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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
Christians and the Story of Israel: Spectators or Participants?
Dahl's proposal actually deals more explicitly with the second of the two questions posed above: the question of a helpful interpretive framework. But clearly there are implications in what he says for the question about where Christians "get off" claiming the First Testament as their own (especially as his ideas are developed by van Buren). In the present situation, there seem to be three options. The first is simply to acknowledge that the First Testament does not belong and never has rightfully belonged to Christians, nor is it addressed to them. Christianity is such a fundamentally different religion from the forms of religion in the Hebrew Bible that there is no fruitful connection to be made (Levenson 1985). While it must be said that no serious contemporary theologian would proffer such a view, it is, for one thing, at least implicit in much Christian piety and liturgy. I see it myself quite frequently in the understanding of the relationship students bring into classes on the Bible; and Robert Jenson's observations about how much church practice illustrates the secondary if not irrelevant status of the First Testament points to it as well (14). It raises the question whether Marcion won an implicit victory after all.
Divorcing the Second Testament from the First does have the merit of removing a stumbling block in Jewish-Christian relations; Jesus was not the Jewish Messiah, but, in the case of the church, some cosmic redeemer figure sent by God in response to some generalized human need, and in the case of Jesus scholars, a teacher of a life philosophy in the tradition of Hellenistic philosophical movements (Cynics, Stoics, etc.). But, as suggested above, the Christian faith would be unrecognizable and incomprehensible without a clear connection to biblical Israel.
A second option is to view the Hebrew Scriptures as, in Paul van Buren's phrase, "somebody else's mail," that is, to see Christians as essentially spectators to a story that is not their own, but is nevertheless crucial for understanding their own story. In this view, Christians receive "permission" through Christ to "look over the shoulders" of the original addressees of the Scriptures, but must acknowledge that they are not its intended audience, nor is its story about them. This view addresses the supersessionistic tendencies of the traditional hermeneutic, and it is certainly in this spirit that van Buren offered it (as we will see below, he later changed his view). But it breaks down when one tries to make it cohere with central Christian claims that Christ is both the Jewish Messiah--that is, the figure who comes in response to biblical Israel's hopes and longings--and the one through whom Gentiles have obtained full access to the God revealed in and through Israel's history, a promise also integral to the story. It does not admit, in other words, of a development of either a coherent Christian theology or a viable understanding of the church's relation to Israel.
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