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The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson

Abstract

Traditional ways of understanding the relationship between the First and Second Testaments of the Christian Bible have proven untenable both theologically and historically. Theologically, they have had at their foundation a supersessionistic stance over against biblical Israel and Judaism, and have often proffered an unsustainable claim of triumph over evil and suffering. Historically, historical-critical interpretation has rendered a straightforward reading of the First Testament as pointing toward the coming of Jesus problematic. This article proposes that seeing the relationship between the Testaments in light of the literary and theological rubric of God's endangered and reaffirmed promises overcomes many of these problems. It yields a fruitful basis for a biblical theology that acknowledges that both the story of Jesus and the church and the story of Israel and Judaism involve a mix of faithful response to God's promises, fundamental struggle with their endangerment, and common hope for their reaffirmation.

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That the Christian church began as a particular expression of the faith of biblical Israel has proven to be a source of great riches as well as a tremendous challenge for the church throughout its history. Since the first generation of Christians, the task of understanding and explaining the church's relationship to Israel and, later, Judaism has been a

significant component of Christian theology. Sadly, the character of much of this reflection has been defensive, polemical, and supersessionistic, as the church came very early on to view the continued existence of Israel in the form of Rabbinic Judaism as a threat to the gospel and to its own existence rather than a sign of God's continued faithfulness to Israel. The consequences of this way of understanding the relationship between the two traditions have been well documented (e.g., Flannery).

The last few decades have seen an increasing recognition on the part of scholars and the church (in many quarters, at least) that this basically supersessionistic attitude toward Judaism has been destructive both in terms of relations with Jews and Judaism and to the credibility of the church's own witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Historians, biblical scholars, and theologians have documented much of the tragic history of the relationship, have done much to "rediscover" the Jewish roots of the Christian tradition, and have begun to formulate the Christian faith in ways that directly reflect these new perspectives. But while there is much yet to be done in all three of these areas, the constructive task--that is, the task of incorporating a positive understanding of Israel and the Jews into the church's theology--is the area most in need of further attention.

A crucial aspect of this task involves defining the relationship between the First and Second Testaments of the Christian Bible. And doing so involves coming to terms with two basic observations. On the one hand, the church, even after it became a Gentile phenomenon, has at every significant turn in its history reaffirmed, sometimes in the face of overt opposition, that the "Old" Testament Scriptures, and hence the story of Israel, are an indispensable part of its authoritative writings and, along with the "New" Testament, form a/the prime source for its theological, ethical, and liturgical reflection and practice. But on the other hand, the traditional formulations of the relationship between the Testaments (e.g., prophecy-fulfillment, typology) have come under fire in recent times both because they support and reflect the church's supersessionistic stance over against Judaism and because critical biblical scholarship has called the historical basis for the traditional relationship into question. In the light of all this, the question of how, precisely, the church ought to understand the relation between the two Testaments clearly belongs among those contemporary theological issues that stand in urgent need of rearticulation.

A first step toward addressing the issue is to recognize that it actually involves two questions. The first is about the warrant for the church's "adoption" of the First Testament: By what right do Christians, especially since the church very quickly became and remains almost exclusively Gentile, read the First Testament and consider it their "own"? And the second concerns interpretation of the texts themselves: By what means, or how should the church read the First Testament in relation to its central message? In what follows, I will briefly rehearse some of the traditional answers to these questions, and then turn to the particular proposal I wish to put forth.

The Traditional Understanding of the Relationship

Clearly one of the reasons that the church has held on to the First Testament so fervently is that the Second Testament itself simply cannot be understood apart from the story of God's dealings with Israel. One of the most important rhetorical goals of practically every author in the Second Testament is precisely to assert and demonstrate the integral connection between the gospel and the story of Israel. That is, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, as well as the existence of the church, represented for the early church not just the continuation, but a new chapter in--indeed the climax of--the story of Israel as that people elected by the one God to work out God's creative and redemptive purposes for the world. As Nils Dahl has insisted, the first Jewish "Christians" turned to their Scriptures initially not out of apologetic motives, but to fill out for themselves the very content of the conviction, born chiefly of the resurrection, that the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah promised to Israel.

The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson

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