Dr. Richard Gaffin has written a knock-out piece describing what is at stake in the recent retirement of Professor Doug Green at WTS (hat tip Nick Batzig).
Now, I have known for a long time that there were two different appraisals of Vos’s contribution to biblical theology. One version says that the Old Testament needs to be read first as if no New Testament existed (the so-called first reading). Only then is it followed by a second reading that takes the New Testament into account. This second reading is usually compared to Second Temple Jewish readings of the Old Testament that are in most ways “surprise” endings to the story. This is called the “Christotelic” hermeneutic. I firmly believe that the Christotelic version actually distorts Vos. One way to ask the question is this: are there any dead ends in the Old Testament? Is there any passage that does not speak of Christ?
The answer is that there are no dead ends. John 5 and Luke 24 prove this. We do not mean by this that Jesus is the antitype of every single element in the Old Testament. Rather, we mean that Jesus is the culmination of the entire story, and that the entire story progresses to Jesus. This involves the correct balance between ultimate truth and progressive development. The true reading of Vos involves an organic inter-related holistic approach to biblical interpretation, where Jesus is the natural outworking of the progressive nature of the Old Testament development.
However, I realized only recently that I still had some remaining shackles of the Christotelic interpretation, as I had until recently still thought of the “2 readings” of the Old Testament as valid. “Christocentric” is ultimately a better word for the true Vossian version of biblical theology than “Christotelic.” Read the article. You will be glad you did. The reports of the death of biblical theology at Westminster Theological Seminary have been greatly exaggerated.
David Gadbois
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paigebritton
Reed Here
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Ron Henzel
Green Baggins 