Guest Post by Dane Ortlund
In h
is brief article “Did Jesus and His Followers Preach the Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?” in this book, Greg Beale identifies five hermeneutical presuppositions with which the New Testament writers read their “Bibles”–our Old Testament. By “hermeneutical presupposition” we mean a lens that colors how we interpret the text of the Bible every time we read it.
Nothing, perhaps–certainly nothing in such short compass–has influenced my understanding of the macro-structure of the Bible as much as this short list, digested and implemented as a lens for text after text.
Well worth unhurried reflection.
Dr. Beale writes:
Jesus and the apostles had an unparalleled redemptive-historical perspective on the Old Testament in relation to their own situation. . . . This perspective involved a framework of five hermeneutical and theological presuppositions:
1. the assumption of corporate solidarity or representation;
2. that Christ is viewed as representing the true Israel of the Old Testament and true Israel, the church, in the New Testament;
3. that history is unified by a wise and sovereign plan so that the earlier parts are designed to correspond and point to the latter parts (cf. Matt. 11:13-14);
4. that the age of eschatological fulfillment has come in Christ;
5. as a consequence of (3) and (4), the fifth presupposition affirms that the latter parts of biblical history function as the broader context to interpret earlier parts because they all have the same, ultimate divine author who inspires the various human authors, and one deduction from this premise is that Christ as the center of history is the key to interpreting the earlier portions of the Old Testament and its promises.
–G. K. Beale, “Did Jesus and His Followers Preach the Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?”, in The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New (ed. G. K. Beale; Baker, 1994), 391-92; italics original.
Each of the five points above is footnoted with various supporting literature and can be consulted for further exploration.
The one phrase that might be unfamiliar to many readers is “corporate solidarity” in the first point. This refers to the assumption in ancient Jewish thinking that the one stands for the many and the many are included within the one, particularly when it comes to a representative leader of a people. The most obvious example is the way Paul speaks of Adam, Christ, and their respective followings in Romans 5:12-21. For those in Adam, or in Christ, what is true of him is true of them. This interpretive lens demystifies text after text.
For example, how is it that Isaiah 49 can speak of Israel as Yahweh’s servant in verse 3 and then speak of the servant bringing back Israel three verses later, in verse 6? We cannot make sense of this apart from the hermeneutical presupposition of corporate solidarity.
