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

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Fall, 2000 by James Hanson

The result of wrestling with these questions was a construal of the relationship between the First and Second Testaments that, in broad outline, obtained until the modern period and is still influential today. This construal has three closely related features worth highlighting here. First, it sees the First Testament as posing a problem to which the Second Testament provides the answer. That is, the First Testament sets forth the background for God's redemptive intervention on behalf of humanity and creation; it becomes Acts I and II in a three- (or four-) part "drama of salvation." In Act I, God created the earth and its inhabitants out of and for love and communion (Gen 1-2); in Act II, humans rebelled against their creator, bringing about a new situation of discord and death (Gen 3) and creating the need for God to rescue humanity. In Act III, God performs such a rescue by sending Jesus the Son to die on the cross and be raised; and in what can be seen as Act IV (or as the second scene of Act III), God completes this act of redemption when Jesus returns again in glory. As Kendall Soulen has so helpfully shown, this understanding of the unity of the Bible came to form the traditional "canonical narrative," that is, the overarching framework within which the Bible was to be read (the rule of faith, embedded in the creeds and liturgy).

Now on the one hand, it was in this way that the church preserved the unity of the Testaments against the very live and appealing option, most closely associated with Marcion, that held that the First Testament has to do with an altogether different God. In the face of this claim, the traditional canonical narrative affirms that the God of Israel, as attested in Israel's Scriptures, is the one God who created and sustains all that exists, who creates humans to be in a special and unique relationship to God and to the rest of creation, in God's own image, and that it is this self-same God who acted in Jesus Christ to rescue humans, and all creation from the consequences of their disobedience to God. As I will discuss further below, however, this construal, for all its strengths, not only ignores or minimizes most of the history of God's dealings with Israel, but it also renders the continued existence of Israel unnecessary and even illogical.

The second principal aspect of the church's traditional formulation of the unity of the Testaments is perhaps the most familiar. The First Testament contains the writings of divinely inspired figures whose primary purpose is to foretell the coming of God's redemption through God's Son. That is, the First Testament is related to the Second in terms of prophecy and its fulfillment. Though this reading of the Scriptures of Israel most likely came about as a result of the first Christians "searching the Scriptures" and interpreting them in light of the events--i.e., interpreting the prophecy in light of the fulfillment--as much as vice-versa, the presentation of the gospel in terms of the movement from prophecy to fulfillment is already established in most of the Second Testament writings (see, e.g., Matt 1-2; Acts 2). Like the traditional canonical narrative, the prophecy-fulfillment idea has served in important ways to support the truth and shape of the gospel.