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.

Beyond Literalism and Expressivism

In a chapter entitled Beyond Literalism and Expressivism, George Hunsinger describes what he calls Karl Barth’s “Hermeneutical Realism.” This way of understanding theological language avoids the naive univocality of literalism as well as the skeptical equivocality of expressivism, going beyond both, by describing the relation between text and referent as analogical.

This is something that has been on my mind the past few months (mainly because of Childs and Frei). I found the following quotation to be helpful:

Barth’s decision to construe the relation [between text and referent] as analogical rather than univocal or equivocal depended not on general considerations but on his reading of the texts as a modern human being within the community of faith. If one asked about the “semantic force” — that is, about the mode of reference — of the biblical texts, then the referent itself was the decisive factor, Barth reasoned, which ruled out both the “literalist” and the “expressivist” solutions. The “univocal” solution proposed by the literalists was ruled out because it could not do justice to the referent’s abiding mystery. It failed to honor the mysterious divine hiddenness in the midst of the divine revelation. Likewise, the “equivocal” solution proposed by the expressivists was ruled out because it could not do justice to the referent — this time to its self-predication. It failed to honor the perspicuous divine self-unveiling in the midst of the divine hiddenness. The alternative was therefore to construe the mode of reference “analogically.” The reticence of analogy honored the mystery, the predication of analogy the perspicuity, of God’s self-revelation as attested in Scripture.
- George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 221.

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”.

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.

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.

A More Nuanced Theory of Historical Referentiality

In a short chapter entitled, “The Canonical Approach and the ‘New Yale Theology,’” Childs briefly reviews how his canonical approach might benefit from the cultural-linguistic approach of his colleague, George Lindbeck. While he commends much in Lindbeck’s book, The Nature of Doctrine, Childs still finds a few points of disagreement. I found his second point helpful as it relates to an issue that I have been wrestling with in Hans Frei’s book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. Specifically bothersome to me is Frei’s complete rejection of the biblical text’s having any ostensive historical reference. Thankfully, Childs disagrees with Frei and Lindbeck at this particular juncture:

. . . in agreement with the recent emphasis on ‘narrative theology’, Lindbeck stresses the ‘intratextuality’ of meaning. Indeed, the term has provided a much needed service in checking the abuses of a crude theory of historical referentiality which has dominated biblical studies since the Enlightenment (cf. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative). Nevertheless, the concept is not without serious problems when used as a positive formulation of the Bible’s relation to the external world. Above all, the New Testament bears witness to realities outside itself. The prophets and apostles spoke of things which they saw and events which they experienced as testimonies to what God was doing in the world. It is far too limiting to restrict the function of the Bible to that of rendering an agent or an identity. Rather, the nature of the biblical referent must be determined by the text itself which points referringly both to the Creator and the creation in a wide variety of different ways. To recognize that the Bible offers a faith-construal is not to deny that it bears witness to realities outside the text. Christians have always understood that we are saved, not by the biblical text, but by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who entered the world of time and space.
- Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (United Kingdom: First Fortress Press, 1985), 545.

Frei’s book is definitely helpful in pointing out the development of a ‘crude theory of historical referentiality’ in response to Enlightment/post-Enlightenment threats, but as Childs points out, it doesn’t do much in positively formulating a theory of historical referentiality. Childs’ canonical approach offers a via media wherein the biblical referent is determined by the text itself.