Post-modern NT?

The writers of the New Testament seem to be willing to interpret Old Testament passages to mean something very different than what the original authors intended.

One example is Matthew's use of Hosea 11:1 in chapter 2 verse 15:

So [Joseph] got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

Hosea makes no mention of the Messiah. His original clearly is referring to the exodus from Egyptian slavery. Yet Matthew invests new content in these words applying them to Jesus Christ. These words were "fulfilled" in him.

This raises several questions:

• Did the NT writers use a faulty method of biblical interpretation to arrive at these results?
  
• If so, how can we trust the conclusions they make?
  
• If not, can we use the same approach in our own interpretation?
  
• If the Bible can be used in this way, what's to prevent us from reading our own ideas and wishes into the text?
  
• If the Bible can be used in this way, how can it be any longer an ultimate authority?
  
• If we shouldn't use the Bible this way, how can it be legitimate for the NT writers to do so?
  

One important point, inspiration cannot be used to "sanitize" this method of interpretation. The apostles and early Christians used this method in all their study of the Scriptures (the Old Testament). It wasn't limited to the documents that later made up the New Testament.

My current understanding has been shaped by many influences, but primarily Peter Enns, NT Wright and Tim Keller.

The early Christians were not taking liberty with the OT Scriptures. They were not just making up whatever interpretation they wanted. They were guided by a simple principle. And this principle was taught to them by Jesus himself.

In Luke 24:27, the narrator tells us:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Here's the principle: All Scripture is primarily about Jesus Christ. This is true whether the original author was aware of this or not.

So Matthew was not playing "fast and loose" with the text from Hosea. He was simply understanding it from the post-resurrection perspective that Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the story of slavery and exodus, of exile and return.

Likewise, we must understand Scripture from this same perspective. Not only must we do this when reading the OT, but also the NT. When Paul says, "You must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips" (Colossians 3:8), it must be understood in the context of Jesus Christ. We cannot clean up our act. We can only live in the power of God's grace as expressed in the person of Jesus Christ.

The written Word of God is essentially about the incarnate Word.

• It is not a list of rules for living.
  
• It is not a source book for systematic theology.
  
• It is not a science textbook.
  

It is the word of life about the living Word.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Outline for Preaching

I have been describing some of the problems with the virtual canonization of expository preaching as “the only method of preaching that preserves the purity of Scripture and accomplishes the purpose for which God gave us His Word” (John MacArthur, Rediscovering expository preaching, p. 24).

While many still cannot see the problems, it is time to move on and answer the question, “Exactly what kind of preaching should we be doing?”

Let’s start with the Old Testament. For many pastors preaching from the Old Testament is problematic. Some avoid it almost entirely. Others treat passages from the Old Testament as morality lessons.

Then there are those who apparently have never read Hebrews 8:13. They teach about tithing from Malachi. They promote Sabbatarianism. They manufacture artificial distinctions between the moral, civil and ceremonial Law given through Moses.

Until recently, I struggled with some of these same problems. But through the influence of N. T. Wright, Tim Keller and Peter Enns, I have finally understood how to treat the Old Testament with respect and from a Christian perspective.

The key is Luke 24:27, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Jesus reinterpreted the Old Testament in light of what God had accomplished in the life, death and resurrection of his Son. Through the book of Acts we see the Apostles doing the same thing. Paul proclaimed from the Scriptures (Old Testament) the good news about Jesus.

When we preach from the Old Testament, the ultimate focus must always be on Jesus Christ. We can preach about Joseph and talk about how faithful he was, about how God’s providence was displayed in his life, and about how he held to his faith right down to the end by making them swear to take his bones back to the Promised Land. But in the end we must shift the focus to the One who was faithful to the point of death on the cross, to the One who God providentially used to provide the Bread of Life, to the One who did not waver in the Garden and trusted God to fulfill his promise of resurrection.

I now find preaching from the Old Testament more exciting, more appealing and more powerful as every text is reinterpreted in the light of what God has accomplished in the person of Jesus the Christ.

The Old Testament is more than just background for the Gospel. It is an important part, an essential part, of the grand narrative that finds its key moment in the resurrection of Jesus. And this narrative continues today.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

The Old in the New

When the writers of the New Testament quoted from the Old Testament in support of their message, they did not use the historical-grammatical method. Instead they used a hermeneutic most Evangelicals would find disconcerting. They clearly interpreted Old Testament passages in ways that the original writers could never have intended them to be read.

Peter Enns addresses this in his book, Inspiration And Incarnation: Evangelicals And The Problem Of The Old Testament.

There is also an article, Apostolic Hermeneutics and an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture: Moving beyond a Modernist Impasse, online which contains the heart of his thesis. Here are a few quotations (emphasis added):

The manner in which the Apostles handled the OT seems unexpected, strange, even improper by modern conventions. The Apostles do things with the OT that, if any of us were to do likewise, would be criticized as deviations from “normal” hermeneutical standards.

Grammatical-historical exegesis insists that the interpretation of texts must begin with the words in front of us understood in the context in which these words were written. Even with the caveats that pure objectivity is an illusion and that the author’s intention is essentially unrecoverable (or better, recoverable only on the basis of the words in front of us, which places the modern interpreter in a hermeneutical circle), it is nevertheless a fundamental notion that meaning must be “anchored” somehow in something beyond the mere will of the interpreter. Any writer (including this one) who wishes to be understood will have a deep-rooted sympathy for such a hermeneutical principle.
A problem arises, however, when we observe how the Apostles handled the OT. Despite protestations to the contrary, grammatical-historical hermeneutics does not account for the New Testament’s use of the Old. However self-evident grammatical-historical hermeneutics may be to us, and whatever very important contributions it has made and continues to make to the field of biblical studies, it must be stated clearly that the Apostles did not seem overly concerned to put this principle into practice.

And it should be self-evident that, for various portions of Scripture, we have in our minds pre-existing interpretations of the Bible that reflect what we have come to think the Bible contains…. These views are sometimes held so deeply (and unwittingly) that it is only through considerable argumentation that someone can be shown that what they may consider part of the Bible really is not.

Paul did not begin with Isa 49:6, which speaks of Israel’s return from Babylon, and conclude grammatical-historically that this speaks of Christ. Rather, it is the reality of the risen Christ that drove Paul to read Isa 49:6 in a new way: “Now that I see how it all ends, I can see how this, too, fits; how it drives us forward.”

To put it another way, it is the conviction of the Apostles that the eschaton had come in Christ that drove them back to see where and how their Scripture spoke of him. And this was not a matter of grammatical-historical exegesis but of a Christ-driven hermeneutic. The term I prefer to use to describe this hermeneutic is Christotelic…. To see Christ as the driving force behind apostolic hermeneutics is not to flatten out what the OT says on its own. Rather, it is to see that, for the church, the OT does not exist on its own, in isolation from the completion of the OT story in the death and resurrection of Christ. The OT is a story that is going somewhere, which is what the Apostles are at great pains to show. It is the OT as a whole, particularly in its grand themes, that finds its telos, its completion, in Christ. This is not to say that the vibrancy of the OT witness now comes to an end, but that—on the basis of apostolic authority—it finds its proper goal, purpose, telos, in that event by which God himself determined to punctuate his covenant: Christ.

The church instinctively wants to guard against such a misuse of Scripture by saying, “Pay attention to the words in front of you in their original context.” What helps prevent (but does not guarantee against) such flights of fancy is grammatical-historical exegesis.

But this does not mean the church should adopt the
grammatical-historical method as the default, normative hermeneutic for how it should read the OT today. Why? Because grammatical-historical exegesis simply does not lead to a Christotelic (apostolic) hermeneutic. A grammatical-historical exegesis of Hos 11:1, an exegesis that is anchored by Hosea’s intention, will lead no one to Matt 2:15. The first (grammatical-historical) reading does not lead to the second reading. This is a dilemma. The way I have presented the dilemma may suggest an impasse, but perhaps one way beyond that impasse is to question what we mean by “method.” The word implies, at least to me, a worked out, conscious application of rules and steps to arrive at a proper understanding of a text. But what if “method,” so understood, is not as central a concept as we might think? What if biblical interpretation is not guided so much by method but by an intuitive, Spirit-led engagement of Scripture with the anchor being not what the author intended but by how Christ gives the OT its final coherence?

The more I reflect on the nature of biblical interpretation throughout its long history as well as in today’s world, the more I am convinced that there must be more to the nature of biblical interpretation than simply uncovering the “meaning of the text,” as if it were an objective exercise.

But biblical interpretation is a true community activity. It is much more than individuals studying a passage for a week or so. It is about individuals who see themselves in a community that has both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Truly, we are not islands of interpretive wisdom, degrees in hand and off to conquer the Bible. We rely on the witness of the church through time (with the hermeneutical trajectory set by the Apostles as a central component), as well as the wisdom of the church in our time—both narrowly considered as a congregation, denomination, or larger tradition, and the church more broadly considered as a global reality. Biblical interpretation is not merely a task that individuals perform, but it is something that grows out of our participation in the family of God in the broadest sense possible.

You may wish to read the entire article or, better yet, buy the book.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”