02 - The Christian's Attitude Toward the OT

The Christian’s Attitude Toward the Old Testament.

The Christian’s attitude towards the Old Testament is determined by the teachings of the Saviour. In the Old Testament books, lost, as it were, among the Mosaic books that set forth the Law and determined the stan­dards of everyday life, Christ has shown us a higher, unexcelled, eternal commandment: Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy hearty and with all thy soul ana with all thy mind… and the second is like it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself (Matthew 22:37; Matthew 22:39). He also said: Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of Me (John 5:39). The unquestionable value of these Scriptures, for us Christians, even more than for the Jews, is determined by this testimo­ny concerning Christ. As to individual books of the Old Testament, they acquire significance for us depending upon their relative worth as school masters which bring us unto Christ (Galatians 3:24), i.e., teachers who lead to Christ the chosen portion of humanity, as the Apostle Paul puts it. Some aspects of the Old Testament remained relevant only until the time of reformation, i.e., until the coming of the Saviour (Hebrews 9:8-10). The Apos­tle Paul writes that the establishment of the New Testament made the first old (Hebrews 8:13). We find the limitations of the Old Testament conception of God especially in those passages in the Old Testament books where, for example, God’s allowing the cruel slaughter of foreigners by the people of Israel is taken as a command of God, as we read for example, in the book of Joshua. The weakness, the relativity of religious and moral conceptions corresponding to the infantile and youthful state of humanity and ancient Judaism, damaged moreover by sin from time immemorial, are frequent­ly expressed there, even in those cases when they are sanctioned by the name of God. Nevertheless, even these facts do not mean that the Old Testament loses its value in Christianity. This can be seen by all in the way that the Church treasures the texts of the books of the Old Testament, how it guards their every letter. Two thousand years have passed since the Old Testament period came to an end. Yet still, unchangingly, the Psalter is read at all the divine services in Orthodox churches, and just as unchangingly, it would seem, are preserved words which are foreign to us - Israel, Sion, tribe of Judah, tribe of Ephraim, the names of various ancient peo­ples: Ammonites, Moabites and others, and also, expressions which one might think of as not being essentially Christian, such as, In the morning I slew all the sinners of the land (Psalms 100:8). However, the words and the expressions have remained, but their meaning has changed. Such expres­sions have acquired a new meaning - the spiritual Israel, the heavenly Sion, the battle against the spiritual foe, spirits of wickedness in high places. It can be said that the Psalter has become the model for Christian prayer, and all of our divine services are saturated with excerpts from it and other books. The content of the Old Testament Scriptures was Christianized by the Church. Within the Church the Old Testament Scriptures have been filled with the thought of Christ, of the Cross, of the Mother of God. “Having made the sign of the Cross with his staff, Moses straightway divided the Red Sea…,” “Horse and rider did Christ cast down in the Red Sea…”; and the three youths of Babylon were saved by Christ from the fire in the fur­nace: “…Christ spread a spiritual dew upon the children that revered God…” And the Prophet Jonah was saved through the Cross: “In the belly of the beast of the waters Jonah stretched out his hands in the form of a cross…” Only for the childish mind is the Old Testament set forth as “sacred history,” as if “history” comprises its essence for a Christian. How­ever, for us adults, especially through the content of the hymnography of the divine services, a more lofty understanding of it is revealed, shadowy and prefigurative. Many of the Fathers of the Church teach us to prefer the spiritual aspect of the Bible to literal interpretation. Saint Maximus the Confessor teaches that: “In Sacred Scripture it is possible to distinguish between flesh and spirit, as if it were a person of sorts. And he that would say that the letter of the Scripture is its flesh, and its meaning its spirit or soul, would not sin against the truth. It is plain, then, that wise is he who, leaving the flesh as something corruptible, cleaveth wholly to the spirit, as something that doth not decay.” And Saint Maximus himself, in his inter­pretations of the Sacred Scriptures, emphasizes its mystical-kerygmatic meaning, leaving aside its narrative aspect as “flesh.” And the Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete chanted during the Great Fast provides us with an example of how persons and events of the Old Testament become symbols of the spiritual falls and rebirths of the Christian. However, if one does not know the contents of biblical history, one will not receive the intended edification from the elevated content of the Canon. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired. But divine inspiration is not the same as omniscience. The authors of the sacred books were men who were raised above the common religious-moral level, capable of sensing and of absorbing the inspiration of the forces of Grace, and, especially at certain moments, of rising to spiritual heights, of experiencing the illumination of mystical light, and, finally, were capable of reaching moments when they could hear unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter (2 Corinthians 12:4), which were transmitted through them, or at other times remained unexpressed and inexpressible by words. But these same Scrip­tures contain an abundance of ordinary material: sacred and popular tra­ditions, genealogies, religious and civil law, historical events, pictures of everyday life - in a word, that which the authors considered worthy of preservation in the memory of future generations as a support for their faith and spirit. In their entirety, the Sacred Scriptures are sanctified, over­shadowed by the Holy Spirit, and each of their component parts corre­sponds to the sacred contents and holy aim of the whole, as, let us say, a bird’s feather to the bodily structure of the whole bird, or as every sacred object accepted for use in a church, for they serve for the greater glory of God. We are guided by these basic conditions when we approach the theo­ries of so-called “scientific” biblical criticism of modern times.