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When a Christocentric Reading Is not Really Christocentric

More By Jerry Shepherd

In his recent book, Do We Need the New Testament?: Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself, Old Testament scholar John Goldingay says the following:

By sleight of hand, aspects of what the First Testament says about God are filtered out in the name of christocentric interpretation. But the real problem is that we don’t like these aspects of the Scriptures. Christocentric interpretation makes it harder for the Scriptures to confront us when we need to be confronted. It is not the case that what was hidden in the Old is revealed in the New. Rather, there are many things revealed in the First Testament that the church has hidden by its interpretive strategy, obscuring the nature of scriptural faith.

I disagree with Goldingay here on a couple of points. First, there is certainly such a thing as a very valid Christocentric interpretation. I have told the students in my Old Testament classes for nearly thirty years now that:

Our reading of the Old Testament is going to be unabashedly Christological. We will read the Old Testament through New Testament lenses, lenses that have been ground in the conviction that the Old Testament Scriptures testify to Jesus the Christ.

Since we are reading the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament, we will allow for the New Testament to take priority in unpacking the Old Testament. We respect the right of an author to clarify earlier statements with later ones. How much more is this the case with God. God fully has the right to clarify in the New Testament statements he has made in the Old Testament. The New Testament provides the authoritative interpretation of the Old Testament.

Second, I also disagree with Goldingay when he expresses his disagreement with Augustine’s famous statement, “The new is in the old concealed, the old is in the new revealed.” I understand the reasons for Goldingay’s disagreement. But I think that what Augustine meant was that what is taught in the New Testament was already there in the Old Testament, which corresponds very well with what Paul says in Rom 16:25-27 regarding

the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God.

It seems to me that the import of Paul’s words here is that the mystery was hidden in the pages of the Old Testament, and that now, because of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Christ, those pages are now correctly interpreted and that the gospel of Jesus Christ can be proclaimed using the Old Testament Scriptures.

But I do agree with Goldingay on two very important points. First, Jesus himself was not Christocentric. Rather, Jesus was theocentric, and the Theos he was theocentric about was the Theos revealed in the Old Testament. He did not come to reveal to us some other God than the one that Israel already worshiped, as revealed in the Old Testament. Notice the following declarations of Jesus as found in the Gospel of John:

My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me. Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own. Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him. (John 7:16–18)

I am not here on my own authority, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, but I know him because I am from him and he sent me. (John 7:28–29)

When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him. (John 8:28-29)

If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. (John 8:42)

For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say. (John 12:49–50)

Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (John 14:9–10)

Jesus was not centered on himself but on the Father.

Second, I completely agree with Goldingay that a Christocentric reading of the Old Testament should not be used in such a way that it turns into a trick, a sleight of hand, that makes the things one doesn’t like in the Old Testament—Presto!—magically disappear. A Christocentric reading should not be used to nullify God’s revelation of himself in the Old Testament. Such a move simply becomes a way of avoiding the teaching of the whole canon of Scripture, and of trying to use Jesus to endorse one’s own ideologically-driven reading of Scripture.

Lately, certain theologians have argued that if we read the Old Testament through a Jesus lens, then we will have to get rid of certain parts of the Old Testament, because the depictions of God there, in the minds of these theologians, do not correspond to the character and teachings of Jesus. In particular, it has been argued that depictions of God executing punishment on his enemies, punishments which could be described as employing violence, have to be taken as false representations of God, lapses on the part of God’s anointed prophets, and projections on the part of the Israelites onto Israel’s deity. They then argue that if one is going to read the Old Testament through a Jesus lens, Christocentrically, and in a way that is “cruciform,” one will have to reject these false depictions of God. Given the sheer volume of this material in the Old Testament, one can only regard this hermeneutical move as one that is, at the very least, semi-Marcionite.

The problem, however, with this hermeneutical approach to the Old Testament is that it is neither Christocentric nor cruciform. In other words, it does not approach the writings of the Old Testament in the way that Jesus approached them. It does not read the Old Testament the way Jesus read the Old Testament. And it fails in this regard in two ways.

First, it fails in that Jesus does nothing, absolutely nothing, to suggest that the God of the Old Testament is other than he is portrayed as revealing himself and his character to be, or as the prophets proclaimed him to be. There is no reason to believe that Jesus was disappointed with the way in which the Old Testament portrayed his Father.

Second, it fails in that it does not listen to Jesus when he talks about both himself and his Father as those who will engage in retributive punishment against the wicked. In its claims to be cruciform in its interpretation, it fails to deal with the witness of the New Testament that the cross also plays a role as a criterion of judgment against those who are enemies of the cross (Luke 20:17-18; Heb 10:29-31). And it fails to recognize the witness of the New Testament that the cross of Christ is precisely what qualifies Jesus to be the one who will pour out judgment on the world (Rev 5:9). In other words, this approach has a problem, not just with the God of the Old Testament, but with the Jesus of the New Testament.

The Jesus of the New Testament does not sit in critical judgment on the Old Testament. And when this more modern form of a Christocentric reading or so-called cruciform reading performs a content-critique on the Old Testament, it is doing the exact opposite of what Jesus himself did. It actually constitutes an anti-Christocentric reading.

The Jesus lens is not to be used as an optical filter, eliminating strands of light which we don’t like. Rather, it is a magnifying glass which makes the Old Testament text larger, more intense, and more demanding.

The witness of the New Testament is completely and absolutely correct. The God portrayed in the Old Testament is, indeed, the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 15:6; 2 Cor 1:3; 11:31; Eph 1:3; 1 Pet 1:3).

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