The Old Testament is qualitatively identical with the New; both sets of texts bear concerted witness to the miraculous love of God for his world.
As we approach the season of Advent with its catena of hope-filled rituals and texts, I was reminded of a book I’d been meaning to read for quite some time.
The prophet Isaiah features prominently in the Revised Common Lectionary’s slate of Advent readings. This year (Year A, 2022-23) we meet Isaiah in chapters 2, 11, 35, 7, and (of course) 9. These are passages which feature Jerusalem lifted up, peace reigning over death, the parched wilderness bursting into bloom. These are passages penned by a hope-filled, brimming-with-boldness prophet (Isaiah the son of Amoz), speaking truth to those in power (within Israel) and offering glimpses of God’s eternal reign.
The book of Isaiah is, of course, situated in what Christians call the Old Testament, the 39 books (for most Protestants) spanning from Genesis to Malachi which recount the story of God’s people Israel. For Jews this book is called the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak (T-N-K, the consonants in Hebrew, stand for Torah, Neviim, Ketuviim, meaning Law, Prophets, Writings). In this collection of texts, written at different times, by different authors, with different aims, and in different genres, we encounter the complex, dramatic, and breathtaking script (cf. Scripture) which narrates Israel’s history and hope.
For Christians, however, the Old Testament is often viewed as a problem, an obstacle, a bugaboo-hobgoblin hybrid! In what way is the Hebrew Bible –the Scriptural witness of a discrete and defined people (Israel)– Scripture for non-Israeli, “Gentile” Christians, such as you and me?
The apostle Paul tells Timothy –his half-gentile pastoral prodigy in Ephesus– to hold fast to the sacred writings he’s known since his youth; the Scriptures which are able to lead one to salvation, fill one with divine life, and equip one as pastor of God’s church (2 Tim. 3:14-17). Paul tells Timothy to rely wholeheartedly on Scripture for everything he needs, and guess what he meant by “Scripture”? The Hebrew Bible.
The New Testament was not recognized as a canonical collection of writings (“Scriptures”) until at least the late second century (AD), over one hundred years later than the writings of the apostle Paul. This means that “Scripture” for the earliest Christians, even for the figurehead of Christianity itself, Jesus, meant something different (in scope) than what we imagine today: it meant the Hebrew Bible.
Of course, through the process of canonization (the recognition of the divine authority and spiritual utility of the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible and the 27 of the New Testament), the Christian Bible came to include more than just the Scriptures of Israel. However, such texts in particular (i.e., the Hebrew Bible) are mentioned by the earliest Christians as being charged with divine life and capable of leading one to salvation. This means that Christians must reckon with the Old Testament, seeing it not as a bugaboo or an obstacle but as an illuminating, energizing, source of divine life, to the same degree that the New Testament is for us.
The book I’d been meaning to read for quite some time (to return to my opening sentence), is Brevard Childs’s, The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture (Eerdmans, 2004). Let me just say: I have read many handfuls of books on various topics in the field of Biblical Studies (I am not bragging, I was forced to read such books for six years in college and graduate school!), but this work by Childs is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.
The title says it all: Christians throughout the centuries have struggled to understand the book of Isaiah as Christian Scripture. Childs’s book, then, takes the reader on a journey from the apostles (1st century), through the church fathers (2nd-4th centuries), the medieval and reformation periods (11th-16th centuries), all the way up through the post-Enlightenment, modern period, and post-modern setting in which we find ourselves today. Through sustained engagement with Christian interpreters of Isaiah throughout the centuries, Childs traces the manner in which Christians have struggled (valiantly) to interpret this document as a living testimony to Jesus Christ.
The book is well worth the read but may be difficult and a bit dense for non-specialists. My aim, then, is to summarize his conclusions. The questions he aims to answer are as follows: Are there any discernable threads which span from the 2nd century readings of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus all the way up to the post-Enlightenment readings of modernity? If so, what traits have characterized Christian interpretation of Isaiah throughout the history of the Christian church?
After three hundred pages of historical and theological analysis, Childs lists six enduring features which consistently emerge in the church’s struggle to read Isaiah as Christian Scripture: the authority of Scripture; its literal and spiritual senses; Scripture’s two testaments; its divine and human authorship; its Christological content; and the dialectical nature of history. In what follows, I will take each of these in turn.
The Authority of Scripture. Childs first writes, “A basic characteristic of Christian exegesis [throughout history] has been its acknowledgment of the authority of Scripture.” Inherent in the Christian reading of Isaiah has been an acknowledgment of the divine authority of the Hebrew Scriptures. Interpreters from early on believed that one couldn’t truly apprehend the Old Testament as Scripture if one did not acknowledge (in practice and belief) the normative utility and function of such texts for the church. Here lies the rub, however: the authority of Scripture, throughout centuries of sustained reflection, did not derive from any quality intrinsic to the texts themselves (i.e., the elegance of its rhetoric, its grammatical and historical accuracy, etc.), but rather from its designation by God as writings “for the life of the church.” In the words of Childs, “biblical authority was manifested, above all, in its usage in shaping the life of the congregation through preaching, liturgy, and catechesis [instruction].”
The Literal and Spiritual Senses of Scripture. Next, Childs concludes that “a basic characteristic of Christian exegesis has been its recognition of both a literal and a spiritual dimension of scripture.” Throughout the history of Christianity, Christian interpreters have taken pains to understand the historical, grammatical, philological meaning of the words, phrases, and references in the Scriptural text (the literal meaning). However, along with such pursuits, Christians throughout the ages have always dug deeper, discovering transcendent yet connected meaning, from the past, for the present. John Calvin and Martin Luther, famous figureheads of the Protestant Reformation, took pains to “extend their interpretation of the literal/historical sense to apply existentially to the needs of contemporary congregations.”
Scripture’s Two Testaments. “An essential component shaping family resemblance within the Christian tradition is the conviction that the Christian Bible consists of both and Old Testament and a New Testament.” While the exact nature of the relationship between the two has been debated for centuries, Christian interpreters from the very beginning have acknowledged the independent (yet connected) authority of each corpus in its own right. Against viewing the Old Testament as “Law” and the New Testament as “Gospel” (or “Letter” versus “Spirit”), Martin Luther, for example, “demonstrated how the Old Testament could function according to the Spirit as gospel, whereas the New Testament could be rendered as mere letter” at times. The spiritual posture and expectations of the reader are thus significant: both testaments comprise “Christian Scripture” and we can fall into reading either in an unhealthy, un-Christian way (as dead letter/Law as opposed to life-giving Word/Gospel).
The Divine and Human Authorship of Scripture. Throughout the centuries “the Christian church has always confessed that God was the author of scripture... Yet at the same time human beings were designated as authors communicating the teachings of God.” One conceptualization of this was offered by Thomas Aquinas (13th century), who suggests that “the literal sense is what the human authors intended in their writings, but because God comprehends everything all at once, a multiplicity of sense can also be derived from the one divine intention.” Somehow it was held in tension that the time, culture, and language-conditioned words of particular human beings were to be taken with the utmost seriousness, while at the same time those words constituted the very Word of God, capable of transcending time, culture, and language, to address his people in the ever-changing present.
The Christological Content of the Christian Bible. The questions asked and answered under this heading are: “Is there a determinate meaning within the biblical texts of the Christian Bible?” Or are the texts so capacious and capable of diverse meanings as to render the quest for a singular reference meaningless? Childs answers: “Traditional Christian exegesis took it for granted that the biblical witness was directed toward a specific reference.” And that reference? Jesus Christ. The parameters established to safeguard such a reference are comprised in what Childs calls the “rule of faith,” or the canon. While many think of divine inspiration (God breathing his life-giving Spirit into Scripture) as related only to the words of Scripture, Childs extends this to the editorial arrangement, collection, and coherence of the “canon” itself. The deliberate collection of the 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New, the precise arrangement of the texts therein, and their “final form” for use by the church, has been shaped, influenced, and guided by God’s divine Spirit. The boundaries, limits, and scope of the canon itself, then, functions to steer readers towards its telos, its “determinate meaning,” and that is: the life of the Word, Jesus Christ.
The Dialectical Nature of History. Lastly (thanks for hanging on this long!), Childs writes, “An intense interest in the nature of history has been an enduring characteristic of the Christian interpretation of the Bible from its inception.” With the word dialectical Childs means that distinctions have been often expressed “between ordinary and divine events, between an inner and outer dimension, or between a confessional or secular perception.” Johannes Cocceius (17th century), for example, sought to emphasize the “radical eschatological nature of God’s action in history. This was not an extension of human events; it was qualitatively different.” He goes on to interpret the prophetic history in Isaiah “in apocalyptic terms as a discontinuity between the old and new ages.” With Martin Luther, Cocceius “sought to recover an existential quality of history,” not separating ordinary and divine, but not melding them either.
After this painstaking analysis, Childs concludes that there do exist some strands of continuity stretching from the earliest Christian interpreters to the present day. Such Christians have struggled to understand Isaiah and other portions of the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture, but their struggles have paid immense dividends.
As we enter the season of Advent, rife with passages from Isaiah, the Psalms, and elsewhere, I would encourage you to receive the Hebrew Bible as Scripture; to see in such texts the life-giving Gospel of Jesus, which, when read with the eyes of faith, can lead readers to salvation, healing, and completion. The Old Testament is qualitatively identical with the New; both sets of texts bear concerted witness to the miraculous love of God for his world.
This Advent season, in the words of Isaiah the prophet: “Come! Let us walk in the light of the LORD” (2:5).
Jonah Bissell
Associate Pastor