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

These first two aspects of the church's understanding of the relation between the Testaments are embedded firmly in the church's creeds and liturgy (Soulen; van Buren); they are nicely illustrated in the "Nine Lessons and Carols" service that King's College Cambridge puts on every year. The service begins with Genesis 3, in which, according to the service, "God tells sinful Adam that he has lost the life of paradise"--the problem. The next three deal with prophecies of the coming savior, Genesis 22), in which "God promises to faithful Abraham that in his seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed"; and Isaiah 9 and 11, which foretell the coming of the savior and foreshadow his peaceful reign, respectively. Then come the announcement of Christ's birth (Luke 1), the birth itself (two from Luke 2), the visit of the wise men (Matthew 2) and finally, the "unfolding of the mystery of the incarnation" in John 1. Seen in this light, the relationship between the two seems self-evident: a proper reading of the First Testament leads inevitably to the coming of Christ. (Another very similar, but more elaborate example of this is Handel's Messiah.)

The third component of the traditional understanding of the relationship between the Testaments arises largely from the fact that the picture presented by the first two did not go unchallenged, i.e., from the recognition that the First Testament still served as the Scriptures for the physical descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the Jewish people. The refusal of most Jews to embrace the gospel, and their continued use of their Scriptures with a very different interpretive center (the Mosaic Law), necessitated a response from the church to defend its own claims to the Scriptures (e.g., Justin Martyr's DIALOGUE WITH TRYPHO). This is a complicated question with historical, theological, and literary dimensions that are hotly disputed (see Serial; Gager; Ruether; Davies), but I think it is safe to say that, at a minimum, the seeds of a full-blown replacement theology are sown in the Second Testament; they are tilled in the first centuries of rivalry, and they come to full fruit in the Constantinian "triumph" of the church in the fourth century.

Working together, these three aspects of the church's hermeneutic provide a neat, logical, and in many ways very compelling construal of the unity of the Christian Bible, one that has not only provided a logic by which to incorporate the First Testament, but has illumined aspects of the human condition before God in profound ways through two millennia. It answers the two principal questions posed at the beginning of this section in this way:

* By what right does the church read the First Testament? Since it has responded to the gospel of Jesus Christ, it has replaced the carnal descendants of Abraham and Sarah as God's elect, and thus the First Testament is properly the Church's book, for Christians are now the people of God.

* By what means does the Church read the First Testament? By constructing a narrative framework that places the First Testament in a position to function as preparation for and background to the Second Testament and the story of redemption through Christ. Within this framework, much of the First Testament has functioned in a typological or prefigurative manner, or as a shadow-like version of the truth God revealed in the gospel (Frei: 39).