In exchanges with readers of this blog and in personal conversations about the way the Bible unveils the temple theme, even many mature Christians have said that they were learning things that they had never come across before, both with regard to the relationship between Solomon's temple and the creation account of Genesis 1-3 and also to the fulfillment of the temple motif in the person and work of Jesus Christ. These conversations have not been surprising to me, as much of it was new to me when I began studying this about 5 years ago. Once the material was introduced to me, its presence in the Scripture became so obvious that I was disappointed that I had missed it before, and I also wondered that I had never come across it with various teachers and pastors in the past.
If that ignorance on my part was isolated to a single subject -- and to me -- that might not mean much; however, I fear it is indicative of a larger failure of the church with regard to the Old Testament. If I may be provocative, I will suggest that the typical evangelical and reformed approach to the Old Testament often leads to the same results for which Jesus criticized the Pharisees -- and his hesitant to believe disciples. Jesus pointed to a different way of reading the Old Testament that is consistent with the way we have developed thoughts regarding the temple.
Thus, though the Pharisees were regarded in their day as experts on their Bibles (the Old Testament to Christians), Jesus inveighed against their ignorance, telling them that they searched the Scriptures "because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life....Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (Jn 5:39ff.). Jesus here is declaring a close connection between Old Testament teaching and his incarnation that fails to translate to the way that it is taught in many evangelical pulpits and Sunday School classes. Yet, this is also the way that Jesus consistently taught, with Luke explaining that Jesus addressed the depression and doubt of the disciples on their way to Emmaus by opening the Scriptures and pointing to how they showed forth Christ's sufferings and resurrection. This is also the way Christians used the Old Testament throughout the book of Acts.
Even entire Gospels are structured in this way. Thus, Matthew's gospel is organized such as to point to Jesus as the fulfillment of the true Israel by emphasizing the parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of the nation. Thus, chapter 1 begins with a genealogy that shows Jesus as descending from Abraham. In chapter 2, he goes down to Egypt, just as Israel, and is called out by God (words from Hosea are cited as prophetic of this typology). In chapter 3, he is delivered through the waters of baptism (Israel, the Red Sea), and in chapter 4 he experiences his own wandering in the wilderness, succeeding in overcoming Satan where Israel -- and Adam in Eden before them -- had failed. Following this, Jesus announces that the Kingdom is at hand, and he takes his disciples to a Mountain. Unlike Moses, who delivered the 10 Commandments from Mount Sinai, Jesus pronounced blessings -- the beatitudes -- before explaining what life would look like in a kingdom founded by the One who had come to fulfill the Law.
All of this is to say that the New Testament looks at the Old in a Christ-centered way, or to use current terminology, in a redemptive-historical sort of way. This means that the progress of the history of redemption is the dominant theme of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and reading the Bible properly requires that the interpreter keep the history of redemption motif in mind at all times. We read the Old Testament in light of the Christ event, and we should not read it in a way that neglects to take note of the fact that the Messiah has come.
Most of us, I fear, were not taught to read the Bible in this way. We probably learned to link the Old Testament sacrificial system to the crucifixion, but if we got much beyond that we did better than most. The study that we have done of the temple is just one aspect of an interpretive approach that can be taken to many other Old Testament ideas, themes and events. Doing this enriches our understanding of the person and work of Christ. The coming of Jesus was not a sudden surprise in the biblical story: it is the point of the whole thing from the start. Understanding this opens up grand vistas in our reading of the biblical accounts while also affirming both the unity and diversity of Scripture.
Please don't misunderstand: this is not to say that when we read our Bibles we find Jesus in every passage of Scripture. You don't need to try to find Jesus under every bush. However, most of us would benefit from learning to think about the Old Testament in the way that Jesus and the New Testament writers did.
A few months ago, a prominent evangelical pastor made waves with statements that modern Christians need to "unhitch" the Old Testament from their faith -- he seemed to buy into the caricature that the Old Testament is a dark, legalistic story. While it is easy to focus on his misunderstanding of the Old Testament, I was most struck by his utter ignorance of the New. Nearly every passage of the New Testament has roots in the Old, and to "unhitch" Christianity from the Old Testament, correctly understood, is to lose Christianity altogether. I am saddened that his sheep have such an incompetent shepherd.
While that pastor's prominence makes his situation sad and pathetic, many of us that sit in pews have also been taught only truncated understandings of the Old Testament. For pastors to teach it -- and congregants to learn it -- in a Christ centered, redemptive historical way is a great need of our day.
By the way, I should give credit where credit is due. Much of my understanding of this temple theme follows the thought of Greg Beale, whose The Temple and the Church's Mission was a great eye opener to me. Anyone that has read Beale will see his influence in what I have written. Biblical theologians such as Geerhardus Vos and Meredith Kline have also helped in the development of my thinking. These, of course, are all serious theologians. I am just a scribbler.
4 comments:
Harry,
I haven't kept up on all your blog posts, but I have read several of them and find them excellent. I am still considering myself a baby Christian, so any new material I can find is appreciated.
I haven't spent time in a typical "Evangelical" congregation (which is a pretty broad term these days) so I can't give my personal experiences on that, but growing up in Mormonism, they did an extremely poor job of teaching any kind of meaningful exegesis of the Old or New Testament (mostly due to lacking any consistent or thorough hermeneutical principles) and having a lack of understanding of progressive revelation and redemptive-historical theology. These are so important to having a deep understanding of God's revelation.
I had first heard the comparison of the temple to the creation account in Richard Barcellos' "Getting the Garden Right". He wrote the work as an extension to his "In Defense of the Decalogue", another excellent but short book, in refutation of the "New Covenant Theology" Calvinistic Baptists who have developed a theology which, in essence, boils down to the abrogation of the Sabbath for the New Covenant church, being completely opposite to how Reformers and the church have viewed the 4th commandment. It doesn't simply go that far; most of them reject a covenant of works or grace, and the exegetical problems extend out from there. Barcellos' books were both a great read, and I think he also quoted Beale.
I hadn't heard about the comparison of Christ in the gospel of Matthew to Old Testament Israel. That's really fascinating. I'll have to look more into that. It is certainly clear that Matthew focused on writing to a Jewish audience for the purpose of describing Christ as the prophesied Messiah.
I hope to find the time to go back and read the series and more of your work in the future.
I was going to make the connection in my comment between the "New Covenant Theology" (usually just called NCT) theologians and Stanley's call to "unhitch" from the Old Testament. While they seem to arrive at different conclusions, they both seem to be saying that nothing in the Old Covenant is relevant today, and only the commandments reiterated or introduced in the New Testament really matter. Stanley seems to be taking this idea to an extreme by saying the Old Testament doesn't matter at all, while the NCT crowd would probably say it still has value in terms of God's progressive revelation as to His nature, character, etc.
If we completely separate the Old Covenant from the New, it leads to serious problems. Why did Paul quote the Old Testament law when teaching a moral principle if nothing written in the Old Testament matters anymore? How can the Pauline epistles and the epistle to the Hebrews make any sense if we just "unhitch" from the Old Testament? The Reformers would never have held to any such theories or come to the conclusions that seem to become so popular today. It may well be the fault of the church as a whole, as you said, to teach proper understanding of the Old Testament, or it may be a tendency for people to lean toward hearing from scholars who favor liberal critical theory rather than the grammatical-historical hermeneutics of the Reformers.
The lack of proper biblical understanding is most likely a combination of many factors, including a general laziness on the part of Christians for personal study in theology in any kind of rigorous fashion. The fact that ~78% of those who took the survey by Ligonier & LifeWay research (whose results were published just in the last few days) thought Jesus was the first and greatest creation of God shows we need a serious overhaul in the church's theological education. Otherwise, the church is going to have an incredibly difficult time withstanding the pressures that society and liberal scholarship are going to be placing on her.
Matthew, thanks for taking the time to comment. My exposure to New Covenant Theology is limited, though I recall reading a critique in one of Michael Horton's books (I can't remember which one right now). I am also not familiar with Barcellos, but I will check out the book you reference.
Matthew, thanks again for the additional inciteful comment. You outed Andy Stanley!
More seriously, your comment contains a lot of good insight. I think dispensationalism is the other common theme in the background of both Stanley and the NCT's that leads to bad outcomes. For most evangelicals over the last 100 years, dispensationalism has disconnected the Old Testament from the New in ways that resulted in many Christians seeing the Old mostly as a set of moral stories. Much OT preaching has treated Old Testament history as a sort of Aesop's Fables -- and this has been done by ministers committed to biblical inerrancy. Under the influence of dispensationalism, the ability to see the OT in ways articulated in the NT has been largely lost.
My understanding of NCT is limited, but it seems to me that in their desire to find a middle ground between dispensationalism and NCT they have doubled down on their perception of discontinuities between the testaments. From my brief reading, the results are not good.
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