Preliminary Reflections

There are several broader discussions today that we will not be able to engage in detail in the scope of this short essay, but it is worth mentioning them and making some indication of where the approach of this paper falls with respect to such discussions. Five matters merit brief reflection.

First and most fundamentally, it is as vital as it is easily forgotten that the fundamental task in reading the Scripture in a faithful way is to see what is there. Unhurried, word-by-word consideration of what a text actually says (and not what we expect or hope it to say) is the great prerequisite to hermeneutical fidelity and insight. This is one reason teachers and preachers of the Bible who have this trait yet without formal Bible training sometimes demonstrate greater insight than formally trained teachers and preachers who do not discipline themselves to slow down and notice what a text actually says. A century ago the great New Testament scholar Adolf Schlatter commended this in his call throughout his writings and ministry to hermeneutical Beobachtung (“observation”) and Wahrnemung (“perception”).15

Christocentric hermeneutics is a sophisticated enterprise and we all stand on the shoulders of others, but we should not talk about it as a new gnosis, a secret way to read the Bible that remains unavailable to the uninitiated. The basic key to healthy Christocentric hermeneutics, as to any particular hermeneutic, is simply to read the Bible—the whole Bible, and each part in light of that whole—and notice what you see.

Second, we recognize the wealth of literature among Old Testament scholars themselves on how to read the Old Testament. Should a text be read only in its immediate historical context? Should broader redemptive history—the unfolding storyline of the mighty acts of God in our space and time continuum to save a people to himself—be integrated into a reading of an Old Testament text? Should a text be read “once” or “twice”? That is, should we allow for a New Testament perspective on reading an Old Testament text, but only on “second reading,” after it has first been read on its own terms and in its own immediate context, as an original reader would have understood the text? From yet other hermeneutical quarters: Should a text be read “canonically”—that is, with respect to the entire finished form of Scripture, but without worrying too much about the historical process by which the canon has come down to us?16

14_{In two other places in the OT we find a similar pair of questions and answers—Psalm 24:3–6 and Isaiah}

33:14–16. Yet in both of these other texts, unlike Psalm 15, the summons to upright living is immersed in a context rich in celebration of the redemptive work of God. Psalm 15 therefore stands out as particularly challenging to handle in a redemptive way.

15A theme of Werner Neuer, Adolf Schlatter: Ein Leben für Theologie und Kirche (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1996).

One contemporary voice carrying forward this specific emphasis of Schlatter’s is Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study, Studies in Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006).

16_{A good place to begin to get a sense of the issues here would be Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed., Theological Inter-}

This is a constellation of discussion points in which it would be easy to get bogged down. In any case I am not an Old Testament scholar and my competence in these discussions would be minimal anyway. My main concern is more immediately practical: how the New Testament coaches us in reading a text such as Psalm 15, and how that informs our actual reading of the Bible and teaching and preaching of it. I will simply say for the sake of clarity that the approach of this paper is that it is not only permissible but obligatory that Christians read the Old Testament in light of the whole Scripture and supremely the coming of Christ, as sanctioned and modeled by the apostles’ admittedly diverse use of the Old Testament. Jesus Christ himself is, as Motyer put it, “the master theme of the Bible.”17 I further suggest

that this is best done when the immediate historical and literary contexts are paid close attention. Thus the “micro” (grammatical-historical) and the “macro” (biblical-theological) dimensions to reading an Old Testament text are not in competition but complementary and mutually inter-dependent. Both are vital to interpretive fidelity. A Christian hermeneutic is grammatical-historical-biblical-theological. It is both exegetical and sythetic, focusing on both the trees (indeed, individual twigs) and the forest. But Jesus and the apostles leave us with the inescapable conclusion that the Old Testament is to be read as part of a whole and not on its own now that we stand on this side of Christ’s coming.18 To read the

Bible in this way is not allegorical, because Jesus and the apostles teach us to read the Old Testament as historically linked with the New Testament; an allegorical approach would be one that seizes on mere verbal or conceptual links that are ripped out of more meaningful organically historical linkage.19

Third, beginning to move more specifically to Psalm 15, it should be noted that this text is not quoted and probably not alluded to in the New Testament.20 This raises the question of whether and

how to understand Psalm 15 in the light of the New Testament, since we have no explicit apostolic

17_{Alec Motyer, Look to the Rock: An Old Testament Background to Our Understanding of Christ (Leicester,}

Eng.: InterVarsity, 1996), 19. Motyer says Christ “is himself the grand theme of the ‘story-line’ of both Testaments, the focal point giving coherence to the total ‘picture’ in all its complexities. . . . He is the climax as well as the sub- stance and centre of the whole” (ibid., 22).

18_{Among the voluminous literature promulgating this general conviction one might look especially to Sidney}

Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament: A Contemporary Hermeneutical Method (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Graeme Goldsworthy, Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture: The Application of Biblical Theology to Expository Preaching (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); G. K. Beale, A New Testament Bibli- cal Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011). N. T. Wright makes the point that whether one takes the OT according to Hebrew or according to English book order, the OT is a story in search of an ending (N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion [New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 90–91.

19Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Theological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (trans. D. H.

Madvig; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), esp. ch. 1.

20_{The listed OT citations in NA28 suggest Ps 15:2 (“He who walks blamelessly and does what is right and}

speaks truth in his heart”) could be seen as echoed in John 8:40 (due to a reference to speaking the truth), Acts 10:35 (due to a reference to one who “does what is right and acceptable”), and Hebrews 11:33 (due to a reference to enforcing justice) (Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th Revised Edition: Based on the Work of Eberhard and Erwin Nestle, ed. B. and K. Aland, J. Karavidopoulos, C. M. Martini, and B. M. Metzger [Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesell- schaft, 2012], 851). But these verbal associations are all of a sufficiently broad and general nature that it is unlikely these are deliberate allusions to this particular psalm in any deliberate way. The most one could say is that these NT texts function out of a common “encyclopedia of production,” or shared universe of language and categories (Stefan Alkier, “Intertextuality and the Semiotics of Biblical Texts,” in Reading the Bible Intertextually, ed. Richard B. Hays, Stefan Alier, and Leroy A. Huizenga [Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009], 3–21). My comments in this footnote are informed by the work of Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven: Yale

treatment of the text to emulate. This tension causes some scholars, such as Richard Longenecker, to be hesitant about seeking to employ apostolic hermeneutical strategies with Old Testament texts not explicitly addressed in the New Testament. The present essay aligns instead with scholars such Greg Beale, who argue that the apostles give us representative models for how to read the Old Testament—a diverse assortment of models, to be sure—and that the faithful reader under the guidance of the Spirit can confidently read the Old Testament mindful of Christ under this apostolic tutelage, even texts to which the New Testament does not itself explicitly refer.21 I read Psalm 15, in other words, through the

guidance of the apostles extrapolated out to Old Testament passages not specifically engaged. We are coached in handling Old Testament passages that the apostles do not cite by paying close attention to how they handle those Old Testament passages that they do cite.

Fourth, the Bible is inexhaustibly rich and this essay is not meant to displace other possible ways to treat a text such as Psalm 15. Multiple valid perspectives or approaches to this text should be encouraged, of which this article is one offering.22 To speak of multiple valid perspectives on a text is not to fall into

some sort of reader-response or poststructuralist hermeneutic that allows readers to find whatever they wish to see in the text in a way that is beyond critique. It is rather to acknowledge that every reader is located in time and space, with certain individual and community history, with a certain temperament, and so on. The text does not change; but the context in which it is read does change. Someone who has been converted to Christ out of a life of corrupt money-handling will find a certain force and meaning in that emphasis of Psalm 15. On the other hand, someone who has never borrowed or lent money but whose besetting sin is the use of the tongue may find that emphasis particularly meaningful. And so on. Fifth and finally, and continuing to zero in on Psalm 15, there are two equally unhelpful ways to handle a text such as this. One extreme we could call a crass moralizing and the other extreme a strict Lutheranizing.

By “crass moralizing” I mean a reading that extracts the ethical summons of the text without any broader recourse to the text’s place in redemptive history which culminates in Christ’s saving work, consideration of audience, and other indications of the redemptive backdrop against which such a text belongs. This approach functions out of a naïve anthropological optimism and simply asks what the text is instructing me to do, and then seeks to go out and do it. It is reading a text like an entry in a dictionary, in which context is irrelevant, rather than like a paragraph in a novel, in which context is everything. By “strict Lutheranizing” I mean a hyper-focus on one’s inability to perfectly discharge the summons of the text. This is the hermeneutical tunnel-vision that reads every imperative in terms of the second use of the law, the law as a mirror in which one sees one’s own moral inability. It functions out of a dour anthropological pessimism. It is the refusal to maintain a distinction between meaningful if imperfect obedience, on the one hand, and perfect obedience on the other hand. Instead, sinful depravity and University Press, 1989); idem, Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014); idem, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016).

21See the contributions of Longenecker and Beale and others in The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?

Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New, ed. G. K. Beale (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

22_{We are helped here by the writings of Vern Poythress and John Frame; see esp. Vern S. Poythress, Sym-}

phonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2001); idem, Redeeming Philosophy: A God-Centered Approach to the Big Questions (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), ch. 7; John M. Frame, Perspectives on the Word of God: An Introduction to Christian Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999); idem, “Backgrounds to My Thought,” in Speaking the Truth in Love: The Theology of John M. Frame, ed. J. J. Hughes (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2009), 9–30.

sinless perfection are the only two moral categories in play. This approach has difficulty retaining a category for, say, Noah in the Old Testament, or Simeon in the New: each of whom, while sharing in humanity’s fallenness more generally, is described as a righteous, godly man (Gen 6:9; Luke 2:25).

The temptation toward either of these two inversely related errors lies in the fact that there is truth to each. It is not that each is completely void of truthfulness but rather that each grasps a part of the truth and erects it as the whole truth, creating a misshapen hermeneutic. We should take a text and ask what we are called to do in light of it—lest, as James says, we become hearers but not doers of the word (James 1:22). And we should be ever aware of our wayward diseased hearts and our inability to obey God perfectly even as regenerate Christians—it was of the covenant people that Isaiah remarked, “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa. 64:6). To take the text before us: Psalm 15 is

richly moralizing, if what we mean by that is that it summons us into deeply moral realities and the dignity of real virtue. And Psalm 15 is, from one perspective, law-that-cannot-be-kept; no one does it perfectly. But neither of these is the only thing to be said. To take either as the exclusive message is one- dimensional and reductionistic.

And yet the alternative to either of them is not simply splitting the difference—melding together a bit of moralizing with a bit of the second use of the law. Psalm 15 and similar texts are indeed full and rich and deep in their moral summons, and this summons ought not to be watered down or avoided. And such texts do portray a godly integrity that sobers us with a reminder of our weakness and frequent failure to live consistently in such a way. The question is how to do justice to both realities.