Tag Archive - christological hermeneutics

Not To Us, And To Us

March 22, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 97 Comments

I want to keep circling around to Bible here. I hope you’re not sick of it yet. If so, see you tomorrow!

In early January, I mused on some of the pressing issues that would be creeping up in my little corner of the evangelical world. The thought that we still need to figure out a better way to say what the Bible is and what we’re supposed to do with it continues to find traction. (Rachel Held Evans has made this one of her themes for the year as well.)

Yesterday one of my friends was snarking about acquiring for himself a new wife or two.

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Apparently, he wants to lead a raid across I-95 and take a beautiful captive home for his efforts:

When you wage war against your enemies and the LORD hands them over to you and you take prisoners, if you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you fall in love with her and take her as your wife, bringing her into your home, she must shave her head, cut her nails, remove her prisoner’s clothing, and live in your house, mourning her father and her mother for one month. After that, you may consummate the marriage. You will be her husband, and she will be your wife. Deut 21:1–13, CEB

How are we supposed to deal with passages like this?

In general, of course, we do not want to build rules out of exceptions. If we meet a strange case, this is not necessarily the starting point for thinking through how to conceive of normal.

But…

When it comes to interpreting and applying scripture, how we think about what scripture is and what we’re supposed to do with it need to be able to handle myriad verses that we do not, and should not, “apply to our lives”–at least, not directly.

In short, we need an understanding of what scripture is, and a reading strategy, that allows us to say, first, “This was not written to us,” and then to say, with equal conviction, “This is written to us.”

The first is an acknowledgement of historical distance, cultural difference, and, most significantly when it comes to the Old Testament, an era of God’s work that applies to us only indirectly because of the advent of Christ.

“Not to us” is an important step in biblical interpretation. We need to have ears to hear how a story would have resonated with Babylonian exiles; we need ears to hear how “Jesus is Lord” might have resonated, or caused dissonance, for a first century Roman.

We need to know that when we read, “Expel the immoral brother!” that it is a word for a first century church and might not be God’s word to us about, say, the man in our meetings with a flatulence problem.

“Not to us” is a significant moment in our biblical interpretation.

But then, the Bible is the witness to God’s revelation; it is the authoritative word for the church. All scripture is inspired, and therefore somehow useful.

The question, of course, is what does “somehow” mean?

In the famous 2 Timothy passage about scripture alluded to above, Paul says that scripture is able to give the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. As we find in Romans as well, there is a Christological hermeneutic that comes with affirming the OT as the word of God. The OT scriptures function as a pointer to a later coming Christ.

“To us” means “to us who are in Christ,” which means that we must read with a Christological lens, and with Christ as the coming climax to the OT narrative (or surprising disruption of that narrative, as the case may be), in order to assert its authority over us.

“Not to us”: yes, this scripture passage told the Israelites they could take wives from their captives. But we may not.

“To us”: we boldly allegorize to fit our saving story of Christ. He defeated the king of the kingdom to which we were enslaved, and took us to be His holy bride. As scripture, to us, this is not a pass to engage in stealing humans for our own, but a veiled witness to the rescue from an enslaving union to the powers of sin and death into the freeing union of grace and life (Rom 7:1-12).

“Not to us” and “to us” is a dialectic that a narrative approach to scripture enables us to develop. It is a story. And in the revelation of the story’s climax, even the earlier moments in the story are transformed.

The Story of Christ… Really…

November 15, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

I’ve found myself indirectly thinking about what it means to read the Bible as Christians. By “indirectly” I mean that these thoughts have gnawed around the edges of my thinking while I’ve been working on other things: teaching the Gospels and Acts, writing a paper on wisdom literature in the Coen Brothers’ movies, listening to sermons on the deadly sins, reading books on what the Bible is and we’re supposed to do with it.

By “reading the Bible as Christians” I don’t just mean reading it like we’re supposed to learn from it. There are lots of ways to read the Bible so as to learn from it. But those among whom I number myself approach the Bible as Christians–not as Jews, not as Mormons, not to mention that we don’t approach it as atheists or pantheists or deists.

Reading the Bible as Christians means that we not only read it with a ready disposition to hear it as God’s word, as the story of salvation, it means to read the story with the conviction that the narrative comes to its surprising climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

You have to do this on purpose, if you want to do it.

Pick up the book of Deuteronomy, and you’ll come away with a strong sense that they way God will fully restore his people is through their faithful obedience to Torah. Jesus is a surprise.

Pick up the law or the prophets, and you’ll come away with the strong sense that God’s ultimate plan is for a nation to be located in the geophysical land of Israel. The explosion of the promise of land to a promise of the world and indeed of new creation is a surprise.

Pick up the Proverbs, and the next thing you know you’ll be looking for your diligence to overflow in wealth and peace. The call to embody the death of Jesus in all quarters of our world is a surprise.

To read the Bible as the story of Jesus is to decide that nothing in the OT comes to us directly. It all comes to us mediated through Jesus. This means both that it is mediated through Jesus and that it all comes to us. Some is transformed in him, some is fulfilled and left behind. And some comes as a word reiterated now for a people reconfigured around Christ rather than Torah.

The vitality, and validity, of our reading the OT as Christians hinges on our willingness to read it in light of what we know to be more ultimately true: the Christ who is the end of the Law, the Christ to whom the Law, Prophets, and Psalms bear witness.

Problem Passage: Blood on Us

October 20, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

When Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was ramping up for release, it was widely scorned as anti-Semitic. One particular point of contention came from Gibson’s choice to include the self-imprecation of the Jews from Matthew’s Gospel:

Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere and that a riot was starting. So he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “ I’m innocent of this man’s blood, ” he said. “ It’s your problem. ”
All the people replied, “ Let his blood be on us and on our children. ” (Matt 27:24-25, CEB)

In a stark indictment, Pilate is absolved of all responsibility while the Jewish people invite the blood guilt on themselves. Make that “all” the people (πᾶς ὁ λαός). Not the leadership, not the Pharisees, maybe not even just the Judeans. All the people.

This seems to be a democratization of Jesus’ warning to the scribes and Pharisees from a couple chapters earlier:

Therefore, look, I’m sending you prophets, wise people, and legal experts. Some of them you will kill and crucify. And some you will beat in your synagogues and chase from city to city. Therefore, upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been poured out on the earth, from the blood of that righteous man Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. I assure you that all these things will come upon this generation. (Matt 23:34-36, CEB)

So the question is, what do we do with this, and the blood of Jesus thing in particular? The concern it raises, of course, is that such a canonized curse opens the door for all sorts of evil such as has, in fact, been performed by “Christians” on Jews throughout the course of history. What is a responsible twenty-first century reading of the text?

Here are a couple of thoughts:

First, I think we should take seriously the “this generation” of Jesus’ warning to the scribes and Pharisees.

There is a narrative line within the Gospels, especially during passion week, within which these passages fit; namely, Jesus prophesies that Jerusalem will be destroyed because it has rejected him as Messiah. This means that the judgment that the Gospels anticipate coming on “Israel” have a first-century reference and fulfillment.

Jesus, like Jeremiah and Isaiah before him, predicted the destruction of the Temple, and Jerusalem, as God’s punishment for faithlessness.

I know that this raises its own problems about God. But I do think it’s an important first step in reading these texts to realize that the promised judgment has come, it has been spent, and we are not called to be its agents and our contemporaries do not stand under it.

Second, though, we are confronted with the challenge of this being in our Bible, which we confess to be God’s continuing word to the church. What does it mean to read this within such a framework?

Here, I have been suggesting that we willfully read the text in light of the larger canon’s blood imagery. In Matthew itself, the blood of Jesus is the blood of the covenant. Might we reread the cry, “His blood be upon us” as a plea to be marked as the blood-sprinkled covenant people of God?

In 1 Peter, the very purpose of election is to be sprinkled with the blood of Jesus. And Hebrews and 1 John make use of the notion that blood cleanses en route to forgiveness.

For the reader of scripture as a whole, the cry of all the people at the condemnation of Jesus need to be merely imprecatory. It might also be a beautiful instance of dramatic irony. What the people might mean as characters is not fully known to them. But to we who read there is another plain meaning to the words.

His blood be on us and our children. Amen. And by this blood may God forgive us all and purify us all from any unrighteousness.

Reconceiving the Bible (review pt. 4)

October 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 12 Comments

“I can just pick up my Bible, read it, and know what God has to say to the church.”

“The Bible speaks to all areas of life. If you want relational, financial, sexual, or political guidance, the Bible is the place to go.”

“The Bible is the owner’s manual.”

“The Bible contains the system of doctrine that God’s people should know and believe.”

“No,” says Christian Smith. “And no. And no. And no.”

The subtitle of The Bible Made Impossible is “Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.” The gospel is the good news, the good news is the word of Jesus Christ. To be an evangelical is to be one who promotes the good news of Jesus Christ.

And, a truly evangelical reading of scripture is one that recognizes that the point of the Bible is the saving word about Jesus Christ.

To read the Bible as an evangelical is not to read it to assemble a whole series of doctrines; it is not to read it as a compendium of life advice. Evangelical reading of the Bible is reading so as to discern in both Testaments the witness to Jesus Christ.

Or, as I put it so often here: we must imitate the NT writers in their employment of a Christological Hermeneutic.

What the Bible is “about” is not everything, it is about God’s salvation of the world through Christ. We should therefore seek this message, and discover the Bible’s unity, around this saving story.

In other words, there is a unity to scripture. But it is not the unity of a wholesale theological system; it is not the unity of agreement on what every passage means; it is not the unity of a transhistorical law which God reveals piecemeal over time.

The unity is what makes us Christians: the common affirmation that this is the story of God’s reconciling the world to Himself in Christ.

This understanding of what a Christian reading of the Bible looks like is not only as ancient as Jesus’ words in Luke 24 or John 5. It is also what we find advocated by John Stott (“Our savior Jesus Christ… is Scripture’s unifying theme,”) and the Dutch Theologian G. C. Berkouwer (“the significance [of scripture] can never be isolated from the redemptive-historical work of Christ”) (p. 103).

One of the crowning moments of the chapter on Christocentrism was an assessment Smith made of a sermon he heard on James. I’ve dabbled in and wondered about how we should be reading and preaching James–a virtually Christ-less book in the NT. My thought? We need to read it with the same strong Christological hermeneutic we are charged to bring to bear on the OT. Smith said essentially the same thing.

So my love fest with The Bible Made Impossible continues. Smith has rightly focused our attention on what the Bible is, and what it is for–and these mean that other ways of thinking about, reading, and applying scripture are shown up as misguided at best.

As an aside, I should say that the Westminster Seminary that died in the early 2000s had previously taught me just this way of thinking about the unity of scripture. It was the story of the work of God to save a people to God through Jesus Christ. The replacement of that Christological commitment with a version of evangelical biblicism is testament to the counter-intuitive nature of Smith’s proposal for many in the evangelical world.

Also, so you know: all is not pure unadulterated love. Smith keeps saying that a Christological reading is according to the rule of faith and Trinitarian, to which I of course say “No and no.” However, the overall import of what he is advancing is so crucial that I overlook this quibble and embrace Smith’s work for the greater good.

Aside 3: this program of Smith’s also finds a strong ally in Karl Barth and resonates strongly with what I’ve been posting in the Barth reading group posts over the past couple of months.

Theological Interpretation Article in Christianity Today

September 29, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Media with 6 Comments

I’ve had a thing or two to say about theological interpretation on ye’ old blog over the past couple of years. I am a theological interpreter of scripture, and strive to be a Christian reader of scripture, at that. So in general I resonate with, and am happy for, a movement that strives to carve out respectable space for so engaging the Bible in both the academy and the church.

This month’s Christianity Today has a cover story on theological interpretation by J. Todd Billings. It is not yet available online, but read it when you can if you would like a nice overview of what theological interpretation is up to.

The article echoes commonly stated needs of the church: to have a Bible that speaks to it as a word for people who are devoted to loving and following the Lord and God about whom the text speaks.

It also indicates that one of the more important ways forward is to read using the rule of faith.

As usual, I find the former element more important and compelling than the latter, as I continue to find myself scratching my head about what someone committed to the Rule of Faith is supposed to “do,” what kind of identity it forms, and why Christological readings should be transformed into Trinitarian readings. But then again, you’ve heard all that from me before!

This article really is a judicious piece, a welcome and accessible introduction to what is happening in the world of theological interpretation of scripture and provides some sense of why it is important.

Christ or Trinity?

September 12, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 31 Comments

Since the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation last month (see here, and here) I have been mulling the question of Christian hermeneutics. In particular: is there a difference between a Christological hermeneutic and a Trinitarian hermeneutic? And if so, why do I advocate Christological readings rather than Trinitarian?

The answer to the first question is decidedly yes: there is a difference between Christological and Trinitarian hermeneutics. The former, readings that explore the ramifications of scripture for the story of the crucified and risen Christ, points us to the ministry of Jesus, in particular his death, resurrection, and exalted Lordship. The latter points us to the divinity of Christ.

The clearest example I have seen of the important difference between these is the reading of Lukan intertextuality provided by Richard Hays at SBL last year. He cited Jesus’ words at the end of Luke, that Jesus opened the minds of the travelers to hear all the things written about him in the scriptures.

Hays then proceeded to engage with a far-reaching reading of how Luke was applying the OT texts that referred to YHWH to Jesus instead. The upshot of Hays’ reading was that Luke is showing us that the OT’s YHWH is none other than the Jesus of the Gospel.

Even though this reading focuses on Jesus, it is a Trinitarian reading inasmuch as the working assumption that makes the reading possible is the idea of an eternal Son coequal with and in some way identical to the God of the OT.

Luke, however, intends a very different interpretation of the OT as a witness to Jesus.

Luke does not simply say, the OT is about Jesus no go find out how I’ve shown this. He tells us precisely how the OT speaks of Jesus the Messiah. First, in Luke 24:26-27 he says, “‘Wasn’t it necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things and enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures.”

The thing written about Jesus in the scriptures are not that Jesus is YHWH, but that Jesus, as Messiah, had to suffer and enter his glory.

This is even more clearly stated later in the same chapter:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures,and said to them, “Thus it stands written that the Christ would suffer and would rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.(NET Bible)

To read scripture aright is not to read it as a witness to the eternal Trinity, but to read it as witness to the suffering and glory of the Messiah.

The presupposition needed for the Christological reading that Luke directs us to is not that Christ is preexistent or in any sort of ontological way identifiable with YHWH of the OT.

The presupposition required for a Christological, narratival hermeneutics is that Jesus who died was, in fact, the Messiah, that that God raise this Jesus from the dead and enthroned him over all things.

There is a difference, and Luke invites us to Christological narrative rather than divine onotology as the way to correctly read scripture in light of the Christ event.

The narrative of Jesus, not divine identity as it is often construed today, is the way to correctly read the whole Bible in light of Jesus as Messiah, according to Luke (and Paul and John and Matthew and Mark and Peter and Hebrews and Revelation). This means that our hermeneutics will be driven by the story of Jesus rather than the Trinity. It also means that when we chose to use the Rule of Faith as our hermeneutical grid, we have taken a significant step away from the Christian reading of scripture that is commended to us in the NT.

Word of God and Theological Interpretation

August 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 8 Comments

Yesterday’s post probed a bit of Karl Barth’s doctrine of scripture. Today I want to think a bit about what such a view of the Bible as the Word of God might mean for how we conceptualize theological interpretation of the Bible.

The conference I attended in New Zealand last week was on theological interpretation. In short, the movement is designed to muster Christians to read the Bible as Christians, and not as ostensibly detached historians.

Scholarship has been mired by the idea that our goal is to use scripture to find a history behind the text that is the actual history we are concerned with. In general, scholarship has worked to assess the human hands’ work in inscribing the Bible, setting God entirely to the side.

So what does it look like for Christian scholars to embrace our conviction that this scripture is the means God has chosen to speak to the world in order to reveal, ultimately, the redemption offered in Jesus Christ?

I typically approach this question with a hermeneutical type answer: we read the Bible Christianly when we read it as a witness to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. A christological reading strategy keeps our readings focused rightly on Christ and on the fact that our calling is to live faithfully after him and in him.

An interesting question that was raised at the Colloquium last week, however, had to do with the fact that many of us spoke as though theological interpretation is an ecclesial practice. What does it mean to read the Bible as something written in, with, and for the church?

Many of us used such language in our presentations. But all of us were academics. Ok, there were one or two folks who were also ordained ministers. But we were engaging in a decidedly academic task.

All of this (Barth plus the Colloquium) got me wondering: if theological interpretation is predicated on the notion that the Bible is the word of God, is it viable to think that we can read the Bible theologically in the academy at all? If the Bible as the word of God depends on the fact that God chooses to take quite humans words and make himself known afresh through them, does that make academic study of the Bible, by definition, the wrong kind of practice for hearing the Bible as the word of God?

I think academic study of the Bible is crucial. And my seminary classroom regularly becomes a place where that academic study confronts the church with a demand for more faithful practice.

Moreover, rigorous scholarship opens our eyes to the thought world within which the scriptures made a certain kind of sense and bore various connotations that are too often lost on current day readers. So academic study of the Bible is crucial for hearing what was said. And, such study should help us see more clearly how, in fact, the Bible speaks about God.

But after we’ve said all that, can we expect that the Bible, studied in the academy, will be the Bible as word of God? Or will that experience of scripture depend upon participating in the hearing of scripture with a body gathered to hear it–or at least, listening to it as proclamation?

Or, to put things differently, might we expect that a group that has gathered to study the human hands at work, the human history as such, will be inherently less likely to be confronted with those human hands as “word of God” than a group gathered to hear (and listen!) to and for the word of God?

These really are questions, and I’d value your feedback. At root what I’m trying to figure out is whether Barth doesn’t offer us a doctrine of scripture that offers a helpful way forward in doing historical biblical scholarship without growing anxious that it does not immediately address us as word of God.

Given that the word is spoken in such historically contextualized modes, and that these are what God has chosen to speak through, might the process of shaping understanding of what the scriptures “meant” be the best way forward for Christian academics?

Christological Exegesis [for Trinitarians]

August 22, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 15 Comments

At the Colloquium on Theological Interpretation this weekend, the issue arose as to whether hermeneutics that strives to be Christian hermeneutics should be Christological or Trinitarian–or whether saying one means you’re doing both.

I argue for Christological rather than Trinitarian. And no, they are not the same thing. Though Trinitarian exegesis will have some Christ in it, and Christological exegesis might lead you to say Trinitarian things about God, in practice they are two different ways of reading the Bible.

The primary reason I attempt to read with and develop a Christological hermeneutic is that the story of Jesus is the hermeneutical grid for reading scripture that the NT writers articulate when they tell us what the scriptures are about.

Whether it’s Luke saying that the suffering, resurrection, and exaltation are what scripture is all about (ch. 24) or John’s Jesus telling the Jewish crowds that the scriptures in which they think they have life testify about him (John 5) or Paul’s declaration that the crucified and risen Christ who is Lord over all including Gentiles (Rom 1) or 1 Peter’s claim that the prophets spoke of the Messiah’s coming suffering and glory–the NT’s Bible-reading hermeneutic is to see that the scriptures tell the story of the suffering and exalted Messiah.

In other words, to read the Bible Christianly is to read it as a story of the crucified and risen Messiah–to read it as an indication of what God is going to finally do within the story to save and deliver God’s people.

The challenge with Trinitarian readings is that they read to insert into the story the Triune identity of God. This means both that the Bible becomes less about the story unfolding on its pages than the God who is “out there,” and that the person in whom the story is finding its resolution is less importantly Israel’s Messiah and more importantly God incarnate.

While the narrative of the suffering servant tells us a great deal about Israel’s God, it does so through the story of the crucified and risen Messiah. In fact, I would argue that we know what we are saying about God is true because when God is read aright God, too, is interpreted through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

That is to say, we do not read the story of Jesus through our prior understanding of God, but we understand God through the revealed story of the saving work of Christ.

A good theology will understand God’s identity as tied to and shaped by the Christ event. Mike Gorman can say that Paul discovers that God himself is cruciform: the interpretive key is the story of Jesus.

The Christ of Israel

May 20, 2011 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 10 Comments

This week we’ve wrestled with a number of challenging issues: how the Father’s relationship with Jesus is played out in the cross; how to read the OT if Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah.

This is a perfect week to stumble upon §14.2 in Church Dogmatics, a section entitled, “The Time of Expectation.”

The time of expectation is the time of the Old Testament. But to say this much is to claim that the OT has its value as part of a narrative of revelation, the narrative of Jesus.

Barth is keenly aware of alternative ways of reading the OT. He knows of historical criticism that would situate the text in Ancient Near Eastern context (merely). He knows of moves to construct and reconstruct the history of Israel.

But he equally knows that none of these things is what deals with and listens to the OT as the revelation of God as part of a narrative that is heading toward its climactic revelation in Jesus. The OT is our sacred text, and word of God, because it is expecting the coming Christ.

Here, I start to get nervous. I am all for a hermeneutic of Christological revisionism–reading the OT in full knowledge that the crucified Messiah is the one who had to suffer, be buried, and rise again. Luke 24 teaches us that this is what the OT speaks about when it looks to the coming Messiah. 1 Peter is remarkably affirming on the same point.

For the most part, I think Barth pulled it off.

The highlight was the second of his three points, where he talks about the Jesus-ness of the OT like this: it is “the witness to the revelation in which God remains a hidden God, indeed declares Himself to be the hidden God by revealing himself” (84).

Barth works through the ways in which those who bear God’s name are always a people judged; they were “death incarnate.” He speaks of them as a people who represent God, but who do as as so fully human that God is always meeting people in sinful humanity that is living in rebellion against the God who continues to meet them. This means that God is rejected as God is revealed in the voice of the prophets; that the prophets are rejected and stoned for speaking the words of God.

There is always, thus, judgment with the appearing of God in glory and salvation.

In the third point of this section, Barth talks about the ways God meets with humanity in the OT. In the revelation of God through people, land, temple, lordship, judgment, and kingship, there is a true coming of God to humanity, but one that hides a truer eschatological future that is not defined by, or confined to, these earthly categories.

This section is great for its refusal to get into atomistic prooftexting, and its focus on the hidden, even cruciform, nature of the God of the OT in God’s revelation.

I was at times not happy with the distance Barth put between God and the people, the covenant, and the OT revelation more generally. I tend to think that God is free, as Barth insists, but that in this freedom God has chosen to bind Himself to Israel and the covenants. Barth thinks God is free to leave them behind, it seems; I think this would make God no longer God.

I also wasn’t entirely happy with Barth relegating all OT covenants to one covenant of grace. But that’s probably just a relapse of an earlier nightmare.

All told, Barth gives very good guidance for starting to plot Jesus onto the map of Israel–and for wrestling with the question of judgment in particular. More on that anon.

The Church’s Jesus Interprets Everything

May 18, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 12 Comments

Last week I posted a bit on “the church’s Jesus,” in part to throw my lot in with those who see Jesus as God’s agent rather than with those who see Jesus as an interesting historical phenomenon.

The first thing I said was that the church’s Jesus is the agent of Israel’s God. And this has some ramifications that we need to get more comfortable with.

In particular, to say that Jesus is the consummate act of Israel’s God on earth, that Jesus is the revelation of God, that “however many promises God has made they are yes in him”–to say these things is to claim (whether we know it or not) that Jesus is the hermeneutical key for making sense of the entire Biblical story.

Let me say that in a bit more accessible manner: if we really think Jesus is the Messiah, we should be reading the Old Testament in the same creative ways that the New Testament writers do.

Really, this creeps people out.

In Luke 24 we hear of what it means that the OT anticipates a coming Messiah: that the Christ must suffer, die, be raised, and repentance for forgiveness of sins be proclaimed in his name to all nations.

If this is true, it means that other story lines in the OT (like the ones where an earthly king conquers all the nations, like the ones where the Messiah is glorified by the subjugation of the nations, like the ones where the physical land of Israel takes pride of place as the possession of God’s people) are dead-ends. Or, perhaps better, swept up into a story that transforms them.

Knowing that the identity marker of the people of God is union with Christ, we eschew the identity markers of circumcision and food laws–i.e., of ethnic Israel.

Knowing that the defining moment in the story is the crucifixion and resurrection, we structure our lives and ethics to publicly placard to the world that we are the cross people, living in hope of resurrection. That means, of course, that we do not structure our lives by such things as avoidance of icons or sabbath keeping–which would be aimed to show the world that we are the first Exodus people. No, we’re the second Exodus people.

Knowing that Jesus is the defining moment of the story, we reread the psalms, incorporating ourselves into the story of the singers, and Jesus into the Lord whose name is praised.

Jesus becomes our hermeneutic. Luther was half right when he said that the “canon within the canon” is what places Christ front and center (paraphrase). The other half is this: where Christ is not front and center we have both the freedom and obligation to put him there.

That means reinterpreting the scriptures of Israel in light of the Christ event; and it might even mean reinterpreting parts of the NT (James, anyone?) in light of the same.

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