I guess we can fall down both on our exegesis – “what did the text mean to it’s original hearers?” and our hermeneutic – “how do we respond to the text?” I can understand, say, the Deuteronomy purity laws without then assuming that I’m under an obligation to abstain from shellfish. I’m not under that obligation, because I’m not a party to the OT covenant. (Actually, I’m antinomian to the extent that I don’t even take the 10 commandments as normative for the Christian, but that’s possibly drifting off-topic.)

Keep up the good work, I’m appreciating your commentary on all this.

I’m thinking about that old types-and-shadows method of biblical interpretation… not too fond of that one. It seems to me that it sets up a situation where only a specialist with particular esoteric insight would be able to “properly” interpret the biblical text — not to mention that it ignores the principle that the text “cannot mean now what it never meant then.” It seems in some ways a gnostic idea that the text would contain hidden knowledge that later enlightenment would reveal.

Charismatics love their types and shadows, and that needs to go: it’s eisegesis rather than exegesis (reading into the text rather than from the text).

The way it works for scripture to interpret scripture it to take an understanding of what the OT meant to its original hearers and then read the NT. Understanding the OT background causes the NT to explode with a “bigger-picture” meaning, which only then allows a deeper understanding of some of the OT themes. But you have to start chronologically… when Jesus said a particular thing to a Jewish audience, why did he say it, or why were they offended? Understand that from the OT and it informs what’s going on in the NT, which (only) then deepens one’s understanding of God’s intent in the OT.

I know it sounds like only a very subtle change I’m suggesting, but it’s an important one because it has led to misreading and misinterpreting the OT, and doctrines are then built on the misunderstanding… like David’s Tabernacle and all kinds of weirdness. One must begin with the OT, then the NT, and only then reconsider the OT… but the reconsideration must not do violence to the way the original hearers would have interpreted it. I highly doubt that Moses would say, “Here’s the Torah, which is good stuff — and it’ll be even better in 8,000 years when your descendants really start to understand it.”

One last bit and then I’ll stop. The OT speaks of a messiah to come, and some of the characteristics of this messiah are given. Understanding what the Jewish people were waiting for based on their understanding of the OT at the time helps us see how Jesus fulfills the criteria — and in some cases, how the Jewish nation missed it. This way, when Jesus quotes a particular bit of OT scripture or the events of the gospels allude to something in the OT, we can understand that as a messianic claim. Remove that understanding, and the messianic proof is down to what Jesus said and the miracles. Take those two proofs into the modern day — “hypothetically,” let’s say someone calls himself an apostle and a healing miracle occurs when he prays. If those two proofs alone were adequate for Jesus and him, it would add implied credence to whatever our hypothetical apostle teaches… no matter how outlandish or heretical.

In other words, all of scripture, old and new, points us relentlessly back to Jesus. Which I guess is Dan’s first point.