Christ in the Old Testament

Here’s a quote from Barth on reading the Old Testament with a view to the fact that Jesus Christ is the Lord of time–past, present, and future:

. . . If there is a spiritual presence of Jesus the distance of Israel’s time on the regressive line of time makes no difference to the fact that its history was His pre-history, and that He was in it before He was, i.e., before this history reached its consummation, so that when He came, it was not only possible but necessary to recognize Him in this pre-history and its record. If His time is the real divine centre of all time, are we not forced to see it as the time which embraces and controls all time before and after Him? Consider the decisive place occupied by the Old Testament in the early Christian liturgy. Consider the ease with which the Church accepted the Canon of the Synagogue. Above all consider the degree to which the New Testament is impregnated with the Old. Such phenomena cannot be satisfactorily accounted for on secondary motives, or from accidents of history. We have here an intrinsic necessity of the highest order, an insight which the later Church may have done much to obscure, and which may even strike us as strange, but which for the apostles and their communities was a self-evident truth. They were forced to accept it because they knew from the very outset that the man Jesus was the fulfilment of the prophetic history of Israel, that its history was the beginning of His, and that its record in the Old Testament was the record of Him. The only way to Him was by reading, understanding and expounding Moses and the prophets, and therefore hearing His Word as the fulfilled and final Word of God, but the Word already proclaimed and attested. . . .
(CD, III.2 p 483.)

Elsewhere in his dogmatics, Barth makes the point that seeing Christ as the telos of the Old Testament is not merely a matter of scientific exegesis (i.e., simply quoting a handful of explicitly messianic proof-texts), but a matter of faith. It is to believe that Christ’s person and work was and is, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, “according to the Scriptures”.

Consistent Biblicism?

. . . In actual fact, there has never been a Biblicist who for all his grandiloquent appeal directly to Scripture against the fathers and tradition has proved himself so independent of the spirit and philosophy of his age and especially of his favourite religious ideas that in his teaching he has really allowed the Bible and the Bible alone to speak reliably by means or in spite of his anti-traditionalism. (CD, I.2 p 609)

Barth on Homoousia

I’ve recently begun reading Barth’s Church Dogmatics and it’s been interesting. I haven’t been posting as frequently just because either I’m not sure exactly what Barth is saying (or the implications of what he’s saying) or because I’m too busy just trying to get through the book (it’s taking me an hour to read about 10 pages!). There’s definitely a lot of things in CD that I appreciate so far. Barth seems to have immense respect for the Reformers even if he may disagree with them (quotes a whole bunch of them: Calvin, Melancthon, Turretin, Gerhard, Chenmitz, Polanus, Wollebius, and so on. . . Luther’s quoted almost every other page!) and he also quotes from Roman Catholic theologians, Eastern Orthodox, the early Church Fathers, and a handful of his own contemporaries (obviously he makes reference to Schleiermacher and von Harnack, but I was surprised and delighted to find him quoting Bavinck). Much of what I’ve read so far seems to resonate with Luther’s  theologia crucis–if there’s anything Barth refuses to do, it is to go beyond what God has revealed to see him “in the nude” (as Luther would say).

Anyway, I probably will not be posting as often these next few months, but I’ll be posting quotations here and there of things that are interesting, helpful, odd, or all of the above.

For now, here’s Barth on the concept homoousia:

. . . The concept of homoousia is not an attempt at independent, arbitrary, so-called natural knowledge of God. It seeks to serve the knowledge of God by His revelation in faith. We have not concealed the historical and material ambiguity of this particular concept. Hence we neither can nor would hide the fact that considered in itself it serves the knowledge of God very badly. For philosophers and philosophical theologians it has always been easy game. But it may be that very little depends on its immanent soundness or unsoundness. It may be that even in its obvious frailty it was the necessary standard which necessarily had to be set up in the 4th century and which even to-day, as often before, has still to be kept aloft against the new Arians, not as the standard of a foolhardy speculative intuition of the Church, but as the standard of an unheard-of encounter which has overtaken the Church in Holy Scripture. If this is so, of what avail is anything that might be said against it? Do we not have to be aware of all these objections, and yet still acknowledge it as the dogma which the Church, having once recognized, can never let go again? For in all its folly it is more true than all the wisdom which has voiced its opposition to it. We have no reason to take any other view of it. We are under no illusion as to the fact that we do not know what we are saying when we take this term upon our lips. But still less can we be under any illusion as to the fact that all the lines of our deliberations on the deity of Christ converge at the point where we must assent to the dogma that Jesus Christ is ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, consubstantialis Patri. (CD, I.1 p 440-41)

For those who are interested in Barth a new collection of essays titled Engaging with Barth should be helpful (Michael Horton is one of the contributors). Also, van Genderen and Velema interact a lot with Barth in Concise Reformed Dogmatics from a more confessionally Reformed perspective.

Barth on Scholasticism

. . . Nothing that can claim to be truly of the Church need shrink from the sober light of “scholasticism.” No matter how free and individual it may be in its first expression, if it seeks universal acceptance, it will be under constraint to set up a school and therefore to become the teaching of a school. Fear of Scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet. The true prophet will be ready to submit his message to this test too. (CD, I.1 p 274)

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.

The Literal and Figural Interpretation

In his book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1974), Hans Frei gives a historical account of how the literal (once inseparable from the figurative meaning) and historical meaning of scripture (which up until this point were held together–pretty much since the beginning of the history of Christian exegesis) were gradually separated, and eventually set in opposition to one another in the 18th and 19th century. This is quite evident in the debates during this time concerning the New Testament’s usage of the Old Testament.

Frei spends a chapter discussing Anthony Collins, a staunch anti-christian deist, who argued that if the Old Testament prophecies concerning Christ were not ‘literally’ (in his redefined usage of the term literal–i.e., “. . . describes and refers to a state of affairs known or assumed on independent probable grounds to agree or disagree with the stated proposition.” (76)) fulfilled in the New Testament, then Christianity could not stand. The gist of his argument:

. . . if language is to be used in a ruled, rational way, propositions cannot mean several things at the same time, nor do statements refer to states of affairs that do not correspond to the features described by the statements, except in purely arbitrary application of someone claiming divine sanction for his perversion of thought and language. Typological or any other nonliteral interpretation cannot sit in judgment over the ordinary referential way statements using ideas of sensation make sense. (83-4)

In essence, Collins’ argument is either that the OT prophecies must be interpreted ‘literally’ (i.e., rationalistically) and the NT writers are found to be wrong, or if the OT prophecies are to be considered as fulfilled (Collins’ lumps a bunch of terms together: allegorically, typologically, figuratively, etc.), then they were fulfilled nonsensically, and, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The alternatives: “Literal and false, or typological and meaningless” (70).

The pre-critical understanding of the ‘literal,’ was different from Collins’ own. To the Reformers and many of the Protestant scholastics,

The identity of literal and historical sense of scripture involves a cognate unity on the part of God: the divine author of the book is the same as the governor of the history narrated in it. Being both author of the text’s meaning and governor of actuality he unites meaning and fact, so that it does not occur to the orthodox interpreter that there is a distance between words and reference of such a sort that each has a status logically independent of the other.

A statement God makes and intends literally, naturally refers to the state of affairs described in it. A description he furnishes is itself the reference or does the duty for the latter. Moreover, in view of God’s providential governance there is no reason why a statement he makes should not describe two events at the same time, the one literally and the other by prefiguration [i.e., typologically]. (73-4)

The figural meaning of the text, then, was considered to be merely an extension of the literal meaning, and in no way opposed to it. Yet, with Collins redefining ‘literal’ (and others accepting his assumed definition) resulted in

. . . the complete separation of the literal and figurative (typical) senses. Figurative meaning, hitherto naturally congruent with literal meaning, now became its opposite. [. . .] Collins assigned the typical sense to the same class of reading as “mystical, or allegorical, or enigmatical sense.” The Reformers and the general tradition that came in their wake would have flatly denied this association of figuration allegory and insisted that the very opposite is true.

Unfortunately, few protested and most of Collin’s opponents blindly accepted his epistemological presuppositions. What eventually ended up happening is that those who sought to defend Scripture

. . . tended to regard obviously literal kinds of statements in the Bible as evidence of the truthfulness and integrity of human authors, and thus as proper evidence in favor of the historical factuality of their accounts. Orthodox interpreters prior to the days of the “new philosophy” had not used this argument. (Since then it has never ceased completely among theological apologists.)

For the older interpreters neither the human author (alone or together with his setting) nor the empirical-historical fact described by the statement had the logical distinctness or independence from the words of the statement that was necessary to make this kind of argument as well as the skeptical counterargument cogent. (80)

Frei finishes off the chapter pointing out how Collin’s philosophical base (which is representative of his time) set the stage for “the triumph of historical-critical interpretations of biblical narratives” (85). Not that merely rewinding the clock would solve anything, but it would do us well to pay careful heed to the hermeneutic of the early church fathers and Reformers, rather than dismiss much of their exegetical labor as arbitrary allegory, as many want to do, while failing to examine our own philosophical assumptions.

Canon as a “Rule of Faith”

The appeal to a rule of faith rests on a conviction shared by the tradents of the biblical tradition, both Jewish and Christian, that the shaping of the biblical material was not as a haphazard collection, but was the product of theological reflection that the tradents ascribed to divine inspiration. The effect of this canonical shaping was that a framework was given — later called a rule of faith — within which the material was interpreted. For example, the Torah of Moses preceded the prophetic books, with the books of Deuteronomy functioning as the Torah’s conclusion. Likewise, the four Gospels have been bound together, each with a designated evangelist, but these witnesses are linked as belonging to the one gospel of Jesus Christ. In other words, the biblical material in its larger structure has been rendered in a particular fashion. Often this redaction has been termed “canonical,” “kerygmatic,” or “confessional.” In contrast to an objective, history-of-religions perspective, it arises from a practiced and confessed stance of faith. In this sense, there is a semantic “given” designated by its role as sacred scripture.
- Brevard S. Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 316.

Several Observations Concerning Cyril’s Exegesis

After an overview of Cyril’s exegesis, Childs makes a few points of observation:

First, Cyril never intends to explain the “original meaning” of the biblical text. Even this way of formulating the issue would have been incomprehensible to him. Nor is he concerned with the literal sense, since the object to which he is relating the imagery is not confined to sense perception, the hallmark of the literal.

Second, Cyril assumes the theological coherence of scripture in spite of the diversity of imagery. By seeking to explore the intertextual references to the one word, he gains different avenues into the theological substance, which is spiritual.

Third, to characterize Cyril’s approach as allegory, which in one sense it is, does not tell the whole story of what he is doing in this passage. Cyril comes to his exegesis with a knowledge of its substance gained from the whole of the Christian scriptures. He then returns to the Old Testament as if it were a set of musical notes from which he seeks to play a new and different tune in offering a fresh harmonization of Christian truth. This is the process he characterizes as the search for the higher, spiritual sense of scripture. The goal is not to impose upon the passage a theological system, as often claimed, but to move into a form of fresh proclamation to a living audience of hearers (readers) calling for a faithful life in the light of God’s great mercy.

Finally, it is crucial to note that Cyril’s exegesis is not an uncontrolled activity of creative human imagination. Cyril clearly recognizes a creative component, but he always sees it as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Cyril works materially within the theological norms of interpretation provided by the keyrgma and the paideusis and formally within the church’s received scriptures, constantly informed by a skopus which shapes both his questions and answers. The point is not to deny the element of spontaneity and fresh imagination in his commentary, but for Cyril this quality is not an independent force serving apart from the context of church tradition and the practice of worship.
- Brevard S. Childs, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 123.

Whose Bible Is It?

Here is the question that Seitz raises and seeks to answer throughout his book:

To raise in very basic ways the question, whose book are we reading, is at a minimum to remind the modern reader that the Old and New Testaments emerged from religious communities with specific identities. These sacred texts were intended for communities striving to share or at least participate in those same religious convictions, hopes, and practices. The Bible is not a “bestseller” in search of interested readers or readers who wish to have their imaginations stretched or their worldviews broadened, even when this may occur.

. . . How are Moses and Abraham about those who stand outside the circle of Israel? How is the Old Testament a book for and about those who stand outside a circle it assumes as operative by very logic of its own discourse? One would be tempted in the modern climate of biblical study to say that the Old Testament is a book for anyone who wishes to read it, and as a practical reality that is incontrovertible. The book is accessible; it can be purchased and read, as one book among others to be recommended for purchase, in a staggering variety of translations, at the local bookstore. But does that fact itself confuse us about whose book this is . . . ?
- Christopher R. Seitz, World Without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 341-43.

God’s Grandchildren: The Biblical Basis for Infant-Baptism

An excellent article by Mike Horton on infant baptism here.

His eight compelling arguments are also helpful.