A Christian understanding of the OT should begin with what God revealed to the Apostles and what they model for us: the centrality of the death and resurrection of Christ for OT interpretation... The reality of the crucified and risen Christ is both the goal and font of Christian biblical interpretation.
Peter Enns, Apostolic Hermeneutics
Monday, December 01, 2008
Understanding the Old Testament
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7 comments:
This is, of course, nonsense. Christian study of the Old Testament should follow the most rigorous academic discipline. This means that preconceptions should be put aside and that the texts themselves, the setting in which they were created, the evidence we have from non-biblical sources and all other scholarly tools should be used. The New Testament has no place whatever in the study of the Old. On the contrary, the Old Testament illuminates the New. Only if Chrisitans can demonstrate that they are willing to approach all evidence, especially Biblical evidence, with a scholarly mind, can they expect to be taken seriously.
I think you may be disagreeing with Jesus and pretty much all the New Testament authors there...
I'm gld to hear it. Jesus was not a Biblical scholar, nor was he a car mechanic. I would not go to him either for an opinion on the authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy or to have my car serviced.
I think he'd do a pretty good job of servicing a car myself...
Of course, the Christian belief is that Jesus is God, and therefore might have some important things to say about what the right way to interpret his own word.
It's a rather nice way to deal with the postmodern problem of authorial intent in the Old Testament. It's got dual authorship, and we can know the intent of the divine author, because he tells us.
And there's the problem. You can't begin to uderstand either the New Testament or the Old, because you approach them with all YOUR answers to the questions before they have even been asked. Sometimes I think that Richard Dawkins cheats because he wrongly represents Christians as being entrenched in anti-intellectualism, then I see the sort of thing that you have just written and I know I am being unfair to him. You can't just dangle words like 'postmodern' and hope they'll let you get away with talking nonsense.
As far as I can tell, Miss Bassett, the problem here is that you're assuming (without any justification) that Custardy and Peter Enns arbitrarily decided to accept the New Testament as inspired without any critical examination.
Of course, Enns says nothing about a "scholarly" approach to OT hermeneutics; instead, he makes the entirely reasonable claim that a Christian perspective of the OT must inevitably begin with its relationship to Jesus and his revelation. If Jesus is the Son of God, our reading of the Old Testament should center around that fact.
You assumed that a Christian perspective was antithetical to "the most rigorous academic discipline" and then criticized Custardy for being anti-intellectual! But if a Christian can demonstrate that the NT is an inspired document quite unlike any other, he is entirely justified in using it to analyze other inspired texts.
At some point, Christians will have to eschew completely naturalistic assumptions about the Bible.
I've continued the discussion here.
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