Undeception

Mark Goodacre’s latest NT Pod discusses the high concentration of “according to the Scriptures” tags in the Gospels’ Passion narratives and asks whether the Passion narratives are prophecies historicized (as argued by Crossan) or tradition scripturalized. The specific context of his discussion is the Passion narratives, but the principle that will explain it goes for all the Gospel material that cites details of Jesus’ life as prophetic fulfillments.

In the first view, the Scriptures were mined for information about what should have been true about the Messiah, prophecies the NT authors thought would yield some information to fill in their hazy knowledge of the historical details about Jesus. One of the problems with this sort of thinking is that it seems to lean heavily on the assumption that the passages now typically viewed by Christians as messianic had been conceived of as such before the Gospels were written. Easily the weakest evidence for Jesus’ importance presented by Lee Strobel in his Case for Christ material is the claim that Jesus bafflingly fulfilled four dozen OT prophecies, all centuries after the fact. What we can’t forget (and Strobel’s “experts” apparently have) is that we have very little evidence that many of those so-called “messianic prophecies” were considered messianic before the authors of the Gospels cited them as “fulfilled” in Jesus.

I have little doubt that there are instances of the historicization of prophecy in the Gospels, but the idea that all the details of the Passion narratives were extracted by poring over the OT is not particularly compelling. In the podcast, Goodacre points out some good reasons that the model falls short and ends up arguing for something that I agree is more likely: that early believers found in the details of the Passion, which they knew from their traditions, parallels to the Old Testament that were so striking that they sounded like they might have been prophecies. These early believers, particularly the Jewish ones, were so steeped both in Scripture and in their conviction of Jesus’ importance that they looked at Jesus and saw the OT made flesh and walking among them. They also needed an explanation as to how both their cherished Scriptures could be reconciled with this new figure, and so they essentially padded Jesus’ messianic credentials by revising a job description tailor-made around the details they knew of Jesus. They obviously already thought of him as messianic or otherwise eschatologically important (or else why bother?), so they looked to their Scriptures and, using the fluid interpretive methods of the day, found lots of material that buttressed their beliefs.

A very similar way of reading the Bible is amazingly popular even among modern Christians. It’s behind the christological, often called christocentric, readings of the OT, which in practice come off as the reverse process: we see Jesus in the OT more than we see the OT in Jesus because we’re not as steeped in the OT and do not feel the same need they did to justify their new beliefs at the expense of their Scripture’s sole authority. Nowadays we take New Testament theology as our authority and think we have to find reasons to justify keeping the OT around. So when we see a fourth person in the fire with the three Hebrew children, it’s Jesus; when we read of the ram in the thicket, it’s Jesus. And trying to prove a reading of one passage by citing another passage in a completely different biblical context is not at all unlike the NT authors’ attempts to show that their old authority, the Tanakh, affirmed their shift of allegiance toward a new authority by anticipating him through prophecy.

Preachers and inspirational/devotional writers make whole bales of hay out of this sort of typology and similarly anachronistic readings of the OT: our congregations are led to believe that there is christological, or at very least explicitly Christian, significance to be found in seemingly every nook and cranny of the OT. If the “tradition scripturalized” position is correct, this has a very good pedigree in Christian belief. But of course, a parallel’s existence doesn’t at all imply its divine intentionality. We should keep around the Old Testament not because of an erroneous assumption that it is crypto-Christian, but precisely because it’s a testimony of what faith in God looked like before Christ. Reading the Old Testament makes me glad I’m a Christian.

Keith Reich over at Know Thyself has put up a post along the lines of my recent one about why I reject Christocentric readings of the OT that view certain passages as consciously or unconsciously about Jesus. He gives several good examples and reasons why he does, too.

My hard and fast rule for reading any scripture is that it should be read in its own historical context.  Therefore, for Old Testament texts, that context is a historical Jewish context. What did these texts mean to the Jews at the time of writing?  What do they mean for the Jews now?  From a Jewish perspective today, these texts certainly weren’t referring to Christ.

A second problem arises in saying that these texts were specifically written about Jesus, whether or not the author knew what he was writing, and that is that these texts do not line up perfectly with what the New Testament says about Christ.  For example, if Jeremiah’s “New Covenant” was fulfilled in Christ, then why doesn’t everyone “know the Lord?” For Jeremiah states,

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD (Jer 31:34).

Or again, if Jesus is the servant from Isaiah 49, how does Isaiah say this,

And he said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified.”

It seems clear that the servant in this passage is “Israel,” not Jesus.

Christocentrism in the OT.

There’s another example that he calls “the big one” plus some more discussion that you’ll just have to go to his blog to read.

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to him. And why are we told that these treasures are hid in him who is the Revelation of God? Is it that we should despair of finding them and cease to seek them? Are they not hid in him that they may be revealed to us in due time—that is, when we are in need of them? Is not their hiding in him the mediatorial step towards their unfolding in us? Is he not the Truth?—the Truth to men? Is he not the High Priest of his brethren, to answer all the troubled questionings that arise in their dim humanity?
…
The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and towards which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness.

from Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 1, “The Higher Faith“

Although I was once critical of “Christocentric” readings of Scripture in general, I have recently considered that there is really only one brand of it that I have major problems with.

Specifically, I dislike a Christocentric bibliology that views the entirety of the Bible as sub-consciously or self-consciously about Jesus. Jesus’ foot was the one who would crush the serpent’s head; Jesus was (typologically at least) the ram in the thicket; Jesus stood with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; Jesus was the one in view when David was promised that his line would endure forever; etc.

I disagree strongly. The authors of Scripture were entirely children of their own times alone, and while it certainly appears that they began to be hopeful for some of the right things (and missed others dramatically), viewing the NT’s deliberate attempts to reinterpret current events in the terms of OT themes as the decisive “actual meaning” of those OT passages is anachronistic. Inasmuch as they violently commandeer the ancient writings that comprise Scripture ex post facto and thereby prohibit us from seeing certain insights (such as a development of early believers’ understandings of God), these Christocentric interpolations really amount to the truly revisionist readings of the Bible.

Yet there is a way of viewing Scripture that I have an affinity for which I have lately decided qualifies as a “Christocentric” reading. It views the whole of Scripture not so much as “pointing to” Christ (which, again, implies a consciousness on the part of the authors, or at least a more direct divine editorial hand than the evidence suggests) but culminating in Christ. It is much more of an evolutionary approach that mirrors, or perhaps rather, is part of the warp and woof of the development of the universe. It results in an encouragement to judge the Scriptures by Christ instead of revising his theology to make it compatible with some of even the OT’s most disgusting portrayals of God. If Jesus was the definitive Word of God, putting him as he truly was into those wineskins should, occasionally at least, result in a bit of a mess.

Anyway, there have been a few posts on other blogs during this last week that have been complementary to the better aspects of Christocentric bibliology. First was a post by Jeff Dunn on Internet Monk that, while occasionally straying into some classic Christocentrism-of-the-wrong-sort language, did contain this gem:

A woman asked me if I knew of any DVD series that used New Testament characters to teach positive character traits. Another woman, a teacher in a Christian school, needed it for her middle school classes. I said, “No, I don’t know of any.” Then I continued, “And that would be the wrong use of Scripture.”

“What do you mean?”

“Scripture is given to us for one reason only,” I said. “And that is to reveal Jesus to us. If you want to teach positive character traits, try a book like Mickey Mantle’s The Quality Of Courage. That’s much better to use to teach that kind of thing.”

While I wince a little at the idea of the Bible being “given” to us in the direct manner implied here, I do think his main point is a good one. We can look at the saints in the Bible and see some good character traits — heck, Hebrews 11 is full of them — but if we insist that we want to take what they had to tell us seriously, we’ll not lose sight of the fact that the NT authors were firmly, thoroughly Christocentric. The Gospel writers (especially Mark) and certainly Paul were intent on showing even the Apostles to be fallible, while never once intimating the same for Jesus. We even have people go so far as to discern and prescribe “character traits” supposedly exhibited by any and every animal mentioned in the Bible (but only those in the Bible), because of course, “God mentioned the bat in His Word for as many good reasons as we can think of, and more.” There are good character traits in Scripture, and I wouldn’t go as far as Dunn does to say that highlighting those traits in order to teach them was “wrong”, at very least it bolsters Protestantism’s characteristic and problematic bibliocentrism. It also tends towards very silly, misguided, and often sidetracking emphases such as the Prayer of Jabez craze of yesteryear: Jabez prayed that prayer, so we should at least give it a go!

A post that describes bibliology in terms I quite like is Diglot’s ”My Take on the Bible“. It’s short, sweet, and to the well-stated point. His points coincide so closely with my own views that I will not even try to start quoting the post here. What I will do is quote a verse mentioned in the post that I think stands as a good summary of the NT writers’ own Christocentric bibliology.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5.39-40)

As both Jeff Dunn and Diglot pointed out, as self-professed Christians we’ve got to be careful that we don’t major on the minors. Anything in Scripture worth fighting for will be found in Christ. Maybe we should spend less time systematizing or arguing the “fundamental” importance of certain teachings within the Bible (“recovered” by some sect or another), and spend more time listening to the actual Word of God, if that’s who we believe he is.

I’d like to point out a new contribution to the recent conversation in the blogosphere on the topic of the OT vs. NT depictions of God’s disposition — and not just because my blog is referenced! Arni makes some excellent statements, including the following:

Jesus not only preaches non-violence and lives non-violently when there was ample opportunity to do the opposite – he lays his life down in solidarity with those who suffer at the hands of violent power. Jesus is love and God is love, not violence.

Luther said somewhere that Jesus is the sun of the Bible. It is thus in the light of Jesus that the Bible should be read. Just like when the sun rises over a landscape, not all parts of the Bible receive as much light as other parts. There are mountains and valleys, the former receiving more light than the former.

via A “solution” to divine violence: Jesus as the sun of the Bible

I used to have a knee-jerk reaction to Christocentric interpretations of Scripture under the mistaken assumption that they all read Christ into the OT where he was not yet revealed and thus inaccurately portray the original meaning of the OT. But now I see the wisdom and importance of the type of Christocentrism that allows his testimony and example to stand in judgment over the views of God seen in various places in the Old Testament.

Please read and lend your contribution to the discussion!