We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

gregory of nyssa

How the Church Fathers Read the OT

After the completion of the New Testament, the church fathers developed theology in their increasingly Gentile post-apostolic church in such a way that many of the distinctively Jewish features of the NT’s use of the OT diminished. However, this was not the case with regard to the Christocentric interpretation of the OT that was so central to how the NT writers interpreted the OT. As noted historian, Robert Wilken, has noted, the early church fathers didn’t consider the original meaning of OT passages to be altogether irrelevant, but they did consider it merely “preparatory” for the fuller meaning of passages that was unlocked when they were read in the light of Christ. The distinctly “Christian understanding” of Scripture was for them “oriented toward the living Christ revealed through the words of the Bible…”[1]

For these believers, writes Denis Farkasfalvy, “Jewish holy books function and are interpreted as documents of a Christ-centered salvation history with its full and true meaning apparent only in the light of the Church’s faith in Christ.”[2] Indeed, according to Claire McGinnis, “[n]ot only did the NT serve as the key to understanding the Old” for these fathers, but the uniform assumption of interpreters during this period was that “the books of the Old were about Christ.”[3] Following the precedent of the NT, these fathers understood Christ to be the fulfillment of fundamental OT motifs as well as of specific OT prophecies.

Following this precedent, these fathers relied on typological as well as allegorical interpretive strategies to discern Christ in the OT. It was by this means that Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, John Cassian and others were able to discern how violent portraits of God in the OT bore witness to Christ, as argued in The Crucifixion of the Warrior God.

By means of creative Christocentric interpretive strategies such as these, the Bible became for these interpreters “a vast field of interrelated words, all speaking about the same reality, the one God revealed in Christ,” as Wilken notes. The central goal of early Christian interpreters, he continues, was “to find Christ in surprising and unexpected places.” [4] And it was primarily by this means that the early Church was able to continue to embrace the OT as its own.

[1] R. L. Wilken, “Interpreting the Old Testament,” Isaiah: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, trans. and ed. R. L. Wilken, A, R. Christman, and J. Hollerich; The Church’s Bible, xvii.

[2] Denis Farkasfalvy, Inspiration and Interpretation, 23.

[3] Claire McGinnis. “Stumbling over the Testaments: On Reading Patristic Exegesis and the Old Testament in Light of the New,” Journal of Theological Interpretation (April, 2010), 15-31.

[4] Wilken, “Interpreting the Old Testament,” xviii.

Photo credit: Nick in exsilio via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA

Related Reading

Isn’t the Resurrection the Ultimate Revelation of God? (podcast)

Greg considers the relationship between Christ’s death and resurrection.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0744.mp3

Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update

Well, I’m happy to announce that Crucifixion of the Warrior God is now available for pre-order on Amazon! Like many of you, I found that the clearer I got about the non-violent, self-sacrificial, enemy-embracing love of God revealed in Christ, the more disturbed I became over those portraits of God in the Old Testament that…

Jesus is the Center of the Story

The previous post addressed how the revelation of Christ is the surprising twist that reframes how we must read all that precedes it. Today we’ll look briefly at five supports to this claim. Jesus said, “I have a testimony greater than that of John” (John 5:36). Jesus elsewhere claims that “among those born of women…

How NOT to be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part III

In the previous two posts on Oliphint’s God With Us, we’ve seen that Oliphint is trying to reframe divine accommodations in a Christ-centered way, but that what he means by this is not that he is going to derive his understanding of God from Christ, but that he is going to use the “hypostatic union”…

Podcast: Would a Loving God Create a Box that Killed Anyone Who Touched It?

Greg discusses the Ark of the Covenant and it’s strange and violent nature.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0266.mp3

5 Differences Between The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the World

Image by matthijs rouw via Flickr The kingdom of God looks and acts like Jesus Christ, like Calvary, like God’s eternal, triune love. It consists of people graciously embracing others and sacrificing themselves in service to others. It consists of people trusting and employing “power under” rather than “power over,” even when they, like Jesus, suffer because…