The endangered and reaffirmed promises of God: a fruitful framework for biblical theology

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson

A foundational example of this process is the famous early creedal formula Paul cites as he tackles the issue of the resurrection in the Corinthian community: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures ..." (1 Cor 15:3-4). Remarkable about this creed is that, for one thing, it does not specify precisely how Christ's death and resurrection are "according to the Scriptures," but rather simply declares that the connection between the Scriptures and these events is an essential part of professing the gospel. Also noteworthy is that "Christ" here functions not as a title with fully fleshed-out content, but as a name, as a presupposition to the formula; the creed serves to fill out the meaning of the term, and the content emerges from reflection on both the Scriptures of Israel and the events of Jesus life and the early church:

   The basic conviction that the death and resurrection of Jesus had happened
   in accordance with the Scriptures had the double effect that the events
   were understood in light of the Scriptures, and the Scriptures were
   interpreted in light of the events [Dahl: 67].

As Paul van Buren has pointed out more recently, it was just this process of interpretive movement back and forth between the Scriptures and contemporary events that actually created the "Old Testament"--that is, it created the particular reading of Israel's Scriptures that informed/ formed the church's gospel. As van Buren puts it,

   [T]he church did not inherit its Old Testament.... In discovering the
   gospel "according to the Scriptures," Peter and his colleagues, by that
   very process discovered the Scriptures that would be the church's own, the
   reading of Israel's Scriptures that made them ineradicably the church's Old
   Testament [86-87].

In so doing, the church would seem to have vouchsafed the gospel's inextricable relationship to the First Testament.

But the recognition of the integral connection between the gospel and Israel's Scriptures is not the end, but rather the starting point for reflecting on the relationship. This is especially so in light of the historical and theological developments of the first centuries of the church. First, the interpretation of the gospel that eventually brought most of the Gentiles into the church also had the effect of rendering much of the central content of the First Testament--especially the Mosaic Law--moot. When, by the second century, the church had become predominantly Gentile and Hellenistic, and the context of the debate over the Mosaic law was no longer Gentile inclusion (as it was for Paul) but the law's very relevance, the question was inevitable: What does it mean to have as authoritative scripture a book, most of whose contents were ignored at best, or used polemically (against the Jews) at worst? This question led, in turn, to a second: What does it mean that this part of Christian scripture was also being read by a rival community in a way that called into question the central claims of the church?