Like me, you may have found the Old Testament an enigma, even though as Christians we claim it as part of inspired Scripture. Over the years, I have come to value it more and more as I wrestle with it as a student, preacher and Bible teacher. As someone has so aptly reminded me, the Old Testament is, first and foremost, a "Christian" book and not a "Jewish" book - at least, for those of us who are Christians. It is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ who pointed the way (Luke 24:25-27, 44) and the apostles who re-affirmed it in their writings. The fact that we now have re-claimed the Old Testament for the Christian Church does not mean we read it, for that matter, that we understand it as we should. F F Bruce's pamphlet here provides some help to those of us who wish to understand it as Christians. The original is too long to post, so I have divided it up into two parts. This pamphlet was first published as F.F. Bruce, The Christian Approach to the Old Testament, 1955, 2nd Edn. (London: The Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1959).
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In speaking of the Christian approach to the Old Testament, I recognize that there are other ways in which these writings may be approached. There is, for example, the Jewish approach, which finds in them the first and normative stage of the Jewish religion, continued in the later stages of teaching which have taken written shape in the Mishnah, the Talmud, and so forth. There is, again, the Muslim approach which finds, in Old Testament and New Testament alike, earlier and imperfect stages of a process of divine revelation which reached perfection in Muhammad and the Qur’an. These are approaches which we cannot pursue for the simple reason that we are Christians, and not Jews or Muslims.
But there are other ways of approach which are more familiar to us and which we may freely follow up. For example, the Old Testament is a source of high value for our knowledge of the history of certain areas of the Near East in the closing millennia BC. It is also of great importance as containing all the surviving literature of the Hebrew nation from the centuries preceding and immediately following the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BC. Again, the student of religion will find in it an abundance of useful, contemporary information about the religious beliefs and practices of the Israelites and their neighbours in those days. A new book on the Old Testament,1 recently published in America, includes chapters entitled ‘The Critical Approach to the Old Testament’, ‘The Anthropological Approach to the Old Testament’, ‘The Sociological Approach to the Old Testament’.
These avenues of approach are open to the Christian to explore, and some of us have engaged in a good deal of such exploration. But none of them, nor yet all of them together, can be equated with the Christian approach to the Old Testament, for they are explored by non-Christians as much as by Christians.
The Old Testament Witness to Christ
What then is the specifically Christian approach to the Old Testament? It is the approach which sees this volume as the preparation of the gospel. It is the approach which sees the relation of the Old Testament to the New as that of promise to fulfilment. It is the approach which is laid open before us in the teaching of our Lord and His apostles. When the New Testament makes reference to the Scriptures, it is almost always the Old Testament writings that are intended. Thus, for example, when Timothy is reminded that he has been acquainted with the ‘sacred writings ‘ from childhood, it is the sacred writings of the Old Testament that are meant, and it is these writings which, as Paul goes on to tell him, ‘are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim. iii. 5). That the way of salvation is made plain in the New Testament we know; but here it is affirmed that the Old Testament teaches it too. If we ask how it does so, we may find our answer in words spoken by Peter in the house of Cornelius: ‘To him [that is, to Christ] all the prophets bear witness that every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name’ (Acts x. 43). It is by their witness to Christ that the Old Testament writings unfold the way of salvation through faith in Him; it is by that same witness, we may add, that the same writings are ‘profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work’ (2 Tim. iii. 16f.). ‘You search the scriptures,’ said our Lord to His critics (again referring to the Old Testament), ‘because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life’ (Jn. v. 39, 40). These words, ‘it is they that bear witness to me’, are crucial for our inquiry. The Christian approach to the Old Testament is bound up with its witness to Christ. Christ is the goal of the Old Testament. To change the figure, He is the key to the Old Testament; the Old Testament, that is to say, cannot be properly understood apart from Him.
Were our Lord’s opponents wrong in thinking that in these writings they had eternal life? In one sense, no; the way of life is set forth clearly there. In another sense, yes; the way of life which the Old Testament sets forth is the way of life through faith in Christ; but they imagined that they could have life apart from Him through whom alone it could come - the One to whom the whole Old Testament bears witness.
That the New Testament bears witness to Christ is obvious. But the New Testament itself, amid all its witness to Christ, emphasizes that this witness is all of a piece with the witness borne to Him by the Old Testament. The two Testaments are like two parts of one sentence; both are necessary to complete the sense; either is imperfect without the other. And when we listen to the whole sentence pronounced by the two Testaments together, it is the sentence which proclaims God’s saving grace in Christ. The apostles and evangelists appeal to the Old Testament for confirmation of the gospel which they preach. But more than that, our Lord’s own testimony to the Old Testament as the volume which found its fulfilment in Himself has, with rare exceptions, been decisive for the Church’s attitude to these writings. It is by virtue of its witness to Him - and, we may add, His witness to it - that the Old Testament is rightly included in the canon of sacred Scripture. The Christian approach to the Old Testament is dictated by Christ’s own approach to it. ‘What was indispensable to the Redeemer must always be indispensable to the redeemed.’2
Divine Revelation in the Old Testament
How, then, does the Old Testament bear witness to Christ? First of all, it tells how God prepared the way for His coming. Our Lord did not appear on earth like a bolt from the blue in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, as a famous second-century heretic taught.3 He appeared as the fulfilment of a long process of divine activity on earth. The Old Testament gives us the history of this process. After a brief account of the beginnings of human civilization in the Near East, it tells how God selected one man in order that His purpose of blessing for the world might be achieved in this man and his descendants. Most of the remainder of the Old Testament records the dealings of God with these descendants of Abraham, the people of Israel, until at last, many centuries later, the fulness of the time came and God sent forth His Son, Himself an Israelite by birth - but with His coming we have left the Old Testament behind us and have entered into the New. Yet, so closely is the story of the preparation linked with the record of fulfilment, that we simply cannot understand the New Testament without some knowledge of what has gone before. This is one way in which the Old Testament bears witness to Christ.
But in addition to that, the story of God’s preparation for the coming of Christ is a story which itself unfolds the saving principles which were fully revealed in Christ. The whole Bible sets forth the gospel of our redemption, and the Old Testament is much more than a preface to this gospel; it is itself the first part of the saving history. We must be grateful to a number of scholars in this land and overseas who have recently placed new emphasis on this forgotten fact. I may mention one book out of several - Dr. Norman Snaith’s 1944 Fernley-Hartley Lecture on The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, in which it is maintained that these distinctive ideas provide the basis of New Testament teaching as well, and indeed of evangelical Christianity as a whole.
We remember the trumpet-note on which the Epistle to the Hebrews opens: ‘In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son’ (Heb. i, 1f.). These two clauses distinguish the preparatory and the final stages in one long process of revelation, but they make it plain that the revelation was one. What God said in His Son is recorded in the New Testament; what He said to the fathers through the prophets is recorded in the Old. And when we think of ‘the prophets’, we must remember that, in the Jewish nomenclature, the books of the prophets in the Old Testament include not only most of the books which we regard as prophetical in a narrower sense, but many of the historical books as well.
This is important when we view the Old Testament as the record of God’s self-revelation in its preparatory stage. For in the Old Testament we see God revealing Himself in two principal ways. He reveals Himself in His mighty acts of mercy and judgment; and He reveals Himself by the words of His servants the prophets who interpreted to their fellows the meaning of His acts. Outstanding among those mighty acts was the deliverance which God accomplished for His people Israel in the events of the Exodus. In the plagues of Egypt, the recession of the ‘Red Sea’, and the thunders of Sinai He showed Himself to be the Lord of nature and Lord of history; He showed Himself the mighty champion of His people and the righteous judge of their oppressors; but, above all, He showed Himself as a covenant-keeping God, for it was in fulfilment of His solemn promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that He intervened thus for the redemption of their children.
But the people on whose behalf this intervention took place would have understood little or nothing of the significance of these events, or indeed of the identity and character of the God who made them come to pass, had another method of revelation not been immediately available in the words of Moses. For Moses, commissioned to be the spokesman of God to His people, was able to assure them that it was the God of their forefathers who was acting thus for their salvation, and that His purpose in doing so was that they might be His people, bound to Him in covenant unity. The mighty acts and the prophetic words were both necessary for the divine revelation, and both were provided together.
In this whole complex of revealing and redeeming deed and word at the Exodus we may recognize a pattern of divine action which repeats itself on other occasions in the course of the saving history recorded in the Bible, but supremely in the saving work of Christ, in which that history reaches its culmination. (That is why so many of the Old Testament narratives lend themselves so aptly as illustrations of the Christian gospel.) But when we come to the work of Christ, deed and word coincide, for the One through whom the saving deed was done is also the spokesman of God - or indeed, the very self-expression of God- who unfolds the meaning and purpose of the saving deed. What was spoken in partial and piecemeal fashion in earlier times has now found perfect expression in Him - yet in such a way that we shall miss much of its point unless we pay attention to those earlier occurrences of the same redemptive pattern.
I have singled out the Exodus as outstanding among the mighty acts of God in Old Testament times; but the same lessons can be learned from other epochs of Old Testament history. We may think, for example, of the remarkable concentration of prophetic ministry around the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions of the land of Israel. God was acting in judgment in these critical days, and at the same time He was showing the basic principles of His judgment in the visions and oracles of the great prophets. Thus, for example, the Assyrian invader was not to pursue his conquering way unchecked, whatever his own plans might be; he was but an instrument in the hand of Israel’s God—‘the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury!’ (Is. x. 5). Nor was it only in the more disjointed times of His people’s history that God made Himself known, but also by His overruling providence and guidance in quieter and less eventful days. Throughout the long centuries He was teaching them to look to Him as a righteous God and a Saviour, and from the record of His dealings with them we too may come to know Him thus, the more so as we live in the light of that redemption in which He has supremely displayed His saving power and vindicated His righteousness in the sight of all nations. To this redemption prophets and righteous men in those earlier days looked forward, dimly descrying it from afar, uncertain of the manner and time of its accomplishment. Many of them associated the redemption with a figure pictured variously as a prophet (a second and greater Moses), a king (a second and greater David), an obedient and suffering servant of God, accomplishing a priestly work by offering up his life in sacrifice for the sins of others, and so forth. But what relation could these various figures bear to one another? This was to remain a mystery throughout the time of preparation. When, however, the time of fulfilment came at last, the apostles of Christ, the new spokesmen of God, were left in no such doubt: ‘This is that’, they proclaimed, ‘which was spoken by the prophet’ (Acts ii. 16, AV). Christ by His saving work as Prophet and Priest and King had fulfilled the Old Testament promises before their eyes: To him all the prophets bear witness that every one who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name’ (Acts x. 43).
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1 H. F. Hahn, Old Testament in Modern Research (Philadelphia, 1954).
2 G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament (London, 1901), p.11.
3 Marcion.
© 1955, 1959 Religious & Theological Students Fellowship
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