination–as demonstrated in his crucifixion and resurrection, that drove the apostles to see all of the Old Testament as finding its culmination in Christ. The apostles did not arrive at the conclusion that Jesus is Lord from a dispassionate, objective reading of the Old Testament. Rather, they began with what they knew to be true–the historical death and resurrection of the Son of God–and on the basis of that fact reread their Scripture in a fresh way.

There is no question that such a thing can be counterintuitive for a more traditional evangelical doctrine of Scripture, since this is eisgesis (reading meaning into Scripture) rather than exegesis (getting meaning from Scripture). It is precisely a dispassionate, unbiased, objective reading that is normally considered to constitute valid reading. But what may be considered valid today cannot be the determining factor for understanding what the apostles did.

Another way of putting the problem is that apostolic hermeneutics violates what is considered to be a fundamental interpretive principle: don’t take things out of context. So, it is thought, we cannot have New Testament writers taking the Old Testament out of context. But we must learn to look at it differently. It is not that the Old Testament words are taken out of context and tossed into the air to fall where they may. Rather, the New Testament authors take the Old Testament out of one context, that of the original human author, and place it into another context, the one that represents the final goal to which Israel’s story has been moving.

- Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 152-53.

The Basic Meaning of Holy Scripture

A neat quote from Athanasius that gives an idea of how the Church Fathers held two testaments (i.e., the ‘double account’) together. The two were neither confused nor separated but distinguished and were kept together by the common subject matter to which they both pointed, namely, Christ:

What is the basic meaning and purport of Holy Scripture? It contains, as we have often said, a double account of the Savior. It says that he has always been God and is the Son, because he is the Logos and radiance and Wisdom of the Father. Furthermore, it says that in the end he became a human being, he took flesh for our sakes from the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer.

One can find this teaching indicated throughout Holy Scripture, as the Lord himself has said, “Search the Scriptures, for it is they which bear witness concerning me” [John 5:39]
- Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians, in The Christological Controversy trans. & ed. Richard A. Norris, Jr. (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), 87.

Childs on the Servant of the Lord’s Vicarious Suffering

Childs on Isaiah 53 and the vicarious suffering of the servant:

Yet the point of the Isaianic text is that God himself took the initiative in accepting the servant’s life as the means of Israel’s forgiveness. In the first divine speech (52:13), the “success” of the servant is promised because of what God had done. This proimse was hidden, never before told (v. 15), but Israel finally understood it as a revelation from “the arm of the LORD.” The role of the servant resulted in Israel’s forgiveness because of God’s acceptance of the servant’s obedient suffering. Israel not only recognized the freedom that the servant had won for it, but in the experience of encountering the hidden plan of God, was itself transformed into the new Israel, which shared in the coming redemptive age. Aleady the scene for Israel’s restoration was set as God designated the servant as the embodiment of Israel (49:3), through whom God would be glorified and the nation would be gathered again to him. When seen in the light of the unfolding drama of God’s plan to redeem Israel in chapters 40-55, the vicarious role of the servant lies at the very heart of the prophetic message and its removal can only result in losing the exegetical key that unlocks the awesome mystery of these chapters.
- Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 418.

The Prophet Isaiah, John the Baptist, and the Substance of Christian Scripture

Consistent with his conviction that the Old and New Testaments should not simply be conflated (so that either the NT ends up being just a form of midrash, or the OT is read as though it were merely an “earthly” version of the NT), Childs advocates finding the unity of the two testaments in the subject matter (res) which they point to, namely, Christ. Here’s a concrete example of what that looks like:

When John the Baptist linked the appearance of Jesus with the prophet’s call to “prepare the way of the Lord,” he was not making a mechanical connection with an ancient prediction of Isaiah. Rather, the reality of God’s salvation was manifest in Jesus Christ in such a way that his advent provided a perfect morphological fit according to its redemptive substance with the Old Testament promise. In a word, the salvific significance of Jesus Christ was understood in the light of Old Testament prophecy, while, conversely, the Old Testament promise gained its true meaning from the revelation of the Christ in the fullness of God’s time.
- Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 303.

The Maker of Heaven and Earth

In a chapter entitled, “Our Help Is in the Name of the LORD,” Christopher Seitz explores the phrase “the maker of heaven and earth” in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. He explains that the “Creed is more than putting out theological brushfires. It is letting scripture come to its natural, two-testament expression.” (178) In light of this, Seitz considers the fact that the creed begins with a confession of God the Father. This demonstrates that “It is not possible to speak of Jesus as this savior without speaking of God who sent him” (186). He continues, “There is no Jesus Christ apart from the prior electing, creating ‘maker of the heavens and earth.’” In this sense, then, the Old Testament’s per se voice, which witnesses to the same subject matter as the New Testament (i.e., Christ), must be appreciated and understood in order to properly hear and understand the voice of the New Testament witness. What Seitz doesn’t want is a reading of the Old Testament that ignores the fact that the two testaments are distinct books–the New Testament is not a ’spiritualized’ Old Testament. On the other hand, however, Seitz also warns that “the insistence on the rootedness of the description of God in the Old Testament must guard against another tendency”:

. . . The God of the Old Testament has fully identified himself with Jesus Christ. He does not continue to exercise some separate, untameable, unpredictable rule prior to, and perduring after, what he has made clear in Jesus. The New Testament does ont introduce a great parenthesis outside which God retains an unruly and undomesticated authority. The mystery and sovereignty of God the maker of heaven and earth are guarded precisely as these attributes are true of Christ, who raises the dead and walks on water, and of the Holy Spirit, who blows as he will–not over against them. The creed does not seek to isolate the Father to ensure his majesty. It points us to the God of Israel and asks us to see in his life with the world as shown there, that which comes to expression in complete terms in his Son. To speak of the Old Testament as Christian scripture, and not as Hebrew Bible, is not an offense to Judaism, which takes this selfsame literature and hears it through the testimony of tradition, just as Christians hear it in conjunction with the testimony of a second testament. Stressing the Jewishness of God, by reinstating his name or enumerating his Israel-specific life untouched by his condescension in his Son, makes sense for neither Jew nor Christian.
- Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 188-89.

Comprehending the Historical Jesus

Christopher Seitz concludes an interesting chapter on the canonical function of John 21:25. Seitz asks what “the concern of his Gospel–what has been called its perlocutionary force–is to do with the theology of history itself? That is, John is considering whether historiography reaches its aporia in Jesus Christ.” Here’s his conclusion:

. . . There is no access to Jesus to be called “historical” that seeks to interpret the real Jesus in any form but the one given. Any effort to get below or behind the record encounters a different kind of difficulty referred to in John.

Historical proximity, if that is what we should call it, actually breaks apart the very form of the testimony required for comprehension in the first place. To get behind the Gospel record would be to ignore the pivotal role of Israel’s scriptures in showing who Jesus is, on the one hand (see John 19:35-37). On the other hand, to get behind the literary record of the “we” who broker to us the Gospel is to enter a realm where Jesus can be veiled to eyes that lack in the very quest meant to find him as a historical datum that very strange gift: the testimony of the Holy Spirit at work through the testimony of the fourfold Gospel witness. It is a truism that the Holy Spirit’s sending is a function of the Gospels having reached the form in which we now find the record to Jesus the Advocate intends to work with.

In other words, John has in mind a twofold illumination of a sufficient canonical record, a record whose literary limits and form he deems fully competent to compel belief and give life. The chief form of illumination is the sending of the Advocate, but in addition to this, John reckons the witness of Israel’s scriptures also essential in testifying to who Jesus is for those who seek him truly. Insofar as quests for something called a historical Jesus must stand outside these parameters, in order to do their work, they will fail to comprehend Jesus on the terms the Gospels insist are nonnegotiable for encountering him. This encounter deserves to be called historical, because the fourfold apostolic witness to Jesus is witness to reality and truth. The burden remains with those who seek something else under the label of historical questing to clarify how their use of the term “historical” can be correlated with the parameters for comprehending Jesus set by the record to him.
- Christopher R. Seitz, Figured Out: Typology and Providence in Christian Scripture (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 100-01.

Giving Attention to Canonical Form and Context

After examining the book of Lamentations via the canonical approach, Robin Parry concludes by responding to a hypothetical criticism. Parry asks, “does this theological hermeneutic rob the text of its power?” (413) He agrees that among the many voices in the book Yahweh’s is conspicuous by its absence and that “Once Lamentations is read through Christian theological lenses, we insert Yahweh’s voice back into the text.” In response to this, the criticism is raised, “this domesticates the book and emasculates its ability to address the bleakest of human situations.”

Parry responds:

. . . crucial to an adequate response is the need for Christian readers to appreciate both the canonical form of the text and the canonical context. It is the canonical context which allows us to read the book in the light of the cross and resurrection of Christ but it is the canonical form which preserves the voices of the sufferers as uttered on their Holy Saturday. The canonisation of the book in this form requires that we find a way to respect the integrity of that pain without allowing it to be lost in the canonical context. On the other hand, it needs to be acknowledged that respecting only canonical form but not the canonical context fails to read the text as Scripture. The resurrection generates a hermeneutic of hope that can transform the darkness of Lamentations and infuse it with a light not found in the book itself. But, and this is important, it does not make the pain of Lamentations less dreadful and dark. It does not explain why the pain was as it was. It is not a theodicy that seeks to justify God. It does not trivialise the suffering any more than the resurrection trivialises the cross. So, while a canonical interpretation of Lamentations will not allow destruction and death to have the last word, it can allow them a penultimate word. The book of Lamentations speaks during its Holy Saturday experience and is then silent and the Bible preserves it in that form. We have to wait for Isaiah 40-55 to hear the build up to the Easter Sunday deliverance. The canon allows a pause between these two and does not seek to prematurely collapse them. [. . .] A Christian theological reading of the book can bracket out for a moment the resurrection hope and allow the shock of the pain to have its full force. [. . .] The Christian simply cannot forget the resurrection and, once it is factored in, hope will enter the equation again. The world cannot be the same after Easter and sufferings cannot be seen as our final destiny.
- Robin Parry, Prolegomena to Christian Theological Interpretations of Lamentations, in Canon and Biblical Interpretation (SHS 7; ed. Craig Bartholomew et al.; Carlisle: Paternoster; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 413-14.