Hebrew Scripture Theology

It was George Tyrell (not Albert Schweitzer)* who wrote: “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.” (George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads [London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1910], p. 44) The notion that we generally find what we’re looking for has a long history in scholarship!

On the other hand (!), I don’t think that is what we were talking about yesterday. The issue is rather one of posing questions to documents which they were not (in historical terms) written to answer. Once the first Christians were confronted with making sense of “who Jesus was/is, and did/does”, then naturally they looked to the scriptures for guidance. The New Testament itself is witness to the connections made which allowed the church better to understand Jesus’ life and mission.

Or, to put it another way, one can ask a “historical” (even hermeneutical) question about how it was that early Christians looked to these texts, and not other ones, in order to give shape to their understanding of Jesus the Christ. When answering that question, we can see that the “messianic” texts already held within them hints, anticipations, foreshadowings, of a figure that the Christians saw embodied in Jesus.

This, I take it, is something quite different than simply finding what we want! And hopefully helps us towards achieving the [ahem!] “learning outcome” of “understanding of how key HB/OT texts inform theological debate”.

DjR

--
* To be sure, in reviewing older “life of Jesus” studies, Schweitzer had written: “Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make Him live.
But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character.”

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: A. & C. Black, Ltd., 1910), p. 4.