"Only the Metaphysical Can Bless Us, Never the Historical"

If you appreciate the work, consider becoming a paid subscriber!

The earliest instance of the New Testament citing Psalm 69 is Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In chapter 15, the apostle points to the psalm to corroborate his command that believers should, not pleasing themselves, welcome one another. Critically, Paul puts the psalm in Christ’s voice:

“The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”

Consider the claim the primal church makes in making Jesus the voice of Israel’s faith.

I recently asked an Old Testament how preachers should go about interpreting the Psalms Christologically. The professor balked at my premodern bias and insisted that preachers should first read the Psalms— and all of the Hebrew Bible— in its original context. In the mainline church, this interpretative approach is sacrosanct to the point of being beyond consideration; however, it is a curious consensus if the church rightly confesses the triune name of God.

That is—

What is the original context of an Old Testament passage if, as the dogma professes, Jesus is in the Trinity?

What is the original context of Psalm 69 if its speaker is Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim?

To this question, Robert Jenson writes:

“If the Old Testament is first and foremost a record of ancient Israel’s faith, it unsurprisingly turns out to be indeed just that, the artifact of a religious community that is other than the church, and moreover is not now extant. We will read the Old Testament from the New or we will not be able to read these texts as Scripture at all. This new agreement goes, however, little further.

Somehow—it is now often agreed—we have to read the Old Testament christologically and pneumatologically.

But even this repentant scholarship has left that “somehow” undetermined.

Scholarship’s modern inability to resolve that “somehow” results, I propose, from a certain distinction that we all tend to make, that indeed is so ingrained in our habits as to seem inevitable. When it is proposed that Old Testament texts have a christological or ecclesial sense, many biblical scholars will now agree, but this sense will then be anxiously and promptly contrasted with another sense which the texts are supposed to have “in themselves” or “originally” or “for their own time.” The official exegetes will now not often simply brush off proposals of christological and ecclesial readings of the Old Testament. But they will still quickly say, “On the other hand, we must not override their original sense” or something to that effect, and those of us who are not certified exegetes will more or less automatically concede the point.

The trouble is:

When reading Old Testament texts christologically or ecclesially is contrasted with another reading which is said to take them “in themselves,” or in their “original” sense, the churchly reading inevitably appears as an imposition on the texts, even if an allowable one. Christological or ecclesial readings will be tolerated for homiletic purposes, or for such faintly suspect enterprises as systematic theology, but are not quite the real thing.

We need to question this all too automatic distinction.

The place to start is by observing some obvious but generally overlooked hermeneutical facts: an author’s intention or a community of first readers’ reading is plainly not identical with the texts “themselves” or with an “original” import. Any author constantly interprets her own writing—before, during, and after formulating text. We later readers are not the only ones with a particular hermeneutic and with resultant interpretations of the texts an author produces; the author has his own, and these are no more identical with the texts themselves than are ours. Moreover, first readers are just that and no more: they are not pure receivers of meaning but first readers, which is to say, the first readers to have a chance to impose their the church’s christological-ecclesial reading and a reading of the texts in some original entity but the church’s christological-ecclesial reading and the author’s and first readers’ equally problematic readings. So soon as we see that these are the readings to be considered, we are liberated to ask: Which of them grasps the texts “in themselves” or as they are “originally”? And the answer to that question is not necessarily that the author’s or first readers’ reading is original, not if there is someone in the picture besides the author, the first readers, and us. Not when the text is supposed to be Scripture, so that God the Spirit is in the picture.

It was—I now have come to see—a function of the old doctrine of inspiration to trump the created author with prior agents, the Spirit and the Word, and to trump the alleged first readers with prior readers, with indeed the whole diachronic people of God, preserved as one people through time by that same Spirit.

And then we may very well take the christological-ecclesial sense of an Old Testament text as precisely the “original” sense, the sense which it has “in itself,” if in the particular case we have grounds to suppose that the christological-ecclesiological sense responds to the intention and reception of this primary agent and these primary readers.

Thus it was a founding maxim of modern thought: “Only the metaphysical can bless us, never the historical.”

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app