Reading the Scriptures in the School of Christ
a response to some questions about Jesus, God, and the OT
After class the other night, Drew raised this question for me, which with his permission I’m now sharing with you—along with my response.
I get your point that more info/facts about God doesn't necessarily translate into intimacy/knowing God better. I was just taught that Christ introduces God in a unique way or perhaps a fuller way than any time prior. If that is true, then some ways of describing God prior to the incarnation are just wrong. Examples include God being a genocidal general, instant executioner, deceiver etc. So I'm struggling with how Christ can be the fulfillment of Israel's Scripture without in some sense providing a corrective concerning certain portraits of God. I'm fully on board with more going on in Scripture than meets the eye. I just feel some sort of further illumination about the character of God seems obvious in the incarnation. Otherwise I feel like I'm losing a profound sense of uniqueness in Christ coming to earth. If all of the Gospel is present in the OT, why would Christ need to come?
(1) Let me answer that last question first: Christ needs to come because we otherwise cannot receive the Gospel promised in the Law and the Prophets as Gospel. As Hebrews says, quoting Jeremiah, “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Heb. 8:10). What is new about the new covenant? First and foremost, it is that the truth of God’s law has truly become ours; it is written “on our hearts,” which means our desires, our intentions, our habits are one with God’s goodness. Thanks to Jesus, we breath God’s breath and we bleed when he’s wounded.
(2) Yes, of course, God’s character is revealed in Jesus, the incarnate one. But his character is recognizable already in Israel’s laws and prophecies, stories and songs, precisely because he has been raised from the dead by the eternal Spirit as the eternal Son.
The Gospel of John declares, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (Jn 1:18). But the Gospel also says that Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke about him” (Jn 12:41). Similarly, Hebrews opens with this praise: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (Heb. 1:1-2). And it goes on to insist that Jesus is “worthy of more glory than Moses” (Heb. 3:3). But Jesus is immediately said to be greater than Moses in the same way that the builder of the house is greater than the house, indicating that Moses is the work of Jesus! And when Hebrews lauds Moses’ faith, it says “he considered abuse suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb. 11:26). Moses’ faithfulness, therefore, was both from Christ and for him.
(3) Your question seems to assume that because Jesus’ birth and death happen later in history than Moses’ and Isaiah’s, that the God known by the prophets was a different God—or at least that Jesus’ birth marked a change in God’s purposes. But of course that is not the case. The incarnation does not change God. And the change it brings about is the condition of all things, the reality that makes reality real.
Jesus is in himself, thanks to the Father and the Spirit, the condition of time and space, truth and goodness, justice and mercy, knowing and being. Although he comes after Moses and Isaiah, as he comes after John the Baptist, he is before them (in both senses of that word), and so can be known by them. Jesus Christ, as Hebrews says, is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Anyone who knows God, who has ever known or ever will know God, knows him—even if they do not (yet) have the language of the Gospel for identifying him.
Who was it then who spoke with Moses in the burning bush and on the burning mount? Who was it that Isaiah saw high and lifted up? To know the Gospel is to know at last how to answer these questions: Jesus! The voice that questioned Isaiah was a voice Mary would have recognized. The hand that inscribed the Law on stones was nail-scarred.
(4) Yes, I agree: some ways of describing God are just wrong. But not because they are prior to the incarnation—there is no “prior,” ultimately, for those who are in the Spirit! And what is more, thanks to the wisdom of the Spirit, these wrong ways of describing God—ways that picture him as vengeful or forgetful or untrustworthy—are there in the Scripture because God inspired them! Think of the parables of Jesus. They are, as I said the other night, difficult, and they are difficult precisely because that is what we need. To think otherwise is to suggest that the teaching of the Scriptures is something we have to fix rather than to be healed by.
Origen shows us the better way. In Homily 8, for example, he takes up this threatening passage from Numbers, which suggests that God is done with Israel, ready to obliterate them, one and all, so he can make a new start with Moses alone: "And the Lord says to Moses: I will strike them with death and destroy them, and I will make you and the house of your father into a great and numerous nation, more than this one is" (Num. 14:11-12). Origen begins his response with a reassurance of God's goodness: "Such a great threat from the Lord comes, not to expose the divine nature as capable of suffering and subject to the vice of anger, but in order through this to make known to Moses the love he had for the people, and to make known the goodness of God, which surpasses all thought." He then urges his own hearers to pray:
For it is written that God becomes angry and threatens the destruction of the people in order that man may be taught that he has so much opportunity with God, and there is so much ground for confidence, that even if there is some anger in God, it may be mitigated by human prayers, and that man is able to procure so much from him that he may even change God's own decrees."
Finally, he argues that this apparent threat of violence was in fact a prophecy about the “death” of “Moses” (that is, the Law) “read according to the letter” and the raising up of the church as a body comprised of all the nations, a raising up that happens in the reading of “Moses” according to the Spirit!
Then, in Homily 9, reflecting on Numbers 17:8—“When Moses went into the tent of the covenant on the next day, the staff of Aaron for the house of Levi had sprouted. It put forth buds, produced blossoms, and bore ripe almonds”—Origen argues that Israel’s Scripture is like these ripe almonds: “a fruit that is bitter in its outer covering… protected and covered by its next layer, but with its third layer it feeds and nourishes the one who eats it.” In God’s wisdom, “this threefold mystery,” he says, “runs through all the Scriptures.”
In the school of Christ, then, the teaching of the law and the prophets is like this: at first glance the letter is very bitter. It prescribes the circumcision of the flesh, it commands sacrifices and the other things that are designated as "the letter that kills." Throw all this away, as you would the bitter rind of a nut.
In the second place you will reach the protective covering of the shell in which moral teaching or the definition of self-control is described. These are, of course, necessary to protect what is contained inside, but doubtless they too are to be cracked and removed…
But in the third place you will find hidden and concealed in the [law and the prophets] the meaning of the mysteries "of the wisdom and knowledge of God" by which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed, not only in the present life but also in the future.
Do you hear what he is saying? If we find in Scripture something that is unworthy of God, something that we know Jesus would not want or say or do, we can be sure that we are tasting the bitterness of the letter or biting into the shell thinking it’s the nut. What Jesus corrects is not the Scriptures but our readings. He does not expose the Scriptures as false! Instead, he reveals to us the true reading, which was there all along, lifting the veil of fear that has caused us to see shadows instead of light.
(5) So, finally, for now, this is what I was wanting to say the other night, and didn’t quite get said clearly: a mystery is made known to the apostles and prophets of the church—but that mystery does not in any sense indicate a change in God’s character or purposes! In the language of Ephesians, the mystery now revealed is that “the Gentiles have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph 3.5-6). Thus, knowing the Gospel does not mean we know the God of the Gospel better than the prophets of Israel did! Knowing the Gospel involves us in that same knowing! This is why Abraham rejoiced to see Christ’s day!
I’m sure I’ve not answered all your questions, and I’ve probably only provoked others. But hopefully it’s a start toward clarity and mutual understanding.
I’ll post my responses to other questions from the class soon.
Great reflections, Chris! Your answer brings out some of the complexity and strangeness of revelation itself. I also appreciate how often you reference Hebrews. I have heard Hebrews 1:3 cited to advocate for some semi-Marcionite position without any recognition of how the writer of Hebrews relates the OT and the patriarchs to the new covenant found in Christ. The writer clearly provides new revelatory readings of scripture. Thanks for drawing that out! -Andrew
David’s question is great and the teaching of Origin regarding the hard nut is very thought provoking. I think i take a related but (possibly?) slightly different perspective. Or maybe expressed differently? What if some things humans write of God are simply untrue of God (with Christ and the leading of the Spirit as the litmus test), and this is true of both NT AND OT. BUT this very process of three steps forward and two steps back in the way we talk about God, which runs from Genesis to Revelation is very thing that makes the scriptures inspired. Christ is crucified all along the way, and we can only be confronted with that reality by the awful truth that we kill in the name of God and then say ‘it’s in the Bible’ or write Bible stories attributing our violence to God. But God undercuts us from within the text. How could we be confronted with the depth of our scapegoating tendencies (and be forgiven for it) unless we scapegoat others and then write Bible stories to justify our own violence? As i think John Behr says, we can only see our sin in the process of it being forgiven. I wonder if this is part of the way - maybe the only way that the Christ can be perceived in the story? eg, yes the story of the slaying of the Amalekites is inspired because Christ is found in the slain ones. Could this be part of what it means to move past the hard shell of our our own violence that we attribute to God in scripture? (yes, i am very influenced by Girard).