NT vs OT
Dear Socratic Scholars,
I came across an interesting passage in Hays’ Moral Vision of the NT and wanted to know what you made of it: “The NT’s witness if finally normative. If irreconcilable tensions exist between the moral vision of the NT and that of particular OT texts, the NT vision trumps the OT.”
Some how I don’t seeDavis
What are your thoughts?
-Steve
I came across an interesting passage in Hays’ Moral Vision of the NT and wanted to know what you made of it: “The NT’s witness if finally normative. If irreconcilable tensions exist between the moral vision of the NT and that of particular OT texts, the NT vision trumps the OT.”
Some how I don’t see
What are your thoughts?
-Steve
posted by Stephen D. Palmer at 9:04 PM
8 Comments:
Steve,
Coincidently, I just read that again a few days ago. I think the key element of Hays' comment is the qualification "NT ethics." His point, which is clear from the broader scope of the whole book, is that in Christ there is New Creation, and that the fact of Jesus' life, death on the cross, and resurrection are determinative for New Christian ethics. We who have been grasped by the triune God encounter the world with redeemed eyes. We don't live in the time before Christ, but rather embrace the heritage of Israel by virtue of our adoption, and we also have the revelation of the eschaton in Christ and elsewhere in the NT. So because we live after Christ and press forward towards New Jerusalem, that which has been revealed in Christ about what it means to live as creatures in fellowship with our Creator determines our ethics.
I don't believe Ellen would dispute that, but she might suggest that the tensions between the two are not as great as Hays' may see them. Also, I think she would press real hard - as would Jo Bailey Wells - in insisting that Isaiah also reveals similar things, and so perhaps would remind us thereby that is impossible for us to derive ethics from the NT without claiming the OT as our own story, through Christ.
I really think looking for tensions is the wrong quest. It has been a number of years since I read Moral Vision, but tensions only exist in a world of unitary interpretation. If you read Jepthah's daughter and the woman at the well looking for an answer, you'll come up short.
Since this is a blog I might as well be polemical: I think both our bible teachers miss the point about the canon. We should live in the tension. We should see the NT vision trumping the OT. We should be transformed by God's Love, Hope, and Faith through the blessed medium of Holy Scripture and find God's love in every verse, every chapter, every book, every testimony. Les quatre sens de l'Écriture, my friends. Sure the sensus literalis matters (and if you know me you'll know it matters quite a bit) but there is more, there is always more, and the language of tensions, the near-Marcionite language of trumping is only a fight for one.
Is the Bible uni-vocal or multi-vocal?
God does not speak only one way. Scripture qua scripture is the word of God. This is not a complex syllogism.
And I suppose that makes this a patronizing post:) Doesn't that make everything better?
Wilson,
I think you are not attending to what many laity and clergy experience as "tension" as they turn to Scripture when trying to discern the path of faithfulness when confronted with life situations. Certainly I am able to agree with your point, but I think you are sidestepping something you won't be able to sidestep in the parish with your accurate answer that still misses the mark. The person in front of you hears from myriad sources that the Bible is supposed to be as law, for that's how one knows what obedience demands (he is told). So, for example, he reads the OT and esp. Lev and perceives differences from Paul's instructions on the matter of how we are to go about discipline. Now the church can't get away with a non-answer, and the answer that there are many good answers is not an answer. A decision about the community's path must be chosen.
But Paul, in 1Cor seems to let fornicators off scot free. Simply kicked out of the fellowship! What! No eucharist? But Lev said to stone 'em. What are we to do?
I find that many persons - perhaps the majority - don't really embrace the idea of grace and prefer the law, and don't really embrace the idea of peace and prefer God's mandate to kill those who oppose Israel. So they tend to read the NT with an OT lens, rather than the opposite. You and I share a hermeneutic that presumes certain things happened at Easter that changed everything forever, but I find that most persons believe Jesus died so their personal sins don't matter and you have to make sure you are saved by obeying the law, which they usually conceive as Leviticus sans the ceremonial and purity imperatives. And thus they experience enormous tensions when they asked to contemplate the Sermon on the Mount.
So I love and agree with your pithy response but I think you better find a way to confront the tensions that parishioners on a journey actually experience, even if the tensions result from a faulty hermeneutic.
I don't think Wilson is ever going to get any parish anywhere to read or understand de Lubac, but I don't think that matters. He just needs to show them how to read the Bible as if it were actually what the Church says it is. He'll do that.
The other night I heard a 30 year old mother of three weave together John 1, Gen 1, Phil 2, and Gal 4 flawlessly -- and, as it happens, in the same way Augustine did in one of his sermons. Spiritual interpretation is alive and well! -- in some churches.
PA,
Wilson, I am confident, knows that I will react by saying that you underestimate his suitability for parish ministry in your vote of confidence. I adore Wilson. And that's why I am pressing him on this.
It's great you have met a woman able to see the continuity in Scripture. Unfortunately, she's a minority. And that's not due to ignorance of others. It's due, at least in part, to the pervasive influence of a mutant form of Reformed theology that inherently tends towards supersessionism because it is founded upon a set of assumptions like the following: (a) everyone lives in a pre-Christian state based on the Law (ooh, bad!) and (b) the smart ones accept the information about salvation through Jesus in order to get picked for his team (ooh, good!).
This logic generates all sorts of tensions the more we learn about Judaism and the more we read the NT canonically. Richard Hays made his name documenting some of these; so did NT Wright; and now Doug Campbell has listed at least 50 such tensions in his Deliverance of God.
So a problem with the effort to "show to read the Bible as if it were actually what the Church says it is" is that we live in a time of profound differences within the Church over what Scripture is and what the Gospel is.
First there is the hermeneutical gap. We've been taught that Scripture is polyvocal (which is heresy to many in the Church) and to be read either canonically, narratively, and linguistically; many have been taught that autonomous reason and experience trump or equal Scripture in their authority in discerning God's will; while others are taught that all texts in the Bible can be parsed,excerpted from context, and applied in proof-texting our way to obedience. There is no common mind of what the Church says Scripture is right now.
Second, we live in a time in which there is great flux in what the Gospel actually is. In my lifetime, there was the Catholic way, the Protestant (Lutheran way), and then fundamentalist derivatives. Then there was the New Perspective, and now we are just encountering the New Paradigm.
The fact is we live in a time when many of us yearn for an absence of tensions in our reading of Scripture, but that yearning is generating even more tensions as it funds our quest for resolution through the accumulation of information about our ancestors.
Craig,
The pastoral situatedness of your response is both pointed and correct when aimed at me. By that I mean I responded as myself to theologians and not as myself to congregates and so my words should have been more careful and more concrete. Hopefully they are now, at least comparatively.
When confronted by a parisioner who has been taught Marcionism (i.e., God is love, OT no love, OT different God or previous God) I think asking them to follow the path of faithfulness within the tension of canonicity is just as hard a leap as asking them to understand the polyvocality of Scripture. I mean, its just as hard teaching about the Trinity.
Tensions exist at the level of the quest for equivalency. Yes, many (perhaps most) look for the tensionless answer to the questions of their life. They look to see how they should behave or who they should marry or who they should kill (this is an awfully reductionistic account of ethics, but, etc.). Or perhaps they desire to have their moral vision transformed by the cross and resurrection, by the faithfulness of Christ. Perhaps communities desire this. Hopefully communities desire this.
To remain with in tensions is to remain in the quest for equivalency, to remain in the quest for historicity and perspicuity. An allegorical or tropological or anagogical reading is not an easy answer or a way out of a problem for a community: it is a way to say that the problems we saw as so important, may not be that way. The questions are society asks and our church in society has formed ask to ask may be the wrong questions.
This post is long enough, but I have more to say on this. Hopefully some other voices can join us soon.
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