Old and New Testament: You Can Never Understand One Without the Other
A key understanding and teaching in Christianity is that the Old Testament requires the New Testament to be understood properly, and the New Testament requires the Old Testament to be understood properly. You would think this would be a self-evident truth, but trust me on this, most modern Biblical “scholarship” absolutely denies this and forcefully rejects this belief. Modernist Lutherans have thoroughly swallowed this poison as well. Here is a good insight into what the Church has always taught, everywhere, at all times:
From the beginning “the harmonious agreement of the Law and the Prophets with the Testament delivered by the Lord” was the “rule of the Church” [a quote from St. Clement]. In the conjunction of the two Testaments was woven a single vesture for the Word; together they formed one body, and to rend this body by rejecting the Jewish books was no less a sacrilege than to rend the body of the Church by schism. If indeed the coming of Christ determined the “end of the Law”, [telos], the Law itself bore witness that its end was Christ, [skopos]. … For a Christian to understand the Bible means to understand it in the light of the Gospel. “No one can understand the Old Testament without the teaching of the New, since the spiritual meaning of the Old Testament is nothing else than the New.” … Or, as Origen remarked: “We who belong to the Catholic Church do not despise the Law of Moses, but accept it, so long as it is Jesus who interprets it for us. Only thus shall we understand it aright.”
Lubac: Catholicism, pg. 176-177, 178.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Scripture reveals Scripture and when folks ignore parts, they inevitably become very unbalanced in their view of God, which is extremely dangerous and we see the results of this playing out in every Protestant denomination today.
While I wholeheartedly agree with you, I would like to point out one fallacy sometimes committed by well-meaning Christians. In their zeal to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New, there can be a tendency to allegorize everything in the Old Testament. The Song of Solomon, for example, is read only as an allegory of Christ and the Church. The Psalms are read as a coded prophecy of the Messiah. Seeing the Old Testament only as a precursor to the New Testament robs it of much of its richness.
So Jesus was wrong when He used the Law and the Prophets to show the truth to the disciples of Emmaus, and the Law, Prophets, and Psalms to teach the ten in the upper room on the first Easter Sunday. I’m glad we are so much more enlightened than our Savior – NOT!
Dennis, may I suggest that you take another look at the post? The very point of the post is that we must read the OT precisely in light of Jesus Christ and efforts to read it and interpret it apart from Christ are wrong. The very thing Christ, in the texts you mention, urges us to do. Your comments are baffling.
This reminds me of the NET Bible (http://www.bible.org) where the translators have taken the approach of translating the Old Testament in isolation apart from any consideration on how the New Testament viewed the Old Testament. I took issue with a paper on Isaiah 7:14 (woman instead of virgin) published on the website. The writer and translator, Daniel Wallace, replied in an e-mail that the Old Testament must be translated in the views of the people of the time period , not of a later time. This runs the risk of distorting the meaning of a verse when not all aspects surrounding a text are considered.
PTM, I agree with 100%. My sarcasm didn’t come through in what I wrote earlier. The NOT at the end didn’t apply to Jesus, but the postmodern theologians who think the Old Testament doesn’t have anything to say to us. They don’t apply.
Sorry for the confusion.
So, you are reading de Lubac and Balthasar these days. Something you want to tell us?
de Lubac was forbidden to teach or publish as a Catholic by his order, the Jesuits, from 1950 to 1959. The next year he is appointed by John XXIII as a consultant to the preparatory theological commission preparing for the upcoming Vatican Council, becomes a peritus at that council and a member of its Theological Commission, and is made a cardinal by JPII.
von Balthasar was banned from teaching as a Catholic in 1950. He was named — after the Council — cardinal by JPII, but died before being so consecrated.
1950 was also the year of Humani generis, the encyclical of Pius XII detailing the incompatibility of the nouvelle theologie with Catholic thought and faith — of which school these two, along with Rahner, Congar (also once banned then a cardinal), Chenu (who went from making the Index of Forbidden Books to being a peritus at Vatican II), and a number of others including a young fella named Joseph Ratzinger.
Oh well.