Reading along the book of Job

A preliminary note - Job really challenges our standard Evangelical reading practices. We typically read with a magnifying glass, taking a short passage and probing into all the details. That won't work with Job (I would question whether it's the best way to approach any book of the Bible!) because most of the dialogue expresses ideas which are explicitly condemned by God at the end of the book. So we need to read the whole. And when we read the whole, we will get a feel for whose viewpoint we ought to credit. I would suggest that we ought to not to credit entirely any of the human characters in the book. Only the Lord's speech is entirely true. However, Job's speech is to be given more credence than any of his friends on the basis of 42:7ff. With that in mind, we can attempt a Christological reading on the basis of the four methods previously explained...

1. Explicit prediction of Christ is found in Job 19:25-27. It is, of course, possible to explain this prediction away. But looking back from the far side of the life, death and resurrection of Christ it seems extremely arbitrary not to refer Job's confidence to his coming. "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth". We don't have to suppose here that Job understood and expected the incarnation; merely that Job has put his trust in the God who will come. That faith, in a God who intervenes and will intervene, is obviously crucial to Job in his situation. God's general providence is not a sufficient ground of his hope, since it is precisely that general providence against which Job is railing (apparently with justification). Job's faith is in a resolution - we know that resolution came (and will come) in Christ. Consider also Job 9:33, which although not a prophecy per se is pretty clearly crying out for Christ.

2. Job himself, I would suggest, is a type of Christ. (Note the limits on typology previously mentioned here!) Job is repeatedly described as a righteous man, and yet we see him suffering terribly. Of course, Christ also suffered, but the deeper resonance is in the fact that both Job and the Lord Jesus are explicitly forsaken by God. They are exposed to this suffering by the God they have served faithfully, in whom they have trusted for protection. By the end of the book, Job is restored - on which more momentarily. Suffice to say here that Job thus displays both sides of the OT picture of a righteous man: at the beginning and end of the book he prospers because of his righteousness, in the middle he suffers for it. That sets up point 3...

A slightly tangential point, though, before moving on. At the end of Job, the Lord informs us that Job has spoken rightly. In other words, he has maintained his innocence (not just protested it!) throughout. This is in contrast with his friends, who are forced to ask Job to intercede for them and to make sin offerings. Now, for anyone who has read the book carefully, I think this will come as a surprise. Frankly, Job is the only character who has not stood up for the honour of God throughout the long chapters of dialogue. True, we are told that he declined to curse God, but that hardly seems heroic. For most of the book, he complains bitterly about the way God has dealt with him. Is part of the point here that righteousness is not just about what is visible? We only know Job is righteous because he is vindicated in the end. In that sense, also, he is a type of Christ.

3. Job displays the pattern of suffering and resurrection very well. I don't know about you, but I always found the last seven verses of Job hugely unsatisfactory. Job receives back his health, his wealth and his standing in the community, and gets a shiny new family to replace the old one upon which a house unfortunately fell. It's almost as bad as if it had said 'then Job woke up and it was all a dream'. There is no logical link between what goes before and this ending. The only link there seems to be is Job's faith. Can I suggest that the same is true of the resurrection? It is a eucatastrophe. Everything is turned around, for the good. There is a difference though. In the story of Jesus, the resurrection makes sense. Although it doesn't follow logically, it does follow in terms of character and theme - in that sense it is a real eucatastrophe, and not just a case of deus ex machina (see the link for euchatastrophe for explanation). With the resurrection in mind, and only with the resurrection in mind, we can make sense of what happens to Job. Of course the righteous must suffer and be raised again. That is almost the definition of righteousness in the Bible.

4. The big problem in Job is that righteous people suffer. Note that it is righteous people, not just good people. It is not the fact that moral or innocent people suffer that raises the issue here, it is that people who know, love and serve God suffer. That problem is unanswerable in OT terms (which is why the end of Job seems such a cop out). It is only answerable when we see the suffering of the righteous concentrated in the only really righteous person as Christ dies. In fact, it only really makes sense when we understand that Christ is vindicated in the resurrection, and everyone who trusts him is vindicated there too.

How does this help us to read Job verse by verse? It explains why the friends are wrong when they accuse Job of sin; it explains why Job can trust the God who apparently abandons him; it explains why we cannot read God's character from the events that occur in our lives. It makes the problem of Job point us to Christ. Therefore, our own problems - the apparent God-forsakeness of our own lives - can point us to Christ also, as we look along the book of Job to the suffering and vindicated Messiah.

"It came out of nowhere"

We sometimes talk about the Old Testament as being preparation for Christ, and at some level that must be right. Jesus came at just the right time, when everything was ready to be fulfilled. But at some other level I want to ask a question. Who exactly was prepared by the OT?

When you look at the characters in the gospels, none of them get who Jesus is on the basis of the OT. That's a pretty strong statement, but I advance it as a hypothesis - can anyone contradict it? Think of Nathanael in John's gospel - he needs a miracle before he believes; Peter in the synoptics has Jesus' identity revealed to him by the Father; the people who are really well trained in the Scriptures actually cite them to show that Jesus cannot be the Christ (a prophet from Nazareth?!) The big one for me is the beloved disciple, looking into the empty tomb. He 'saw and believed' but 'as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead' (John 20:8,9). The miracle came first, and only then did they go back to the Scriptures and understand them.

Outside the gospels, I think Paul is a test case. His conversion is related by Luke three times, and I can't help thinking that is because Luke wants us to see this as a paradigm of someone coming to Christian faith. Paul knows his OT, no doubt about it. But it takes a personal intervention from Christ before he understands that those Scriptures speak of Christ.

For all these people, despite centuries of careful preparation and witness to Christ in the OT, revelation came out of nowhere and bowled them over.

I think that's important for our understanding of how revelation works. Revelation is always grace - if anyone sees Christ, it is because he freely reveals himself to them. That means revelation is never something that I can get hold of, possess, tame, and call my own. It is always something that can jump out at me, as something new and quite possibly alarming. In that sense, the relation between the OT and Christ is a chronological representation of the relationship that always exists between the Scriptural witness as a whole and Christ.

But when they have seen Christ - and in particular, when they have seen the risen Christ - all these witnesses understand the OT to be all about Christ. They don't think they are significantly reinterpreting it. They are not reading Christ into the OT. But their understanding has changed. They see now, in the light of the resurrection, that Jesus is Lord. Specifically, that means Jesus is, and always has been, Lord over and in Israel's history. The resurrection vindicates Christ, shows that he is the Messiah and the culmination of Israel's hopes and dreams, and in the process shows what those hopes and dreams really were. It always was about him.

That means that when I approach Scripture - Old or New Testament - I approach it as something that genuinely is about Jesus. I do that even for the bits which don't immediately seem to be about him, and the bits which I just don't understand. I study it, wrestle with the content, try to work out what it is saying about Jesus. But I do all that on the understanding that my study and work is not able to produce a view of Jesus which will prompt me to faith and adoration. That would require a work of grace. Jesus is Lord, even over the Bible.

So as a Christian - as someone who has encountered the risen Christ through the Biblical witness applied by the Spirit - I have to read the OT this way. And yet every time I do, there is the possibility (in God's grace) that I will be bowled over again.

Reading along the Old Testament

Oops. I accidentally didn't write on the blog for a month. Well, there will now follow a series of thoughts on reading the Bible in a Christocentric manner. Nothing too original, but just to get me back into the habit!

Whenever I start to read in the Old Testament, I should expect to see Christ there. By 'see Christ' I do not mean that I will always find explicit reference to Christ, or that the OT is shot through with appearances of the preincarnate Word (although there are plenty of both occurrences there). What I mean is that my reading of the OT should be a 2 Corinthians 3:16 experience (read the whole passage to get what I mean). Now, to a very great extent whether in fact I have such an experience is not down to me, but is a work of the Spirit. But it is promised, and therefore the action of faith is to read properly, with expectation, and await the Spirit's work.

So what reading practices do I employ as I set out to read by faith, to 'turn to the Lord' as I read the OT? Here are a few.

1. Look for explicit forward-looking references to the Messiah and his work. Despite all the sceptical work of OT scholars over the last 150 years, these are plentiful. Where you find them, consider whether they might not be the key to the understanding of the particular part of the OT you are reading. It's helpful to consider the particular import of each of these 'previews' of the person and work of Jesus - don't just think 'here's a prophecy of Christ', think through what in particular about Jesus this is highlighting. I personally find it very useful to try to imagine what it would be like to look forward to this as an initial step in understanding.

2. Look for types of Christ. A type is a character who, through their own life and actions, plays out some aspect of the life and work of Jesus. Whenever we look for types, we are engaging in an imaginative process. After all, nobody measures up to Jesus or strictly speaking does anything remotely like what he does. It is more of a case of catching the echoes of the life of Jesus - except these echoes are cast backward through history. Where we do see types of Christ, we should focus first on the particular aspect of Jesus' life and work that we have been reminded of; then (more cautiously) we should ask whether we are being commanded to show that aspect in our lives also (and the type can help us here to think what that might look like).

3. Look for patterns of events which recall Christ's work. Just like the characters who serve us as types of Christ, so events can serve us by bringing to memory different aspects of what Jesus has done. In the OT, we see the work of Christ refracted, as it were, through the history of Israel. Often that refraction will help us to bring out and focus on a particular side to Jesus' ministry which might otherwise get lost in the whole.

4. Look for problems which cannot be solved in OT terms. Where we see a passage which sets up a paradox - especially one of which the author seems very conscious - we will more often than not find that paradox resolved in Christ. These sorts of problems will more often become clear if we read longer passages, or try to fit particular passages into the OT as a whole.

I want to work this out in a particular example - the book of Job - before the end of the week. But I have an intervening post for those who react by saying something like: 'what a terrible hermeneutic! You've already decided what the text will be about before you even read it!'

...Although probably not many of those sorts of people read this blog.

Expecting and remembering

How do the Old and New Testaments fit together? I would venture to suggest something like this. The OT is fundamentally and centrally characterised by expectation. It looks forward, in various ways and from different perspectives, to the decisive action of God in history which will redeem Israel. Psalm 130 captures the beating heart of the OT. Of course, this sense of expectation has its basis in remembrance. God has acted in the past, but the history of Israel is a demonstration that this past action was not decisive: it did not free Israel from sin or danger. It could only be a sign of the full and final action of God to come. The OT is basically forward looking.

By contrast, the NT is essentially about remembering. It is oriented backward, and is characterised by memory and testimony. The heart of the apostles' ministry is to pass on what they have heard and seen. The opening of 1 John is typical. Of course, the NT also looks forward to a glorious climax. But there is a sense in which the climax has already come. Nothing new is looked for or expected from God. The decisive action has been taken, and the expectation that there is is just for its completion. The NT is basically about remembering.

What conclusions can be drawn from this?

1. The Scriptures are a unity. This is not obvious, certainly not as obvious as many of us who have grown up with the Bible often assume. The unity comes from outside the text. The OT and NT are united in so far as the decisive action of God expected in the former is the same as that remembered in the latter. In other words, the Scriptures find their unity in Christ.

2. The unity of Scripture is not found in the similarity or (more strongly) the identity of the old and new covenants, but in their symmetrical relation to Jesus Christ. He is the main thing.

3. The Scriptures live by their relationship to Christ. He is the Living Word, who has life in himself, and the Bible lives from him. I would venture to suggest that the Bible only becomes life-giving when this relation is seen.

In short, to be a person of the Bible is to look beyond (better, through, or perhaps along) the Bible to the One expected and remembered there.

A Hermeneutic of Trust

Just some thoughts, not yet processed into proper prose.

1. A hermeneutic of trust approaches a text with the intention of taking it at face value, assuming that a text is a means of communication between (at least) two people.

2. A hermeneutic of trust takes seriously the nature of the text in question, looking carefully for indications of genre and statements of purpose (implicit or explicit). It seeks to read and interpret a text within the established 'rules' of genre.

3. A hermeneutic of trust is justified de facto by the need human beings have to rely on the testimony of others for both everyday and scientific knowledge; it is justified de jure by the revealed fact that ultimate reality is personal, making personal testimony of ultimate significance.

4. A hermeneutic of trust rejects individualistic approaches to epistemology. Knowledge is a collective enterprise, and testimony is central to that enterprise.

5. A hermeneutic of trust takes the character of the author seriously, at two levels. Firstly, it privileges the author in interpreting the text, seeking to discern the author's intention. Secondly, it asks concerning the moral character of the author, in so far as this has a bearing on the trustworthiness of the text.

6. A hermeneutic of trust steers a middle course between naivety and cynicism, following Ricoeur's principle: "first, trust the word of others, then doubt if there are good reasons for doing so".

The question you can always ask

You are always free to ask the question "but what does it mean?" - even when the answer seems obvious, and especially when the question seems dangerous.

I raise this because sometimes we close the door on this question too quickly. An area I've been mulling over recently (for Relay-related reasons) is that of gender and women's ministry, and one of the things that I have noticed from some contributors to that debate is that they ask one question of the Scriptural texts deemed to be relevant - what does it say? - but not the follow-on question - what does it mean? The latter question will include all sorts of considerations, like "why does it say this? to whom does it say this? when did it say this? how does it fit with everything else?", which make the issue more complex than the simple "what does it say" question makes apparent.

It isn't enough to just quote the Bible. I need to know more than just what words are there. I need to know how they are being used, what they signify. And that requires more work, and perhaps the risk that we find something we didn't want in the text.