The Scripture
(a)The Old Testament
The term “Old Testament” is used
by Christian writers to refer to those books of the Christian Bible which were
(and still are) regarded as sacred by Judaism. For Christians, the Old
Testament is seen as setting the scene for the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, who
brings its leading themes and institutions to fulfillment. Early Christians –
including Jesus himself and many of the writers of the New Testament – simply
used the word “scripture” or “writing” (Greek: graph) to refer to what is now
known as the Old Testament.
1 The Hebrew Bible. This way of
referring to the Old Testament stresses the fact that it was written in Hebrew,
and is sacred to the Hebrew people. However, it fails to do justice to the way
in which Christianity sees an essential continuity between the Old and New
Testaments. A minor difficulty is also caused by the fact that parts of the Old
Testament are written in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew.
2 The First Testament. This way of
referring to the collection of texts avoids using the word “old,” which is held
by some to be pejorative. “Old,” it is argued, means “outdated” or “invalid.”
Referring to the Old Testament as the “First Testament” and the New as the
“Second Testament” stresses the continuity between the two collections of
texts.
3 Tanakh – an acronym of the Hebrew
words for “law, prophets, and writings (torah, nevi’im, ketuvim),” which
is the standard Jewish description of the works that Christians call the “Old
Testament.” This is perfectly acceptable for use within Judaism.
(b) The New Testament
The New Testament, which consists
of 27 books, is considerably shorter than the Old Testament. It is written
entirely in a late form of Greek, widely spoken in the eastern Mediterranean
world of the time. The New Testament opens with the four gospels
followed by The Acts of the Apostles and letters and epistles.
(a) The relation of the Old and New
Testaments
The Christian terms
“Old Testament’ and “New Testament” are strongly theological in nature. These
Christian terms rest upon the belief that the contents of the Old Testament belong
to a period of God's dealings with the world which has in some way been
superseded or relativized by the coming of Christ in the New Testament. Roughly
the same collection of texts is referred to by Jewish writers as ‘‘the law,
prophets, and writings” and by Christian writers as the ‘‘Old Testament.” There
is thus no particular reason why someone who is not a Christian should feel
obliged to refer to this collection of books as the Old Testament, apart from
custom of use.
The Christian
theological framework which leads to this distinction is that of ‘‘covenants”’ or
‘‘dispensations.” The basic Christian belief that the coming of Christ
inaugurates something new expresses itself in a distinctive attitude toward the
Old Testament, which could basically be summarized thus: religious principles
and ideas (such as the notion of a sovereign God who is active in human history)
are appropriated; religious practices (such as dietary laws and sacrificial
routines) are not.
How, then, are the Old
and New Testaments related to one another, according to Christian
theology? One option
was especially associated with the second-century writer Marcion, who Was
excommunicated in the year 144. This was to treat the Old Testament as the
writings of a religion which had nothing to do with Christianity. According to
Marcion, Christianity was a religion of love, which had no place whatsoever for
the legalistic God of the Old Testament. The Old Testament relates to a different
God from the New; the Old Testament God, who merely created the world, was
obsessed with the idea of law. The New Testament God, however, redeemed the
world and was concerned with love. According to Marcion, the purpose of Christ
was to depose the Old Testament God (who bears a considerable resemblance to
the Gnostic “demiurge,” a semidivine figure responsible for fashioning the
world), and usher in the worship of the true God of grace.
There are faint echoes
of this idea in the writings of Luther. Although Luther insists that both Old
and New Testaments relate to the actions of the same God, he nevertheless insists
upon the total opposition of law and grace. Judaism, according to Luther, was
totally preoccupied with the idea of justification by works, believing that it
was possible to merit favor in the sight of God by one’s achievements.
The gospel, in contrast, emphasized that justification was completely gratuitous, resting only on the grace of God. Although grace could be detected in the Old Testament (e.g., Isaiah 40-55), and law in the New (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7), Luther often seemed to suggest that the Old Testament was primarily a religion of law, contrasted with the New Testament emphasis on grace.
The majority position
within Christian theology has on the one hand emphasized the continuity between the
two testaments, while on the other noting the distinction between them. Calvin provides
a lucid and typical discussion of their relation. He argues that there exists a fundamental
similarity and continuity between Old and New Testaments on the basis of three
considerations. First, Calvin stresses the immutability of the divine
will. God cannot do one thing in the Old Testament, and follow it by doing
something totally different in the New. There must be a fundamental continuity of
action and intention between the two. Second, both celebrate and
proclaim the grace of God manifested in Jesus Christ. The Old Testament Throughout
this discussion of the distinction between the Old and New Testaments, and the
superiority of the latter over the for
mer, Calvin is careful to allow that
certain individuals within the old covenant — for example, the patriarchs —
were able to discern hints of the new covenant. At no point do the divine
purposes or nature alter; they are merely made clearer, in accordance with the limitations
imposed upon human understand-ing. Thus, to give but one example, it was not as
if God had originally determined to restrict grace to the nation of Israel
alone, and then decided to make it available to everyone else as well; rather,
the evolutionary thrust of the divine plan was only made clear with the com-ing
of Jesus Christ. Calvin summarizes this general principle with the assertion
that ‘“where the entire law is concerned, the gospel differs from it only in
clarity of presentation.” Christ is shown forth and the grace of the Holy Spirit
is offered in both Old and New Testa-ments — but more clearly and more fully in
the latter. This viewpoint has been characteristic of mainline Christianity. It
can be found, for ex-ample, in the declarations of the Second Vati-can Council,
which affirms the importance of the Old Testament for Christians: The Church of
Christ acknowledges that in God’s plan of salvation the beginning of her faith
and election is to be found in the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She
pro-fesses that all Christ’s faithful, who as men of faith are sons of Abraham
(cf. Galatians 3:7), are included in the same patriarch’s call and that the
salvation of the Church is mystically prefigured in the exodus of God’s chosen
people from the land of bondage. On this ac-count the Church cannot forget that
she re-ceived the revelation of the Old Testament by way of that people with
whom God in his inexpressible mercy established the ancient covenant may only
be able to witness to Jesus
Christ “from a
distance and darkly”’; nevertheless, its witness to the coming of Christ is
real. In the third place, both testaments possess the “same signs and
sacraments,” bearing witness to the same grace of God. Calvin thus argues that
the two testaments are basically identical. They differ in administration but
not in substantia. In terms of their substance and content there is no radical
discontinuity between them. The Old Testament happens to occupy a different
chronological position in the divine plan of salvation from the New; its
content (rightly understood), however, is the same.
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