How should Christians understand the significance of the Old Testament and the God to which the Old Testament testifies? How is the Old Testament related theologically speaking to the New Testament? Is the Old Testament merely essential background to the “main event,” the New Testament? Or is the Old Testament a negative foil, theologically inferior (a God of wrath and law) to the New Testament (a God of love and grace)? Christopher Seitz, in his book The Elder Testament: Canon, Theology, Trinity, offers a wide-ranging, erudite, and theologically rich response to these and many other questions and issues regarding the church’s unique two-testament Scripture, theology, and the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity (one God revealed in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in light of both Old and New Testaments.

The book has three parts. In part 1, “Orientation,” Seitz makes a case for Christians substituting the more positive term “Elder” Testament (wise, time-tested, revered) for the negative-sounding “Old” Testament (outmoded, inferior, passé). Seitz strongly affirms that Christians need to take seriously the fact that the Elder Testament emerged over centuries as God’s particular Word or Book addressed only to one divinely chosen people with whom the living God continues to remain in a loving covenant relationship—Israel / the Jews. With the incarnation of the preexisting Christ and through the Spirit working through the early Christian apostles (see Acts 15 and the Gentile mission of Paul—Romans 9–11), the one true and living God invited Gentiles or non-Jews to become part of this story of God’s people—secondarily grafted on, transplanted, and adopted into an already-existing Jewish community of faith in relation to the one living God. These preliminaries set up the main argument of the book as it seeks to analyze how the Elder Testament can continue to be a canonically fruitful avenue by which Christian Gentiles encounter and hear the voice of the living and Triune God who promises to be known through the Scriptures.

The term “canon” is often thought to refer chiefly to defining the ancient and varied lists or canons of biblical books—which books were considered more authoritative or less authoritative by one community or another. That is one meaning of the word “canon.” For Seitz, however, the more primary meaning of “canon” in the history of the church goes back to the second-century CE church father Irenaeus. His more ancient and theological understanding of the term “canon” was as a “canon” or a “rule” of faith, a guide that shapes the reading of the Old Testament in relation to the New. For Irenaeus and other early Christian interpreters, a crucial starting point was the first chapter of the Gospel of John which hearkened back to the story of God’s creation of the world in Genesis 1. John 1 proclaims that Christ, the Son of God (the “Word” / the “Logos”) was “in the beginning . . . with God” at the creation of all things. Moreover, this Word “was God” and in the course of time this same Word (Christ) “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Thus, if Christ was present with God and as God from creation itself, a canonically-predisposed Christian reader of the Old Testament will expect to find preformed figures and types of the Triune God woven throughout the Elder Testament by its human authors providentially guided by the one ultimate divine Author who from the beginning is Three in One (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). Thus, Irenaeus could interpret the divine voice speaking from the burning bush to call Moses to lead Israel out of its slavery in Egypt in Exodus 3 as the voice or Word of Christ. Reading Exodus 17 and following Paul in 1 Corinthians 10, Irenaeus identifies the “Rock” from which water wondrously flowed to the Israelites in the wilderness as Christ.

If the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the God of the New, then a modern “canonical” interpreter is attentive to two aspects: (1) the unique and discrete witness to God within each of the two separate testaments that honors each testament’s literary and cultural location in time, and (2) the many and varied ways in which the witness to this one God “echoes” back and forth in analogues and dialogues between the Old and New Testaments. Seitz reminds us that the only Scripture that Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest Christian interpreters had was the Old Testament. Thus, much of the theological witness within the New Testament (including the emerging portrait of the Triune God) was already robustly percolating among the narratives, poetry, laws, and prophetic oracles of the Old Testament.

Part 2 of The Elder Testament lays out the opportunities and limits of using modern historical-critical methods (for example, the multiple reconstructed sources or traditions that scholars have posited in the composition of the Pentateuch) in a theologically-centered canonical interpretation of the three parts of the Elder Testament: the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings. In our modern era, scholarly critical tools are often useful and necessary as a way into the plain or literal sense of Scripture as long as the tools are not used to substitute a new or alternate counter-text that replaces the final form of the biblical text. A canonical interpretation uses critical historical insights to better understand the contours and complexities of the final form of the biblical text while seeking to avoid erasing the text’s definitive theological shaping as left by the latter editors or scribes as a guide to reading for future generations.

Part 3 analyzes a number of key Old Testament texts that early Christian interpreters exegeted in great depth and detail in service to shaping their understanding of the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit before the New Testament arrived on the scene. The texts include the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8, God’s creation “in the beginning” in Genesis 1, and the royal psalms of Psalm 2 and 110.

I begin a conversation about this rich and multilayered analysis of canon, theology, and the Trinity with a few modest questions and observations.

(1) Seitz rightly suggests that the “proper stance for us [Christians] as eventual readers of the Elder Testament is one of caution, humility, and respect before our status as invitees into a close and long personal relationship between God and his covenant people [Israel]” (60). Yet early Christian interpreters often did not display these virtues of caution, humility, and respect toward Judaism in their aggressive anti-Semitism (Tertullian, Justyn Martyr, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine, Chrysostom, Jerome). Contra Marcion, Irenaeus argued that the God of the New Testament was the same God as the God of the Old Testament, but he did so while also holding to the inferiority of Judaism. Is the anti-Judaism of Irenaeus inextricably bound up with his canonical interpretation of the God who is God of both Old and New Testaments? And if not, how do we separate one from the other?

(2) Seitz speaks of the “monotheism” of the Old Testament. “The God who has spoken specially to Israel is as well the God of all creation and the God of all nations on earth” (56). “The prophet Isaiah solemnly declares the LORD as God alone. ‘There is no God besides me’ (Isaiah 45:21)” (187). Surely Isaiah 40–55 in its later exilic context moves towards monotheism. Other Old Testament texts, however, reveal more of an openness to the existence of other gods assigned to other nations. A striking example is the Qumran and Greek versions of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 which recount how in the beginning the “Most High” (Elyon) apportioned the nations “according to the number of the gods/sons of gods” with YHWH’s “own portion” being “Jacob his allotted share.” The later Masoretic Hebrew tradition is uncomfortable with the implication of other gods ruling over other nations and changes the text to “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” Psalm 82 speaks of YHWH sitting in the divine council with the other gods of the earth. YHWH condemns the other gods for their neglect of justice for the weak and destitute in their respective nations and condemns them to “die like mortals and fall like any prince.” The psalm ends by proclaiming YHWH as judge of all the earth “for all the nations belong to you!” The plain sense of these texts is that Israel’s Scriptures contain divergent traditions about God and the gods. Other religious texts that archaeologists have discovered from cultures surrounding Israel help us see how much Israel has borrowed from its surrounding culture in the imagery and conception of Israel’s God. The point is not to replace the Old Testament text with a history-of-religions narrative of the rise of YHWH but rather to read closely and honor the diversity of conceptions of God embedded within particular texts throughout the Old Testament.

(3) Recent studies of the diverse depictions of different forms of a “body” for God’s presence in several Old Testament texts understood within Israel’s ancient cultural context highlight in another way the messiness of the theological witness of the Old Testament.1 Alongside these varied portrayals of God’s “body,” the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy juxtapose three conflicting traditions regarding the location and nature of YHWH’s presence relative to heaven, earth, the community of Israel, and the ark of the covenant. By the end of Exodus, God’s presence moves in a pillar of cloud and fire from the top of Mount Sinai and onto the tent-like structure called the tabernacle. God is continually present through the pillar of fire and cloud in the wilderness tabernacle in the midst of the camp of Israel on its journey through the wilderness (Exod 40:38; Num 10:33–34). A second tradition is the tent of meeting which (unlike the tabernacle) stands outside the boundaries of the camp of Israel’s twelve tribes. God’s presence periodically comes down to the tent of meeting for limited consultations with Moses or others after which God returns back to heaven (Exod 33:7–11; see also Num 11:16–17, 24–25). A third tradition in Deuteronomy 4:9–15 portrays God as residing permanently in heaven and not coming down on Mount Horeb. The people see no form of God; they only hear a voice from God mediated from heaven by a pillar of fire. Does Seitz deal adequately with the pluriform portrayals of God here that seem to unsettle what sometimes seems to be Seitz’s more singular and uniform Trinitarian-leaning portrayal of God in the Old Testament. To be fair, Seitz in his rejection of narrative as an adequate category to capture the whole Old Testament does acknowledge the jaggedness of Old Testament traditions: “We see the disjunctions and doublets and backtracking and sometimes obvious anachronism and secondary supplementation. If this be narrative, it is very odd indeed and takes some getting used to” (75). In what follows this comment, Seitz discusses two different angels in the book of Exodus, one a “protective warrior angel” who will guard and protect Israel (Exod 23:23–33) and another angel who is a surrogate or substitute for God who signals God’s distance from the people due to their sin of worshipping the golden calf. The two angels, Seitz argues, cannot be “smoothed out” as occurring on one plane; they are two different traditions that coexist in tension with one another. But this tension, Seitz argues, is the point. In the two angels, God “holds in sovereign balance aspects of great mercy and righteous judgment” (79). Can the same be done with the three different modes of God’s presence in Exodus and Deuteronomy? Would Seitz want to claim that we have here some “pressure” or movement toward a Trinitarian interpretation with God in heaven (the divine Father), God descending to the tent of meeting and ascending to heaven (the Son), and God continually present in the midst of the tabernacle and community (the Spirit)? And what of the conflicting traditions about the bodies of God in the Old Testament? Is such diversity always theologically meaningful and how do we know?

We are indebted to Chris Seitz for this interesting and thought-provoking study of canon, theology, and the Trinity, and I look forward to further conversation.

If the characteristic of the recent movement toward the “theological interpretation of Scripture” has been to elide certain “modern” questions in order to take up other matters too long neglected, Christopher Seitz charts a different path: taking up seemingly everything. Well, maybe not everything, but it would be hard to imagine an engagement with biblical interpretation filling out a wider berth in 280 pages than The Elder Testament: Canon, Theology, Trinity. As the title forecasts, nothing is off limits here. From forays into Pentateuchal source criticism to the Tanakh commentary of Rashi, from text criticism to patristic, medieval, and Reformation theological interpretation, from ruminations about canonical shape to bold Christological, yea, Trinitarian, claims. Wear a seatbelt and enjoy the ride. I suspect most readers will benefit, as I did, from two readings.

Among the many things to admire in Seitz’s oeuvre, chief among them for me is the demonstration that all kinds of engagements with Scripture are theological, rendering “theological interpretation of Scripture” a redundancy while pointing toward paths forward, both older and newer. While much that has assumed the label “theological interpretation of Scripture” casts itself as a liberation from supposed historical-critical dead ends, on the one hand, or the repristinating of Scripture’s multiple senses, on the other, Seitz resists these bifurcations. In this regard, he continues the work of his late mentor, Brevard Childs, though, to his credit, I find in Seitz an even stronger sense of integration. The final result is the provocative claim—does it rise to demonstration?—that the literal sense of the “elder testament” anticipates the literal sense—what else would it be?—of its epilogue that Christians know as their New Testament.

We begin with a charming (and persuasive) French lesson advocating for l’Ancien Testament as preferable to any of our English alternatives, that is, the Elder Testament, original, venerable, esteemed, not an Old Testament, outmoded, worn-out, over-written by the New. Seitz’s readers will understand that this is not just a lesson in semantics, but a theological claim of far-reaching hermeneutical import.1 If this seems at first blush merely some anti-Marcionite resistance we come to expect from Christian colleagues working in this field, it is clearly not less than that, but it is also more. (As a pedagogical aside, one could imagine this chapter serving as a provocative introduction to an “Old” Testament course.)

Seitz’s claims are rather bolder than an affirmation of the abiding witness of the “elder” testament of the Christian Bible, as illustrated in the following, which bears close reading.

[EXT]To speak of the “mind of scripture” is not to open onto a general arena of intertextuality and fecundity of meaning, which in turn requires some prior theological or communal framework to put the pieces together into a molded meaning—the molding being of such a nature that we can identify that while they [readers] thought they were doing something like honoring the text’s coercion or pressure, they were in fact creating meaning. To speak of the mind of scripture will mean above all grappling with the two-testament character of its presentation. The Bible is not a flat surface of associative potential precisely because the first part gets recycled in the second in a particular kind of way. What is said of David man and king is said again, and finally, of Christ. What is said of Sophia is said again of Christ. The challenge for Christian interpretation is figuring out, or figuring in, how that “saying again” amalgamates and enriches for a clear sense-making: clear because competent to be defended as truly given ad litteram and also competent to defeat alternative readings in public testimony. (213–14)[/EXT]

The claim here is not unique but characteristic of Seitz’s consistent position, chosen here for its stark clarity. Note especially those last descriptors: a sense-making “to be defended as truly given ad litteram” and “competent to defeat alternative readings in public testimony.” This is the daring thesis of The Elder Testament, running against the grain of Hebrew Bible scholarship and well ahead its chastened New Testament counterpart—that of itself but not by itself the elder testament bears meaning confirmed but not created by a more recent testament and apprehended by early Christian readers. Thus, Seitz can interrogate with equal vigor the diachronic data of the divine name that propels so much Pentateuchal criticism and also the developmental traces of Israel’s religion in the shape of the canon. He can span the wide sweep of Wirkungsgeshichte of Psalm 2 or 110, of Ecclesiastes, or especially of Proverbs 8. And he can say finally that the rich theological donation of these (and other) texts understood across their two-testament witness is not an uninvited imposition on the former diachronic questions.

Seitz’s metaphorical aid for such claims is the felicitous notion of “pressure.”2 “Pressure,” as I understand it, is the feature of the elder testament suggesting, signifying, and, yes, pressing toward resolution which it extends beyond its circumstances of origin—figuration that bears within itself signs of a reference beyond itself. But Seitz’s notion of “pressure” has less to do with a narrative or prophetic telos (although I do not suppose that is in any sense excluded) and more to do with an ontological res. Therefore, for Seitz, the theological testimony of the elder testament is not controlled as it is frequently by a thematic organizer, such as messianism or covenant or even creation, but by its witness to one god, Israel’s God, whose identity—disclosed textually, accessed in close reading—cannot be limited to a singularity of persons.

That Israel’s scriptures disclose an ontology and do not merely witness to an economy in history is perhaps Seitz’s boldest move—bold enough that even this sympathetically predisposed reader has not yet made peace with it, which is not quite the same as dissent. Perhaps I’ve imbibed too much and for too long the developmental conceit that saturates the discipline of the biblical studies ethos. Nonetheless, I wonder if it is truer to the character of the elder testament to describe these sorts of ontological claims with Seitz as the “mind of the text” or to confess them as our profoundly conditioned retrospective readings, by which what is “there” opens onto new vistas. As metaphors go, I continue not only to be charmed but instructed by the clever analogy of the detective novel, in which the significance of event, character, objects, and so forth is manifest only in the resolution, or, we might say, revelation.3 Thus, first or first-time readers know not the pluri-significance of what they read, but in light of the whole, and with the aid of an inevitable and necessary retrospection, earlier chapters are imbued with a significance—a true significance in light of the literary whole—beyond that which is available in those preliminary movements in themselves.

In other words, I wish from Seitz for a more forthright acknowledgment of apokalypsis—more glad concession that only by means of a Christ-revelation do the ontological ruminations on the elder testament—which, so understood, are not to be resisted—become thinkable. That this is weak sauce compared to Seitz’s nervier alternative, I concede. I am simply not sure that I have been converted. There are, to be sure, reasons to resist this more well-traveled path.

First, simply because it is more well-traveled. And if we know anything about Seitz’s output, it is invariably more interesting than well-traveled paths. I don’t suggest that Seitz privileges “interesting” or “provocative” at the expense of plausible, but I do wonder at times if his eschewals are altogether necessary as will be clear in what follows.4

Second, to follow this path inevitably privileges the revelation of the New Testament not so much as truer, being later in time, but as the more hermeneutically decisive. I do not suppose that Seitz disagrees—I don’t know—but zeal for the elder testament’s theological integrity seems to inhibit this affirmation. It does not seem to me that such an acknowledgment is a slippery slope to Marcionism in any sense. Thus, I do not know if I “need” the stronger, prospective, ad litteram version of the relationship between the testaments. Not unlike the charge of supersessionism, the hermeneutical priority of the inscripturated Christ-event is such that Christian Bible readers can never finally be exonerated of it, requisite qualifications notwithstanding. Unsurpassability carries with it a certain baggage.

Third, this apokalypsis is not detachable from its narrative vehicle. Yet Seitz has made it very clear that the consignation of canonical Scripture to an amorphous category of “narrative” is a nonstarter for the kind of theological interpretation the texts themselves invite (71–84). It is hard to disagree with Seitz at this point. Narrative as the facile be and end all for all theological interpretation of Scripture has certainly overplayed its hand, and Seitz’s criticisms are just. To be sure, the texts of the elder testament are not exclusively narrative any more than their canonical shaping conveys some sort of continuous “story.” And, along with others, Seitz would have us leave this behind as a fad. That’s hard to argue with, though it remains the case that any holistic construal of the elder testament, much less the two-testament Scriptures of the church, requires that it be something, be it a library, an anthology, or viewed as some kind of whole, a narrative cast against the backdrop of the history of Israel. That the books, genres, and canonical shape(s) of the anthology are not straightforwardly a “story” does not mean that to so construe them is to falsify a way of thinking about them. That such a scriptural gestalt has its own integrity and staying power is amply attested by the texts’ own frequent narrative rehearsals—and that across testaments and genres.

Finally, while I find Seitz’s depersonalized notion of textual meaning or intent workable as a kind of placeholder, I’m not sure it is the best we can do. Speaking of the “mind of scripture” or the “ways the words go” and identifying it with the meaning or sense of the text defers the question of validity beyond what may be necessary. I’m sure very few wish any more to adhere to an unchastened notion of “authorial intent” and most certainly not as the identification of the meaning of scriptural texts. But can we not rather speak of the canonical sense of the text as understood, as it must be, from the vantage of the Christ-apokalypsis, and in doing so, need we worry about a lapse into a postmodern reader-response (e.g., 210)? I don’t think so. The interpretive stance of the reader is both normed and free; normed by the given of revelation regarded as unsurpassable and therefore free to read its anticipations and adumbrations from the sacred page. But I don’t see how this is possible apart from the establishment of a hermeneutical fulcrum, which returns me to my original ambivalence.

When a guild-leading Old Testament scholar of Seitz’s learning and sophistication grants permission for a New Testament scholar to be less tepid, I admit that I find it tempting, and I find myself divided:

“What prevents me from being baptized?”

Yet, “Help my unbelief.”

I have always been moved by the profoundly prophetic character of Advent in the Anglican tradition.

This can come as a shock to a visitor to a Lessons and Carols service who expects Away in the Manger and gets an extended reading from Isaiah instead; in the Episcopal Church, we have, gloriously, been working our way through the book of Amos at morning prayer this year since the beginning of December.

In The English Hymnal, the fifth and final advent antiphon for “Veni, Veni Immanuel” reads: “O come, o come, Adonai / Who in thy glorious majesty / From that high mountain clothed in awe / Gavest thy folk the elder law.”1

It is, I believe, a sympathetic coincidence of just such a usage of “elder” as Christopher Seitz recommends in The Elder Testament: Canon, Theology, Trinity, in which the witness of the Old Testament may be acknowledged without the implied supersessionism or distinction buried in unthinking language of “old” and “new.”

I find myself wondering if Christopher Seitz would agree that Advent may represent a liturgical enactment of many of the theological commitments that he describes over the course of The Elder Testament.

By definition, Advent is a moment of transition, of course, which has often been understood as a progression from old to new.

But as Seitz intriguingly observes, the incarnation obfuscates as much as it clarifies (128).

It is the sort of answer to the ultimate question, if I may be permitted to draw an analogy from Douglas Adams, which then necessitates even more, and even more complex, work if one is to begin to understand what the ultimate question was in the first place. Advent is the moment, then, for the Christian church to recall the prophetic witness of the Elder Scripture most clearly to mind.

Paradoxically, there is not a great deal of gospel material to work with concerning Christmas itself, as N. T. Wright frequently complains.2

In practice, then, the liturgy, if anything, privileges the elder material simply because there is more of it.

The medieval advent antiphons splice together a barrage of elder scriptural imagery that moves chronologically backwards in time: Israel in captivity, the continuation of the Davidic lineage, David’s anointed kingship, to the giving of the law on Sinai.

Liturgically, it functions in such a way as to include the congregation in a kind of enacted “liturgical present,” incorporating us as members of “thy folk” and “thy captive Israel.”

As a medieval historian and scholar of medieval biblical interpretation, one of the things I appreciated most about Seitz’s work is his knowledge of, and appreciation for patristic exegesis.

His use, most importantly of the work of Eric Auerbach but also of Henri de Lubac, as well as a patristics scholar like John Behr, alongside a case study of late Lutheran exegesis seems a significant as well as generous sign of his scholarly commitments (79–80, 272).

His repeated observation that the earliest theologians of the church find themselves working not exclusively or even predominantly with the gospels but with the elder scripture is, in my experience, true.

Irenaeus or Athanasius had to introduce a Greek audience to a different narrative of the universe and God’s interaction with it before they could present Christ to that audience as the universe’s key and cornerstone—hence the abiding patristic fascination with Genesis and Exodus in particular.

As Seitz rightly notes, “there was absolutely no dogmatic discussion in the early church that was not root-and-branch exegetical” (202).

Seitz has a good historical appreciation of how the bible would actually have been read in the early church—in other words, in no particular canonical order but most certainly not like any other old book, neither by Jews nor Christians.

Even in the ancient world, usually considered much more literate than the medieval centuries which followed, one may question whether the average Christian read enough to have a normative experience of “the book” or “the scroll,” much less for that experience to be a mundane one.

We may learn a great deal from reader-response theory, but not when it begins from a historically anachronistic premise or without intimate understanding of ancient reading practices.

Augustine’s first, famous introduction to Ambrose includes his surprise at the bishop reading silently and for himself.3

While this may not necessarily be evidence that the ancients always read all books aloud, it certainly underscores the fact that it was normative to read scripture that way, hedged about with and framed by the practices of the liturgy, which sought, if anything, to magnify the extraordinary affect of the text.

In other words, it would always have been very difficult to disentangle the reading of scripture from the living community for whom, to whom, and by whom it was read.

Even for literate Christians and certainly within monastic communities, we cannot underestimate how much of their knowledge of scripture would have come about through oral recitation and the rhythms of the divine office, however regional an experience that no doubt was.

It is a truism of patristic and medieval research that older, textual scriptural variants were most often preserved as part of the liturgy.

Academic discussions of the canon of scripture, therefore, must reckon with the performative, relational aspect of the process by which it formed, and not only as mere historical accident or an arbitrary exercise of authority.

(And on that subject, I think the late antique episcopate would have been flattered by the degree of authoritative control over the church universal some of the more Foucault-ian theories seem to attribute to it.)

Likewise, within the act of reading scripture, “achievements of association rise up in the gradual and surefooted manner in which over generations the scriptures receive their final, stable character” (181).

I would be curious to what extent Seitz is sympathetic to the effects of allegory, or at least to some forms of typology as they reflect these “achievements of association.” In the field with which I am most personally familiar, that of medieval allegorical exegesis, early forms of theology crystallize or are “pressured from” such associations.

For all the excesses of allegory the Antiochenes legitimately complained about, allegorical exegesis did transmit one great benefit which the medieval world inherited: it made all scriptural text potentially applicable and relevant, the prophets and the writings no less than the gospels.

While particularly by the Carolingian era, supersessionist and anti-Jewish language becomes increasingly powerful, it never extends to the idea that one should read the Elder Scripture less; in their numerology, exegetes usually refer simply to the mystical significance of the “two testaments” without privileging the younger over the elder.

One cannot fit those parts of scripture that seem to have been particularly loved and revered into a neatly supersessionist paradigm.

While the gospels, for example, are gorgeously copied in an early medieval insular context, one may well question how often, for example, the Book of Kells was actually read, as opposed to being displayed for undoubtedly powerful effect.

Meanwhile, every child oblate, from Ireland to Iraq, learned to read with the psalter.

Paradoxically, if one is trying to build a biblical society from the ground up, the gospels may have a great deal to say about the personality of Christ, but they have much less to offer concerning the practicalities of church governance: one may find oneself instead drawn to Leviticus or Ezra-Nehemiah for that, as, for example, was the early medieval Irish and Northumbrian church.

Seitz’s own wariness around narrative seems primarily to stem from the often teleological import of modern historical criticism; in a dry aside, he nicknames it the “new allegory” (77).

I found myself wondering how Seitz would understand or defend the particular power of narrative within scripture itself: if he would defend as essential to its message the canon’s presentation of certain thematic trajectories, as, for example, across the early chapters of Genesis.

One way to read Irenaeus is to follow his constant framing and presentation of God’s covenant with humanity, in so doing, “identifying Christianity,” to use a phrase of John Behr.

For both Origen and the Cappadocians, the shape of the exodus narrative itself, with its recurring themes of disobedience, idolatry, wandering, and spiritual struggle, was tremendously compelling.

And of course, we have the narrative arc created by the canonical presentation of the complex and discontinuous poetry of the Song of Songs.

I always joke with seminarians that the Song of Songs is one book of the Bible where modern historical scholarship can’t help you understand the text much better than the ancients did.

Paradoxically, although modern readers claim to be “right” about our reading of the text as explicitly sexual, against the perplexing prudishness and wrong-headedness of the medieval commentators, in churches today it is a text we tend to ignore, rather than placing it at the heart of spirituality and liturgy, or even in association with other biblical texts, such as the Apocalypse or the gospel parables, in the way that they did.

Seitz noted that in Tiberian Masoretic or old Spanish manuscripts, the Song of Songs was thrown together in the same set of writings as Lamentations, and I was immediately reminded of the early medieval exegete, the Carolingian Paschasius Radbertus, who wrote a commentary on Lamentations that juxtaposed it with the Song of Songs.

It is an unexpected pairing until one actually reads the language of both texts closely, and realizes just how many common elements they in fact share.

As a Christian, I am drawn to Seitz’s idea that “the monotheism of the Elder Scripture is inherently dynamic and relational” (198).

Even more directly, he then argues that the Elder Scripture “is marked by the refusal to countenance anything but one God, but at the same time, and precisely because of this claim, to understand the one God’s personal relating to creation and his Son, Israel, as a uniquely prepared adumbration and anticipation of what Christian confession will call Trinity” (216).

Alongside the idea of the “elder scripture,” it is an interesting tactic to dismantle Christian, and in particular, Protestant chronological snobbery and argue for the uniformity of scriptural witness and the value of early Christian biblical interpretation.

I hope it will be of help in the seminary classroom and as an introduction to some important themes in patristic exegesis.

What follows is not a review, properly speaking, of Seitz’s The Elder Testament, but an attempt to reflect on what I take to be its more provocative theses, not only for classic forms of historical-critical reflection upon the OT, but also for evangelical modernism, especially its understanding of “the Jesus event” in relation to the OT’s christological witness and its efficacy. To be sure, this issue forms something of a recurring subtext in Seitz’s book, the thrust of which the author himself summarizes as “a commentary on critical method with an appeal to taking seriously the ontology of the Old Testament—its unique presentation of monotheism—as this opens onto theological formulation” (4). Engaging with a number of OT texts, Seitz argues that the theological pressure at work in the OT’s ontology of wisdom and its presentation of God’s oneness gave rise to a Trinitarian grammar in the apostolic church—a grammar that was not merely “anticipatory” of later developments in the NT, nor a “potential” source of ideas for establishing Nicene discourse. Rather, this grammar was the sine qua non for the church’s trinitarian confession, constraining as well as enabling apostolic confession in the NT, along with the early church’s later creeds and confessions.1 The church’s Trinitarian confession, then, is not “a retrospective overlay” (6) on the OT’s witness, or a piece of reverse engineering from the NT side of things, but native to its presentation of God’s oneness.

That said, the efficacy of the OT’s christological witness in relation to “the Christ event,” or the historical event of incarnation, follows a similar logic, at least as Seitz portrays it. Thus, it is not the historical event of the incarnation or the body of Christ per se that enables recognition and “noetic grasp” of his identity, but Israel’s scriptures, since as Seitz puts it,

The incarnation is as much an act of obfuscation as it is of disclosure for those who walked with or encountered Jesus. The same could be said of the resurrection. Who is this Risen Lord, and how is he to be known? In both cases we are told that the scriptures are critical, indeed indispensable, to noetic grasp. “You search the scriptures and it is they that speak of me.” “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in the scriptures all the things concerning himself.” Proximity to the incarnate or risen Jesus is not chronological privilege at all. Jesus Christ is who he is by disclosure of the Holy Spirit, who spake by the prophets. (128)

Since I regard this issue to be one of the more controversial (and misunderstood) aspects of Seitz’s book, my response will focus on unpacking the logic at work in this claim, especially the challenge it offers to the empirical positivism at work in contemporary approaches to the incarnation.

The first thing to be observed is that while controversial for late moderns in various ecclesial locations, Seitz’s approach finds precedent in the tradition of the early church, going back at least as far as Origen, indeed, to the NT itself. The fact that this is typically missed in many of the responses to his book is difficult to explain, though the larger theological and hermeneutical impact of the so-called Quest for the Historical Jesus upon the discipline of biblical studies is probably a factor. In the theological context generated by this movement, “the Christ event” functions as the unveiling of his identity, which in turn justifies the tremendous amount of historical labor expended in recovering that event.2 For the early church, however, the historical event of Christ’s incarnation did not disclose his identity and glory, but veiled it. The church has always recognized this and used it to explain Christ’s general rejection by the world, not to mention the misunderstandings of his own disciples in the gospels. Even the transfiguration remained opaque to Peter.

In an age dominated by a modern orientation toward the future,3 OT Christology is typically identified with what lies in the future, on the “other side” of Israel’s scriptures in “the Jesus event,” rather than the original voice and context of those scriptures per se. Consequently, the OT provides no access to Christ on its own semantic level or original context, but speaks only of a future access made possible in the first instance, not by Christ’s prior identity as the eternal Word and Wisdom of God (Gen 1:1; Prov 8:22–26; John 1:1), but by Christ’s historical advent in the flesh (John 1:14). Much of this misguided approach to understanding the relation of the incarnation to the OT in our day derives from a basic failure to appreciate the redemptive purpose of the incarnation, as well as the indispensable role played by Israel’s scriptures in securing the noetic recognition of Christ’s incarnate identity. The end result is to transform the theological function of incarnation into a warrant for the noetic superiority of the NT people of God over against biblical Israel.

Of course, one can see or know “more” about the promised Christ of the OT standing where the four NT evangelists stand, in comparison with the OT prophets—provided, of course, that one perceives the earthly Christ through the eyes of faith and in light of the OT’s witness to him. As Origen rightly noted long ago, Pilate and Judas saw the body of Christ, but they did not come to enjoy or know this “more,” because they failed to perceive his identity as the Word. Encountering Christ in the flesh gave them no advantage over others, because they lacked the spiritual vision faith provides.4 The problem lies there, along with the failure to understand Israel’s scriptures, rather than a supposed deficiency in the OT’s witness to Christ that the incarnation or the resurrection was intended to fix.5 That said, this “more” or surplus meaning cannot be used to establish a position of noetic superiority over the OT and biblical Israel, because it arises from the inexhaustible and “built-in” semantic riches of Israel’s scriptures. The insights made possible by the new historical events of the NT era do not arise from an alleged “doxa” provided by the incarnation, which in any case veiled Christ’s divine glory and identity, rather than disclosing it.6 Rather, they arise from the built-in semantic riches of the OT. Thus, the evangelists can see further than the prophets, but this is not because they have keener vision or greater height, but because they have been lifted up by the witness of the prophets, that is, by the hidden surplus inherent in the OT and unveiled in the NT. Augustine put it well long ago: “The New is hidden in the Old, and in the New, the Old is unveiled.”7 The christological and soteriological insights of the NT are genuinely new, though at the same time a manifestation of the “ontological ambition” and “single, original, and ambitious providential scope” embedded within the OT’s literal sense.8 The French OT scholar Paul Beauchamp attempted to express the paradox involved in this with the incisive observation that there is “no novelty so original as this.”9

Over against this traditional account stands the late modern notion that this “more” does not arise from the inexhaustible and hidden riches of the OT, now read in light of Christ, but from “the Christ event” and the NT’s witness to that event. This raises a question: Was it possible for biblical Israel to come into union with Christ the Word by faith without “the Christ event,” where the latter is understood as a historical event that has not yet occurred in the OT? My sense is that early church figures like Origen would have answered yes, because for him, the scriptures of both testaments are the literary flesh of Christ. On this view there is a real sense in which we may speak of the “event” of Christ as that which occurs in the scriptures (including Israel’s scriptures) prior to and after the incarnation. Thus, faith in the OT Word of promise was not a form of time travel that displaced the OT saints from their historical context in order to place them in the NT era, but that which united them with the totus Christus and his benefits in their own day. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that, like the OT saints before them, NT saints do not directly commune with the earthly body of Christ, but await the promise of his coming (1 Pet 1:8). Since they are also positioned in an economy where the earthly body of Christ is also absent, I see no difference between NT and OT saints as far as the mode of access to the reality of Christ is concerned. In both testaments access to this reality is by faith, not by sight, and blessed are those who believe but have not seen (John 20:29; cf. Rom 10:17; 2 Cor 5:7). And in both testaments the reality of Christ is presented and mediated to the people of God through word and sacrament (cf. 1 Cor 10:1–4).

To be sure, OT Israel had a different historical experience of Christ than NT saints do. But to say that Israel’s experience of Christ was different is one thing; to imply that it was inadequate is another. The judgment that Israel’s experience of Christ was not only different, but developmentally inferior, rests on the assumption that we as Gentile outsiders now included in God’s marriage covenant with Israel are in a position to justify such a judgment. Biblical Israel was in a marriage covenant with the Lord. Like any marriage, there is an intimate knowing between the husband and wife that others do not enjoy. Stated in terms of Seitz’s argument, biblical Israel had a privileged access to what it means to know the Lord, because the Lord chose her (election-disclosure). Later on, NT Gentiles are included in this marriage covenant, and they come to know the Lord (adoption-disclosure). But as Paul makes clear, Gentiles are “outsiders” who are coming into a previously existing marriage covenant. Their later inclusion is not a warrant for quantifying what Israel did and did not know in the original marriage covenant.10

In a healthy marriage, my son doesn’t know me better than my wife does, nor is he in a place to know how much my wife knows about me. That is privileged information my wife and I enjoy as insiders to the marriage relation, and which outsiders cannot fully measure or quantify. This is not to say my son doesn’t know me. He just knows me in a different way than my wife does, and that difference is not a warrant for quantifying what she knows about me. Yet we often find the NT church (and its scholars) doing “biblical theology” on the basis of this assumption. It’s as though the difference Israel’s marriage covenant and election makes for knowing the Lord is erased by the later inclusion of Gentiles who have been adopted into the marriage relation. These later adoptees not only want to flatten out the differences between Israel’s knowing and their knowing, they also do not hesitate to assume that they are in a position to take the measure of what Israel knew. Israel’s knowledge was not simply different, but deficient, and they are therefore “superior” to OT Israel and her knowledge. Such a stance assumes that “knowledge advances unidirectionally” as one moves from the OT to the NT, rather than being an “expansively contemporaneous” reality in both testaments.11 This “progressive” pedagogy inevitably fails to appreciate the fact that our reception of OT knowledge is like drinking from a fountain: we inevitably leave behind more than we take away. As a result, the knowledge gained from God’s providential dealings with OT Israel ceases to inform, let alone judge, the NT church in its continuing struggle with the sins of idolatry and schism.

The whole idea of measuring the different ways OT Israel and the NT church knew Christ is folly to begin with, and smacks of modernism’s idea that epistemology trumps ontology (Kant). However, the saints of God are not saved by what they know, but by faith in God’s promises in both testaments. On this approach, the christological witness and efficacy of the OT does not depend in the first instance upon acts of human cognition or recognition,12 but on the providential linkages the Lord establishes between the Word of OT promise and the Word made flesh in time.13 Over against this traditional account of the OT’s christological efficacy,14 virtually every evangelical gnostic I’ve known assumes that Christ came in the flesh to fix an epistemological or “knowledge problem” in Israel’s scriptures. Apart from the things this assumes about the “knowing” Israel enjoyed as the Lord’s spouse, the NT itself makes it clear that this is not the purpose for which the eternal Word and Wisdom of God assumed flesh in time. Christ came to redeem the people of God in both testaments (Mark 10:45; Luke 19:10; 1 Tim 1:15), not to apply a “hotfix” to so-called “knowledge issues” with Israel’s scriptures. What this implies is that the purpose of the NT writings was to bear witness to and illumine the new historical events associated with Christ’s person and work (incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension)—not to subject the OT to a retrospective sorting out on the basis of a “superior” vantage point allegedly made possible by the incarnation. Though this topic is a subtext running through many of the book’s chapters, it should help us appreciate Seitz’s location within the larger catholic tradition of scriptural reading, while at the same time recognizing his continuing commitment to the tools and practices of “close reading” fostered by his training in modern historical methods.