Let me be forthrightly clear: to follow a Christologically conditioned reading of Holy Scripture is not to be, at the same time, an implicit Marcionite. It is also not to suggest that the Old Testament history is simply the Hebrew peoples’ progressive knowledge of God, and thusly their writing thereof, as if it isn’t in fact heilsgeschichte, or the story of God’s in-breaking activity all throughout ‘salvation history,’ providentially and actively orienting and working through the events of said history in order to eventuate the actualization of his pre-destination in Jesus Christ to be for the world and not against it, but with it for all eternity. And yet this is how some very sloppy people, supposed teachers of Scripture (including Brian Zahnd, Wm Paul Young, Brad Jersak, David Bentley Hart et al.), handwave in support of biblical authority without also endorsing the accuracy of the Old Testament’s reality in Jesus Christ. They seem to want to say that the Old Testament is really just the Hebrews’ reflection on God as they wanted Him and thought Him to be; and that it wasn’t until Jesus showed up on the scene, who in an abstract way, takes up the OT and rewrites its reality, and its God, in light of His coming. As if the whole life of Christ is simply a sensus plenior (the full reading of Scripture unknown and even potentially drastically discontinuous with the original authors’ authorial intention). They even want to claim that like the Jesus Seminar, with their color-coded marbles, that they can use Jesus as a cipher to read the OT through; with such thrift and warrant that allows them to discern what in fact is real Scripture and what isn’t (i.e., in the Old Testament-Hebrew Bible). Higher criticize much? In reality most of these jokers are simply parroting what they have read from higher critic in chief, Peter Enns.
This kind of rubbish really shouldn’t be able to stand. It is simply post-Enlightenment rationalism and higher criticism repackaged for the 21st century mind. And this is ironic because these jokers attempt to bypass said modernity by asserting that they are really just forwarding the Bible reading practices of the early church and her respective fathers. This is ironic because their impulses are not being provided for by the church fathers or the early church in general, whatsoever! These jokers have confused some sort of style and mood of retrieval they believe they are inhabiting, with an actual reading and retrieval of the past pre-critical/modern readers of Holy Scripture. And yet their actual motivation is coming from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Teutonic higher critics of Scripture; the ones who like to positivistically and rationalistically slice and dice Scripture into petri dishes of disparate and defunct books of redaction and various forms found in the history of religions.
Rubbish I say. I have no time for such garbage. Let God be true and every man and woman a liar.