Christian Reading .............................................................................

Lecture 8

The promises that the God of Israel makes to his people become

promises to Christians, even if they’re Gentiles through faith in Christ.

But that means that these Gentile Christians have got to ¿ gure out how

to read these Jewish scriptures.

C

onvictions about the relation of Christian faith to the scriptures of
Israel are fundamental to early Christian reading, its practices, and
problems. Rejecting the Gnostic belief that the God of the Jews
was evil or ignorant, the Great Church had committed itself to shaping its
worship and teaching in accord with the scriptures of Israel. The scriptures
can be divided into books of law and books of prophets. Gentile Christians
were much more at home with the prophetic writings. But how are Gentile
Christians to understand the Law of Moses, which they are committed to
read as their own scriptures but not to put fully
into practice? Joined with some philosophical
convictions that the church’s theologians came
to adopt, these problems led them to reading
that was often more spiritual than literal. As Paul
says, “The letter kills. The Spirit gives life.”

From the beginning, Christians read the scriptures
of Israel as prophetic witness to Jesus Christ. An
example is Psalm 22, which begins, “My God,
My God, why have you forsaken me?” Perhaps the crucial disagreement was
the Christian conviction of a Messiah that suffers. Early Christians argued
with Jews about whether Scriptural passages such as these were actually
predictions of Jesus’s suffering. More fundamentally, the scriptures were
read as explaining Jesus’s identity. Psalm 110 says “the LORD says to my
Lord” (that is, Christ) is to sit at his right hand. Daniel 7:13 describes the Son
of Man (that is, Christ) as coming on the clouds of heaven.

A central form of Christian understanding of scripture from the beginning is
typology, which comes from the Greek word typos or type, often translated

Typology means

¿ gurative reading,

which sees one

person or event as

pre¿ guring another.