Intriguing thoughts have a habit of striking me in the middle of sermons, that I then have to push out of my mind until a more appropriate time comes for dwelling on them. The latest being...
... a thought about the vantage points that theological traditions have on the whole Bible. I've been thinking about the two testaments as one landscape, and how we tend to view that landscape. Cue paint drawing:
Suppose this represents the landscape of the Bible, with the cliff in the middle being the divide between the testaments. Now I know this is hugely simplified, and it is not meant at all to comment in any way on the amount of continuity/discontinuity between the covenants (I'm working on the hopefully-uncontroversial premise that there IS both some discontinuity and some continuity).
Now I wonder whether the tendency for the person steeped in the Reformed tradition (like me) is to inhabit position C - because we happily have a wonderful heritage of systems and schema that make good sense of the whole sweep of redemption-history in the whole Bible. C is a synthesising, putting the Biblical data together position.
However, if C is our default vantage point (because we approach the Bible with our understanding of the whole in our head), the problem is that from above, a landscape can start looking a bit flat. The discontinuities between the covenants can start to look a bit smaller than they really are. It appears like the OT believer is really much like the NT believer, because it's all one continuous landscape.
On the other hand, if your preferred vantage point is predominantly 'nose-in-the-text', inhabiting A and B, you'll have an excellent grasp of the position and view of both on the one hand an OT believer and on the other hand an NT believer. But the two will feel really different, and seeing how the two run into one another will be harder. Imagine this as a real landscape - A and B would have the best views of how the scenery really looked at points A and B, but not necessary from that the best view of how the whole landscape looks together.
As a default position C person, my challenge is really to head down into A and B and take a look around. What was it really like to be an OT believer, say, in Isaiah's day? [And I have to resist the easy way out that jumps to the NT to find the explanation for e.g. baffling prophecies. Reading the OT in the light of the NT is, of course, what we must do, but that's your vantage point C work.]
First, I've got to work out what a believer at A knew - what had and had not been revealed before Isaiah prophesied? What were the OT categories someone living at time A would have used to understand what Isaiah was saying? World-wide judgement hasn't been revealed before Isaiah. So it's a new idea. The end of Israel hasn't been revealed before Isaiah. The atoning death of a suffering servant to remove sin hasn't been revealed before Isaiah. How would the believer have understood this new revelation? If you only see it from C's position, you won't see these prophecies forming a real looming cliff in front of you like the view you see from position A. I won't see how different the understanding of the believer used to be without these crucial pieces of information - bits of information that shape the view of a Christian in position B.
Does a more Lutheran understanding of the covenants arise from being good at seeing from A and from B, but not from C? Certainly I'd argue that if you inhabit B too much, without trips to C and A, the OT will be viewed from off the cliff - from on high, a bit far off, not easy to relate to you as a Christian now. Answers on a postcard...
Anyway, I think the unoriginal conclusion is to first work really hard at putting myself in the shoes of the original recipients of a Bible book, and then to work out how it fits into the whole sweep of redemption-history.
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