Christian Preaching of the OT #10

[This is the tenth and final post of a serialisation and slight revision of an old essay of mine, in the hope of getting some interaction from others and also making it more accessible. (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.)]

Conclusion

At the start of this series I anticipated that evangelical approaches to OT preaching would reflect a tension between the desire to see Christ in the OT (as Christians have done since the beginning) and the desire to conform to the Principlizing Bridge Paradigm as our only defence against liberal theology and post-modernism.  What I actually found was that the four authors surveyed had already resolved this tension in favour of one or the other.  Goldsworthy and Mathewson represent the extremes of their respective positions.  Greidanus and Kaiser adopt somewhat more mediating positions but still clearly remain in their respective camps.  Greidanus admits the possibility legitimacy of a Christian preaching OT sermons without reference to Jesus, but rightly questions why you should want to?  Indeed if you have the option of preaching on the un-searchable riches of Christ or any other topic, there seems no good reason for choosing another theme.  Kaiser allows that typology, a form of retrospective analogical interpretation reliant on a progressive salvation history, is occasionally legitimate but seemingly only in regard to ceremonial or symbolic events.[1]  With the notable exception of Goldsworthy, none of the authors provide adequate sermonic examples to thoroughly demonstrate their method.  Additionally both Kaiser and Mathewson refer to Greidanus’ work but don’t really engage satisfactorily with his thesis.  The weakness mentioned in this series of Kaiser and Mathewson’s treatments makes it difficult to adequately compare their methodologies with the more rigorously argued Salvation-History approach found in Goldsworthy and Greidanus.

What conclusions can thus be drawn?  Without engaging in a wider body of literature it is not possible to make decicive statements but I would argue that these books represent the tension present in contemporary  evangelical preaching of the OT between Christocentrism and the Bridge Paradigm.  That each author has resolved the tension one way or the other suggests that the demands of the two are not reconcilable, one must be subjugated to the other.  In my view those who have chosen to make the Christocentric aproach paramount have produced the most useful and appropriate method for Christian preaching of the Old Testament.  

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[1] Kaiser, Preaching and Teaching from the Old Testament, 38