Messiah and the Hebrew Bible, The

Bell & Howell Information and Learing: Foreign text omitted.

In a recent book review for JETS, Walt Kaiser has made a strong plea for the importance of the question of the Messiah and the Hebrew Bible. The question, says Kaiser, "could be a defining moment for evangelical scholarship and ultimately for the Church's view of the way we regard Scripture."1 According to Kaiser, the question ultimately comes down to whether the NT interpretation of an OT text is, in fact, the meaning intended by the OT author. Kaiser states, " . . if it is not in the OT text, who cares how ingenious later writers are in their ability to reload the OT text with truths that it never claimed or revealed in the first place? The issue is more than hermeneutics," says Kaiser. The issue is that of "the authority and content of revelation itself!"2

Another evangelical OT scholar, Gordon McConville, has also stressed the importance of the Messiah in the OT. McConville says, "If the Old Testament is the problem of Christian theology .... [then] the Messiah is at the heart of that problem."3 McConville goes on to say that "the validity of a Christian understanding of the Old Testament must depend in the last analysis on [the] cogency of the argument that the Old Testament is messianic."4

These are strong statements. And they come from two respected Biblical scholars. I believe they accurately reflect the current state of mind of evangelical scholarship. If liberalism once defined itself as a quest for the historical Jesus, evangelicalism may well be in the process of defining itself as a quest for the Biblical Jesus. I believe this question lies at the heart of much of the current evangelical discussion about Biblical theology. I am sure there are more pressing issues facing us today, but I cannot think of a more important topic for us to reflect on at this occasion.

1. Evangelical views of the Messiah and the Hebrew Bible. Evangelical views of messianic prophecy can be traced to the work of two early nineteenth century OT scholars, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802-1869) and Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-1877). The views of these two men still set the agenda for much of evangelical Biblical scholarship. In many respects, their views were similar. Both were influenced greatly by the Berlin revivals in the early nineteenth century. For both, the last word on the meaning of messianic prophecy in the OT was that of Jesus and the NT. Both believed fulfilled prophecy offered essential support for the truth of the gospel. Both also believed that in giving us messianic prophecy, God had intervened in a real way in human history. He had made known his will and purpose. Messianic prophecy was thus not a product of a human yearning for a better life, but the result of a "supernatural" revelation.

In spite of these basic similarities, each man offered a fundamentally different set of answers to essential questions.

a. Hengstenberg. Hengstenberg's understanding of messianic prophecy was shaped by two primary concerns: (1) his own experience of conversion, which was sudden and undeniable; and (2) his desire to use his religious experience as a basis for the defense of the Bible. For Hengstenberg, God's work in the world was accomplished by means of specific divine interventions. These were miraculous events within the arena of ordinary history. The incarnation was a prime example. It marked a new beginning for God's relationship with the world. In the incarnation, the Word had become part of the world. Israel's history was a record of the many and diverse instances of that intervention. Although Israel's history was a part of ordinary human history, it was also, like his own conversion, punctuated with miraculous exce tions.

That a prophet could foresee the exact name of the future Persian king Cyrus (e.g. Isa 45:1) was an exception to ordinary history, but such an exception was to be expected given the divine origin of the prophetic word. When God stepped into the flow of human history, his actions were direct and clear to anyone who witnessed them. They were, in fact, so self-evident that they could be used as proof of the truth of the gospel.

As Hengstenberg saw it, God's acts in history had an immediate but short-range effect on the rest of history. As miracles, they did not become part of the rest of history. They were historical, but not part of history. They were, in fact, exceptions to history and as such were clear signs of God's activity. God's acts in history were like our stepping into the current of a river. Our feet may make a splash, but there are no ripples made in the river. The ripples are lost in the flow of the river. Hengstenberg's own conversion was a divine splash whose ripples were quickly dissolved by the flow of time. There was nothing left for the historian to fix upon and to draw conclusions from. It was a "super"-natural (miraculous) event lost within the course of ordinary history.

For Hengstenberg, the divine revelation of messianic prophecy consisted of similar kinds of miraculous events. In this way, his entire understanding of messianic prophecy came to be shaped by his own conversion experience. As Hengstenberg understood it, the prophets of old were given sudden, miraculous, panoramic visions of the whole of the messianic future. Those visions were like flashes of supernatural light and insight. Often they came so suddenly and faded so quickly the prophet could record only a small portion of the vision. One is reminded of flashbulbs from the 1950s which left one momentarily stunned and unable to see anything but a large blue dot that faded slowly from one's eyes. The prophet hurriedly recorded the vision as it faded from his sight.