This is a question I’ve spent a little bit of time pondering lately, especially on separating translation issues from faith practice or application issues. That is, can I hold onto a position whereby OT translation should primarily focus on the original intent and context, while at the same time believing Christ to be the complete fulfillment of some of those OT passages and understanding that to read the OT and NT scriptures together as a Christian often means reading Christ back into the OT?

After working through examples from Psalm 51 and Genesis 12, Ray comes to his conclusion:

From my perspective, the intertextual approach is most consistent with Christian tradition.  Excising Christ from the OT is a curious innovation of the past 200 years in the West.  To my knowledge, nearly all of the early church fathers read the OT christologically–that is, through Christian eyes, seeing shadows and types (see Hebrews 8:5) of Christ, the church, the Holy Spirit, the sacraments, and eternal life.

It is unfortunate that Christian translators have emphasized the disunity of the Bible in recent years.  It has led to a fragmenting of the church into those who read a Christian Bible unified by the work of the Holy Spirit, and those who read a book made up of various witnesses from various historical and theological viewpoints that may or may not be related to each other.

Certainly, when it comes to producing a Bible in English, there is more than one way to skin a cat.  But how we do the skinning comes with tremendous responsibility to not just translate words and phrases, but to be faithful in our presentation of God’s Word to the world.

What do you think? Can a Christian read the Holy Bible as a unified document and maintain sensitivity to the original meaning or context of the OT? Or does our faith demand that we interpret the OT texts in a specific way?

The functional hermeneutic suggests that the things we view as structural objects to Creation, e.g. light, water, plants, animals, all have an overlying function or reason for their being. For example, the function of light was to establish time as an organizing principle of the universe. Rather than only viewing Genesis 1 as the definite creation of objects, of things, we should instead can perhaps also read it as God creating organizing principles of function and purpose where there was only purposeless chaos before.

Christ’s sacrifice is described in Revelation [13:8] and 1 Peter [1:19-20] as predestined from before the foundation of the world. This suggests that the function of atonement was also established during Creation, such that it would be Natural for mankind to need to be reconciled to God. After the inevitable Fall, the OT describes in much detail a (imperfect) sacrificial system established by God for the atonement of sins. Christ came later as the perfect fulfillment of that system.

Placing this system within the functional hermeneutic, is it not fair to say that atonement (or salvation or redemption) is an overlying function of God’s relationship to Creation, but that the actual sacrifice of atonement (aka expiation or propitiation) is a structure? We are saved/redeemed within the context of whatever structure God has made available for us: for the OT Jews, it was the sins were atoned for (expiated) by the physical sacrificial system; for Christians, the gift of grace through faith in Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection.

I would caution against the suggestion that this allows for the possibility of other redemptive structures in other religions. The point of a function-driven account of Creation is that the relationship between God and his people is set apart from other cultures and systems. The lineage of faith through the Bible establishes this remnant, not the population of the entire world. Salvation is a function of God’s Kingdom; those who live outside of His kingdom do not experience the purpose of redemption.

As those living within the Kingdom, should our focus be on the function or the structure? We are saved by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to live in the Kingdom and give glory to God. That is our purpose, our function, as Christians. To fulfill that role, should we primarily be looking back at the cross or looking forward to Kingdom life? I suggest the latter, but that the observance of the sacrament of communion is our reflection on the structure and event of the cross.

The NT suggests this pattern as well. The gospels look back to the cross, establishing the reason and structure, the what, of our salvation. The letters and epistles are functional, answering the question of how we fulfill our purpose of living in the Kingdom. The apocalypse, Revelation, provides hope for the future of the remnant, answering the question of why we live in the Kingdom.

There is huge debate about this performance, and to watch it is to be disturbed, but it seems to me that Furtwängler is actually pressing the score to the point where actually the music begins to break down (deconstruct). Is this someone who knows that the music being played, and the context in which that happens, are inimical to each other, so much so that the music collapses? The fury of the final bars suggest someone who is struggling to keep control We will never know (but note if you stick to the end how he shakes Goebbel’s hand and then wipes his hand with a hankerchief).

In his comments, Sean notes that “the comparison between the act of interpreting a text and the act of performing a musical score has often been made.” He compares Furtwängler’s interpretation to a recording on original instruments by John Eliot Gardiner and concludes that “Gardiner is the exegete, Furtwängler the preacher.” I dare say that Sean could not have picked two examples further away from each other on the interpretative scale. Gardiner is clinical, every detail is exposed in its proper place and the score proceeds as literally written by the composer. Furtwängler is flexible, bending, shaping and drawing out phrases to fit his view of the musical text.

As one who leaned in the past toward the immovable interpretation, a la Gardiner, but especially that of Otto Klemperer and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, I tended to shake off the more fluid interpreters like Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Leonard Bernstein et al. However my recent shift to more “dynamic” translation texts may also indicate a willingness to engage these latter personalities. Indeed, this is a hermeneutic comparison close to my heart on several levels and one that I also should explore in greater detail.