On handling continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New Testament

I argued in my literal/spiritual sense of scripture thread that the literal sense must be preserved from being subsumed in a construal of its "spiritual" referent. In the same way, the the integrity of the two testaments must be preserved in their joint witness to their one theological reality. As Childs says,

“The Old Testament bears its true witness as the Old which remains distinct from the New. It is promise not fulfilment. Yet its voice continues to sound and it has not been stilled by the fulfilment of the promise” (Biblical Theology, 77)

This fact should warn Biblical theologians against the extremes of overemphasising either continuity or discontinuity between the two testaments. On the one hand, the New Testament is neither the culmination of a unified traditio-historical trajectory nor a midrashic extension of the Hebrew Scriptures. On the other hand, the designation of the Old Testament as “old” is not a reference to its failure and rejection. The canonical relationship is far more complex, in which the Old is understood by its relation to the New, but the New is incomprehensible apart from the Old. The Christian canon asserts the continuing integrity of the Old Testament witness, so that it must be heard on its own terms. Yet the New Testament too tells its own story in which something totally new enters the picture. The complexity of the issue is seen in the fact that this totally new witness is borne in terms of the old, and thereby transforms the Old Testament. In reflecting on the whole Christian Bible with its two very different voices, it must be borne in mind that there is no one overarching hermeneutical theory by which to resolve the tension. The continuing challenge of Biblical theology

“is to engage in the continual activity of theological reflection which studies the canonical text in detailed exegesis, and seeks to do justice to the witness of both testaments in the light of its subject matter who is Jesus Christ" (Childs, Bilbical Theology, 78).

This is the last post in my thread on the two-testamental nature of Christian scripture, a subset of my overall look at traditional Christian exegesis. My next thread will deal with the issue of divine and human authorship of Scripture.

Two testaments, four gospels: the hermeneutical significance of juxtaposition

I indicated in my post on the relation of the New Testament to the Old that a primary characteristic of the Christian two-testamental Bible is that these two testaments are simply juxtaposed to each other. There are no attempts to redactionally link them together, as we find in individual books such as Isaiah, or attempts to update the text of the Old Testament so that it speaks of Jesus more unambiguously (by inserting Jesus' name in Isaiah 53, for example).

In short, this juxtaposition of the two testaments is of a different order than the canonical shaping that gave us the individual books in the first place. According to Childs, this type of "canonical shaping" is comparable to the composition of the fourfold Gospel collection. Just like the two testaments, the Gospels were also simply juxtaposed without an attempt to make the individual books conform to a single redactional pattern. This has hermeneutical significance in that it is the resulting effect of the juxtaposition, rather than in a single editorial intentionality, that should guide theological interpretation. (This also demonstrates, I should point out, that canonical exegesis is commited to reckoning with various types of intentionality when dealing with the totality of Scripture.)

In contrast to the two-testamental canon, however, there is no cross-referencing within the fourfold Gospel collection amongst the individual Gospels. Each of the individual Gospels, however, makes constant and explicit reference to the Old Testament – albeit in different ways. Indeed, the use of the Old Testament plays a major role in the canonical shaping of each of the Gospels and many of the New Testament letters as well. Childs draws the following implication from this observation:

the influence of the Old Testament on the individual shaping of the Gospels belongs to the level of the New Testament’s compositional history and cannot be directly related to the formation of the Christian Bible qua collection. This means that the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament, either by direct citation or allusion, cannot provide a central category for Biblical Theology because this cross-referencing operates on a different level. There is no literary or theological warrant for assuming that the forces which shaped the New Testament can be simply extended to the level of Biblical Theology involving theological reflection on both testaments (Biblical Theology, 76).

The relation of the New Testament to the Old

In the comments to my recent post on figural interpretation, questions were raised concerning the correct way to read the Old Testament as a Christian, especially in relation to the New Testament. Should the OT say what the NT claims it said, should we have the freedom to allegorize beyond that what the NT did say?

This is an issue that Childs wrestled with throughout his career. In my review of his theological approach (summarized here), the categorization of the biblical text as a "witness" has consistently been of fundamental significance. I've summarized Childs on this issue in my post, Canonical Process and the Text as "witness."

The choice to see the text as “witness” to something beyond itself (its substance, which for Childs is God, Christ, the regula fidei, the divine reality etc.) also plays a central role in contemplating the nature of the relationship between the two testaments. According to Childs, the juxtaposition of the two testaments to form the Christian Bible arose, not simply to establish a historical continuity between Israel and the church, but above all as an affirmation of a theological continuity. In other words, it was believed that in some way the unity of the two testaments lay in its theological referent. How exactly these two testaments were to be correlated in order to witness to this reality most fully has been a matter of debate for centuries. The two testamental nature of the Christian Bible consists of simply a juxtaposition of two entities, and this juxtaposition has led to a number of strategies by which to understand the nature of the relationship, such as the one purpose of God, the one redemptive history, the one people of God, prophecy and fulfilment, law and gospel, shadow and substance, etc. [*]

Rather than arguing for the appropriateness of this or that construal (though see my comments on prophecy and fulfilment), in my next post I will look at the theological significance of this simple juxtaposition of two testaments, which is comparable to the juxtaposition of the four gospels.

[*] See Childs' Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 74.

Thread Summary: Scripture's two testaments

The following is a summary of all my posts (so far) dealing with the third of Childs' "constitutive features of Christian exegesis":

1. The problem of a two testamental canon
2. Which canon should we use?
3. The scope of the canon: The "Protestant" pole
4. The scope of the canon: The "Catholic" solution
5. Which canon? Brevard Childs' response
6. The struggle for the scope of the Christian canon
7. The relation of the New Testament to the Old
8. Two testaments, four gospels: the hermeneutical significance of juxtaposition
9. On handling the continuity and discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments

Which canon? Brevard Childs' response

I have outlined the "problem of the Christian Bible" here, with its "Protestant" response here and its "Catholic" response here. How does the father of the "canonical approach" respond?

Childs clearly prefers the former option. In his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture he wrote

The threat which is posed by overemphasising the discontinuity between the Christian and Hebrew Bible is that of severing the ontological relationship between Christianity and Judaism. (671).

Nevertheless, he is aware that the issue remains unresolved and calls for respect of this diversity. A “kerygmatic,” i.e. christological, reading of Scripture leads to a view of the situation as a polarity between Word and Tradition, which find their analogue in the broader and narrower canons. The church’s task is to stand within this tension, struggling to continually discern the truth of God being revealed in Scripture while at the same time being aware that she stands within a fully human, ecclesiastical tradition which remains the tradent of the Word. To summarize:

the complete canon of the Christian church as the rule-of-faith sets for the community of faith the proper theological context in which we stand, but it also remains continually the object of critical theological scrutiny subordinate to its subject matter who is Jesus Christ. This movement from the outer parameters of tradition to the inner parameters of Word is constitutive of the theological task. [*]

[*] Biblical Theology, 68.

The Scope of the Canon: The "Catholic" Solution

I outlined the "Protestant" trend towards a narrow canon in the history of the church here.

There was also, however, a more "Catholic" trend, in which there was a concern to emphasise the catholicity of the Christian faith. This was expressed in terms of an unbroken continuity of sacred tradition from the risen Lord to his church. The church Fathers used as a major criterion by which to determine a book’s authority the testimony of the most ancient congregations having a claim to historical continuity with the earliest Apostolic tradition and representing the most inclusive geographical testimony of the universal church. In addition to this, reference was made to the widespread use of the LXX in the New Testament itself and the amenability of the Greek rendering to Christian interpretation.

In my next post I'll look at Childs' take on this tension.

The Scope of the Canon: The "Protestant" Pole

In this post I pointed out the theological challenge of the scope of the Christian Bible. Within the history of the church, two principles seem to have been operative concerning the scope of the canon which stood in tension.

On the one hand, there was the concern that the truth of the apostolic witness be preserved. The commitment to guard this witness led to efforts to guarantee the proper scope of the sacred writings and to preserve the Biblical text from corruption. Jerome argued for the Hebrew form of the Old Testament on the basis of the fact that the Word of God to Israel had been preserved in the Hebrew Scriptures, which were then translated. Equally important was the view that the Jews were the proper tradents of the tradition (Rom. 1.4) and that Jesus stemmed from the Patriarchs “according to the flesh” (Rom. 9.5). Therefore, to quote Childs,

“to use a different collection of Old Testament writings from those accepted by the Jews appeared as a threat to the theological continuity of the people of God" (Biblical Theology, 65).

This could be called the "Protestant" solution to the problem of the Christian Bible (though it clearly has ancient roots). Tomorrow I will look at the "Catholic" tendency within the history of the church.

Which canon should we use?

As I mentioned here, unlike in Judaism the Church never really settled down on one particular canon of scripture. This poses a challenge for ecumenical dialogue, as different traditions invoke different texts in order to back up their theological positions. Before we can adress the question of which canon the church should read, it is worth rehearsing again just what the church means when it talks of "scripture" in the first place.

As Childs has emphasised and Hägglund demonstrated historically (1958), the church confesses that the Scripture is a “witness” to divine truth, a truth understood to be Christological. For the early church, it was the ability of the Old and New Testaments to point to God’s redemptive intervention for the world in Jesus Christ that enabled them to be authoritative. In other words, what matters is not the texts in themselves qua holy texts, but rather the reality to which they point that makes them valuable. They are means by which the prophetic and apostolic testimony to this reality are preserved, and as such function as a vehicle of this reality for today. This testimony is preserved in scripture and the function of the various summa of church doctrine (e.g. the Roman baptismal confession or the creeds) is the summarize and present the reality to which the scriptures point.

In other words, it's not about the text, it's about the reality. The function of scripture as testimony to this reality and of tradition as summary of this reality has led to two principles which have been operative throughout church history. On the one hand, there was the desire for purity, that the truth of the apostolic witness be preserved. On the other hand there was the desire to emphasise the catholicity of the Christian faith which was expressed in an unbroken chain of sacred tradition from Christ to the church.

In my next post I will look at these two poles in more detail.

For another detailed discussion, with a great comment thread, go here.

The Problem of a Two-Testamental Canon

I have finally come to point 3 of the humongous thread that I started in September 2007 dealing with the defining features of specifically Christian exegesis. Point 3 concerns the two-testamental nature of Christian scripture. Today, just a few words of introduction:

Despite the universal assent within the Christian church to a two-testamental Bible, there are two issues which have never received a single resolution: the scope of the Christian canon and the nature of the relationship between its two parts. The church has struggled throughout the centuries to understand the theological implications of this reality. From the Enlightenment onwards, however, the issue came to be understood in history-of-religions terms. As such, the theological question has largely been ignored as irrelevant. For the Church, the question of the integrity and scope of the two testaments, along with the nature of their relationship, is too important to be ignored.

Stay tuned for a "canonical" response to the problem ...