If Jesus is the Lens of Scripture, What is the Old Testament?

  Torah scroll  |  Photo credit: Lawrie Cate

In my previous post, I began sketching a Christian program of reading the Bible, designed to avoid the pitfalls of modern evangelical readings of scripture. I wrote that a proper Christian reading of scripture will use Jesus as a lens; the meaning and importance of all scripture must be filtered through him.

As I pointed out, one practical way we can do this is to allow Jesus to resolve explicit contradictions in scripture, like the conflict between loving your neighbor as yourself and the commandment that priests shouldn't go near corpses, by observing Jesus' own commandments as having the highest priority.

What about the rest? There is, after all, a great deal of material in the Bible that doesn't directly conflict with anything else. What are we to do with it all, if Jesus is the lens we're reading with? 

In particular, what are we to do with the Old Testament (OT)? Of the Bible's sections, its relationship to Jesus is the most tenuous. Is it merely a road to Christ, with no inherent value of its own? Is it a collection of Jewish traditions, vaguely related to but not vital for our own faith? Is it a mostly outdated book of laws?* 

As I've noted before, one of the primary reasons I value the Old Testament is that it was Jesus' Bible. Whatever else we may say about it, the OT was crucial to Jesus. He had a unique, radical reading of it—one that combined the figures of the Anointed, the Son of Man, and the return of God as King, in a way no one else had done before—that made others question his sanity and morality, but Jesus' thought, ministry, and life do not exist apart from the OT.

A depiction of Jesus' sermon on the mount, one of many episodes
in the gospels where Jesus explicitly engages with the Old Testament | Source

One of the implications of this is that Christians should seek to read the Old Testament as Jesus read it. Where does he place the most emphasis? What material does he draw from? What does he avoid using or referencing altogether? And, perhaps most importantly, what is he doing with the words of the OT?

+   +   +

I'll give some answers to those questions in the next post, but before I do, let me get out in front of one potential concern. I'm not saying here that any part of the Old Testament that Jesus doesn't quote, interpret, or reference is worthless, or even that it is worth less than any other part of the OT. This is because of what the OT is—and is not. The OT, like the Bible itself, is not a list of rules or a roadmap for living your life. If it were, we might be able to say "rules C through J don't count because Jesus didn't mention them" or "the southwest quadrant of the map should be ignored because Jesus never references it."

For Christians, the Old Testament is a story.
Better yet: it is the beginning of a story.
Better still: it's the beginning of the Story.

The outline of the Story is familiar, yet endlessly surprising:

• God makes all of Creation, and it is good. 
• Sin enters Creation through humans, which is bad. 
• God chooses a special group of humans, Israel, through whom Creation will be redeemed and restored. 
• Israel keeps messing up, though, so God promises to come and fix things Godself, though still through the medium of God's promised people, Israel. 
• Then, in the person of Jesus, God fulfills that promise, by living and teaching restoration, and by dying and thereby defeating sin.
• Afterwards, Jesus' followers spread this good news, and they begin building communities of people who will participate in and look forward to the completion of God's promised redemption and restoration of Creation.

The Old Testament is a vital part of that Story; its details are all valuable, and none of them is worth less because it is not directly referenced when Jesus, the climactic figure of the Story, shows up.

"Christ Stills the Storm," by Philip Medhurst | Source

What Jesus does is point out the key elements of the Story so far. For Christians, Jesus is the lens that brings the crucial elements of the Old Testament into focus, and without him, it becomes blurry and hard for us to read. Unless we keep in mind that the climax, the focus, the point of the book is Jesus, the Old Testament can start to look like a list of (often conflicting) rules, or a rather poorly drawn map.

Note that "Is it infallible?" and "Is it inerrant?" are not the kinds of questions that one can ask of a story, any more than one can ask of an algorithm, "Is it green?" or of a piece of music, "Is it pointy?" The category of the thing does not bear that kind of description, and it is fruitless to argue about it. A philosophical statement can be infallible; a record of facts can be inerrant; a story can only be true—or not.

+   +   +

The great blessing of this view of the Old Testament is that it makes the OT indispensable. Every story has to begin somewhere, and without a beginning, a story makes no sense.** The Story begins with the OT, and without it, Jesus is completely incomprehensible. Without the OT, we know nothing of a Creator or a Christ, and the Cross can only confound us. Crucially, the OT is the reason we can answer the puzzle of why God chose to come when God did, and in the person of Jesus.

Because the Old Testament is the Equation to which Jesus is the Solution.
It is the Crescendo of which Jesus is the Loudest Note.
And it is the beginning of the grand Story in which Jesus is the turning point, after which nothing can ever be the same again. 

---

*Thanks to my friend Bailey for prompting this line of thought.↩
**I'm aware that in medias res is a thing, but stories told starting in the middle still have a beginning, whether they actually are communicated that way or not.↩

If the Bible is Not God's Infallible Word, How Should We Read It?

Jesus and a Pharisee. Source

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40, NRSV)

Recently, I led a conversation at a house church that my wife and I attend, in which the group discussed the nature of scripture. It was a startling discussion, because I rapidly discovered that I had the highest view of scripture of anyone in the room. To those gathered, the Bible was merely inspirational material for them on a personal level, or a record of religious tradition. To some at house church that evening, it had been wielded like a weapon against them or their loved ones, with such violence that they could no longer even really relate to or enjoy the Bible at all. There was a general skepticism in the room about any kind of presence of God or direct relation to God in scripture. Needless to say, most of my preparation as discussion leader quickly flew out the window. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating conversation.

A little while later, the Bible study that often meets in our home had its own discussion of the nature of scripture, in which I turned out to be the person with the lowest view of scripture in the room. I was the only person who thought that the Bible was not the infallible Word of God. I didn't really have time to get into a discussion of biblicism and its logical problems, so I merely gestured at some of the issues with this line of thinking by pointing out that, if the Bible is the infallible Word of God, we have to wonder what it means that parts of it are missing (the ending of Mark, e.g.) or textually scrambled (Job and Samuel both have this problem in places).

I've spilt a fair amount of pixels on this blog in painting a picture the problems with the typical American evangelical view of scripture. Today I want to move in a positive direction, and briefly sketch a more honest, fruitful, robust way of reading the Bible—without going so far as my more heterodox friends at house church.

+   +   +

I'm nearsighted, so I can't read a chalkboard or street signs without glasses. They focus the light so I can see and learn the important stuff in class, or get where I'm going out on the road. Without glasses, I can misread the board and accidentally learn something the teacher didn't intend, or mistake the numbers on a highway marker and take a road I wasn't meant to go down.

For Christians, Jesus is the lens of scripture. Like glasses, Jesus helps us focus on what is truly important in scripture, and on what it is actually saying. Without Jesus, scripture can get blurry and out of focus, and it can get hard to determine which of the overlapping or muddled things on the page is supposed to draw our attention.

Pictured: Jesus, yo. Jesus. 

One of the ways that Jesus does this is by resolving conflicts in scripture for us.

The Pharisees of Jesus' day paid very scrupulous attention to scripture, especially the Torah, which is full of commandments from God. Sometimes, though, there are situations where two commandments come into conflict with one another, and you can't obey both at the same time. In those cases, the Pharisees wondered, what was a pious Jew to do? Which commandments take precedence over the others? In essence, one needed a ranked list of commandments. When the Pharisees ask Jesus in Matthew 22 (at the top of this post) "What is the greatest commandment," what they're doing is asking him, "What's at the top of your list?" And he has a clear answer for them: Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (aka "the Shema," which was already the key commandment in most forms of Judaism in Jesus' day) and then Leviticus 19:18.

That prioritizing question is the same thing that's going on in this famous story, found in Luke. In it, Jesus asks a man what his most important commandments are, and he gives the same two Jesus lists in Matthew 22. The twist is, the man wants to know how they should work in practice, and he gets a radical answer from Jesus:

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them.

"The Good Samaritan," Francisziek Sobiepan. Source

Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’ Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:25-37, NRSV)

This parable is Jesus' demonstration of what can happen if your scriptural priorities are out of whack. The priest and the Levite both belonged to groups whose job it was to serve in the Temple, where ritual purity was extremely important. In avoiding what looked like a dead body, both men were keeping themselves in a state of ritual purity, which they had a scriptural mandate to do. Without ritual purity, they couldn't do their jobs, which were absolutely essential to the life of their nation.

The problem is not that they obeyed the commandment not to touch a (probable) corpse, but that when that commandment conflicted with the command to "love your neighbor as yourself," it was the former that they prioritized.* (Jesus then radically extends the boundaries of who this commandment is meant for: not just Jews, but non-Jews also, even their bitter enemies, the Samaritans.)

So when we interpret scripture, our guide is Jesus. Our model for doing theology should not be picking a position and then finding arbitrary prooftexts until we convince people we're right. ("OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!” said no one, ever.) It should be investigating thoroughly what Jesus had to say, and what he did (Jesus' message is delivered as much through action as through words, if not more so) and using that to read the rest of the Bible—and the world.

For example: how should Christians relate to the poor? We often point to things like Proverbs, which has plenty to say about poverty and laziness, and Paul, who tells the Thessalonians that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. But our lens for these passages is Jesus, who preaches a radical ethic of giving and special concern for the poor. So whatever those other things mean, we need to read them with that in mind.

+   +   +

I'll develop this way of reading scripture more fully in a future post, but I wanted to quickly point out some of its implications.

One of the important things about this way of reading the Bible is that it allows the Bible to be what it obviously is: a diverse collection of writings by people with different, sometimes conflicting ideas about God. Having a tool to resolve scriptural conflicts makes it easier to acknowledge that those conflicts exist and need to be wrestled with.

What this reading does not do is deny the inspiration of the Bible. It is possible, and indeed vital, to affirm that the authors of the Bible were inspired by God to write. God-as-Jesus' constant use of and engagement with scripture is next to impossible to explain otherwise.

Perhaps the best thing about this view of scripture is that it places the focus where it should have been all along: on Jesus. When we promote the Bible to an infallible book, the "Word of God," we risk forgetting that what Christian tradition and the Bible itself calls the Word of God is not a book, but a person: Jesus, God's logos, spoken into the world to rescue and restore it. Remembering that Jesus is the lens of scripture can help us to restore him to the absolutely primary place he ought to have in our faith.

Read the next post in the series here.

---

*This is a point at which the Pharisaic tradition actually agreed with Jesus. Rabbi Hillel, who lived around the time of Jesus, was known to have summed up the law in a strikingly similar way:

"On another occasion it happened that a certain heathen came before [Hilliel] and said, 'Make me a proselyte, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot"... [And] he said to him, 'What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbour: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn it.'" Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath: Folio 31a ↩

Is There A Christian Duty To Vote?

Today is Election Day in America. On Sunday, my pastor encouraged the congregation to vote. Though he stopped short of calling voting a "Christian duty," it's a phrase I've heard before. And I wondered: Does such a duty exist?

As a Weslyan by background, I try to do theology by focusing on Wesley's elements of Tradition, Experience, Reason, and Scripture.

Church Tradition is perhaps the least helpful in this regard, as most of the history of the church has existed outside of democratic forms of government. Thus, as far as I'm aware, there has been little in the way of accepted tradition on the matter of participation in democracy. More broadly speaking, much church tradition has focused on the God-givenness of rulers (usually kings), and Christian participation in the government of states has been ongoing in one form or another since Constantine. So it seems that church tradition can at least be said not to forbid voting outright.

Experience is a bit more helpful, though only just. My personal experience is that voting has in no way harmed my ability to act in the world as a Christian. What's more, voting and other acts of participation in democracy have enriched my faith life, as it has given me an opportunity to act on behalf of others in the way that Jesus taught. Taking a wider view, we can see that, while the experience of Christians with democracy has been a mixed bag, direct participation in the democratic process has on occasion been the means for Christians to end great social injustices, American slavery being among the more noteworthy. Experience speaks in favor of voting.

Reason might point out that, in most cases, your vote is effectively worthless. In itself, it is highly unlikely to effect change one way or another. On the other hand, it can't do much harm, either. At worst, then, it is worthless, and at best, it's an opportunity to do some good in the world, to advocate for others, to at least attempt to enact justice. Reason tilts toward voting.

Scripture was written without contact with democratic forms of government, and so can only speak indirectly to this issue. As Christians, our focus in reading scripture must always be Christ. While Jesus was certainly a non-voter, one might point out that he was actively engaged with the governments of his own day in a couple key ways. Notably, he was against the idea of a violent revolution to overthrow the ruling power of his day, Rome, even going so far as to endorse paying its taxes. (He was rightly concerned that it would lead to the destruction of his country.) So at any rate, an explicitly anti-government stance is not the simplest reading, though it has its proponents. When it came to local rulers and authority figures, Jesus engaged in direct confrontation and even condemnation when it was called for. As one of our tools for communicating with those in power, voting is an appropriate, though modest, way for the Christian to imitate Christ in this regard.

+   +   +

So there are plentiful reasons for Christians to vote, and few if any not to. But it a duty?

Perhaps not: after all, it's not a commandment straight from Jesus' lips, or carved in stone on Mount Sinai: Thou shalt vote.

On the other hand, voting is certainly a means of carrying out the commandments. It is a small, indirect, but important way to love one's neighbor, and even to "do for the least of these," if we vote for candidates whose policies will shelter, feed, clothe, and take care of the needy.

So, though it is not a central pillar of the faith, I believe there is such a thing as a Christian duty to vote. And regardless of whether that duty is real, I'll be voting today, as an American, as a Christian, and I invite you, dear reader, to join me.