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.

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
Category: General
Tags: Bible Interpretation, Church Fathers, Cruciform Theology
Related Reading

How NOT To Be Christ-Centered: A Review of God With Us – Part IV
In the first three parts of this review of Scott Oliphint’s God with Us we’ve outline his attempt to reframe all God’s accommodations in Scripture in light of the Chalecedonian Creed. He, in essence, uses the mysterious union of God and humanity in Christ to justify asserting that the immutable God can really become mutable…

How To Talk about Theology
Social media is full of theological debate. Theological arguments that formerly took months or even years to get in print, now only takes the time to write a post or 140 characters and click “publish.” Social media is great in that it makes space for all of our voices. However, it also seems to elevate…

The Greatest Mystery of the Christian Faith
God has always been willing to stoop to accommodate the fallen state of his covenant people in order to remain in a transforming relationship with them and in order to continue to further his sovereign purposes through them. Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside…

Does the Lord “Devastate” the Earth?
There is this passage that has sometimes been labeled “Isaiah’s Little Apocalypse” that proclaims how the Lord will “lay waste,” “destroy,” and “ruin” the earth. (The following builds on this previous post which identifies a dual speech pattern of God). It begins with: The LORD is going to lay waste the earth and devastate…

Satan or God: Who Tempted David to Sin?
The author of 2 Samuel says that Yahweh caused David to sin by taking a census of his military personnel (2 Sam 24:1) while the author of 1 Chronicles attributes this temptation to Satan (1 Chr 21:1). It is clear that the author of 2 Samuel had no problem accepting that Yahweh was capable of…

Why Christ, not Scripture, is Our Ultimate Foundation
In a previous blog I argued that all our theological reflection must not only be Christ-centered, it must, most specifically, be cross-centered. I now want to begin to unpack some of the most important implications of adopting a cross-centered theological perspective. My ultimate goal is to show how a cross-centered theology is able to resolve the…