Christ the Key to the Scriptures

The governing principle of all Orthodox exegesis: the whole of Scripture testifies to Christ. The Old Testament is read as shadow, promise, and preparation; the New as the revelation of the incarnate Word to whom the Old points. The risen Christ Himself, on the road to Emmaus, gives the Church her hermeneutic — “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Christological Key

The ultimate hermeneutical principle in Orthodox exegesis is not a method but a Person: Christ is the key to the Scriptures. All of Scripture — the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels and Epistles — is read as testifying to Him. The Old Testament is preparation for and prophecy of the Incarnation; the New Testament is the revelation of the incarnate Logos and the unfolding of His work in the Church. This christological reading is not, in the Orthodox understanding, imposed on the text from outside; it is held to be the text’s own deepest intention, disclosed by the Spirit within the Church (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001, Part I; see Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology).

The warrant is drawn from the Lord’s own words. “You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me” (John 5:39). “If you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me” (John 5:46). Christ presents Himself as the content and goal of the Scriptures of Israel — not one figure among the many they mention, but the one to whom the whole is oriented. The Orthodox conviction is that the Bible has a single divine Author whose one Word is Christ, and that the unity of the Scriptures is therefore christological through and through (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1, on Christ as the “treasure hid in the field” of the Scriptures; John Behr, The Way to Nicaea, SVS Press, 2001, on the christological reading of the Old Testament as the shared practice of the earliest Church).

The Road to Emmaus

The paradigmatic scene of Christian interpretation is the road to Emmaus on the evening of the Resurrection (Luke 24:13–35). The risen Christ, unrecognized, walks with two disheartened disciples and rebukes their slowness of heart: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:25–27). Later the disciples say, “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). And they recognize Him at last “in the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35).

The Fathers and the Orthodox tradition read this scene as programmatic in three ways at once. First, it is the risen Christ Himself who teaches the christological reading of the Old Testament — the hermeneutic is His gift, not the Church’s invention. Second, the reading of the Scriptures and the breaking of bread are joined: the same Christ who opens the Scriptures is known in the Eucharist, and the Church’s understanding of the Bible is inseparable from her liturgy (see The Bible as the Liturgical Book). Third, the burning heart names the effect of true interpretation: not information but the kindling of the heart in recognition of the Lord (Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001, on Emmaus as the model of Orthodox reading; see Scripture and the Transformation of the Reader). Emmaus is thus, for Orthodoxy, the icon of what it means to read Scripture in the Church: Christ Himself opening His own book, in the Spirit, unto communion.

Shadow, Promise, and Preparation

The Old Testament, read christologically, is understood under three related figures. It is shadow (skia): “the law having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things” (Hebrews 10:1); “which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance (sōma, ‘body’) is of Christ” (Colossians 2:17). The shadow is cast by the reality that is coming; it is real and God-given, but it is not yet the substance. The Old Testament is promise: the covenant with Abraham, the promises to David, the prophetic expectation, all pointing forward to their fulfillment (Galatians 3:16; Luke 1:70). And it is preparation (the patristic paidagōgia): “the law was our tutor (paidagōgos) to bring us to Christ” (Galatians 3:24) — God schooling His people over the long ages toward the reception of the Word made flesh. The Fathers speak of the divine “economy” (oikonomia), God’s ordered plan across salvation history, in which every stage prepares the next and all converge on Christ (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4, on the one economy and the “recapitulation” of all things in Christ, Ephesians 1:10).

This is why the Orthodox tradition insists that the Old Testament is a genuinely Christian book, not a merely Jewish prehistory later annexed. The Marcionite temptation — to sever the Old Testament from the New, to set the God of Israel against the Father of Jesus Christ — was decisively rejected in the second century precisely because it broke the christological unity of the Scriptures (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.27; 4.34, against Marcion). The Church reads the two Testaments as one book with one Author and one subject, and the deep continuity is Christ.

The Two Testaments Interpret Each Other

St. Augustine gave the classic formulation of the mutual relation of the Testaments: “the New is in the Old concealed, the Old is in the New revealed” (in Vetere Novum latet, et in Novo Vetus patet) (Augustine, Questions on the Heptateuch 2.73). The Old Testament conceals Christ within its persons, events, and institutions; the New Testament unveils Him and, in doing so, discloses what the Old was always about. This mutual illumination is the engine of typology: the Old provides the types (the typoi), the New the fulfillment (the antitypa), and each is read in the light of the other (see Typology, the Exodus, and Pascha). The Orthodox reading refuses both to collapse the Old into the New (as if the history did not matter) and to sever them (as if Christ were absent from the Old); it holds them together as promise and fulfillment, shadow and body, veiled and unveiled.

Not a Denial of the Literal Sense

The christological reading does not abolish the historical and literal sense of the Old Testament; it presupposes and completes it. The events of the Exodus really happened; David really reigned; the prophets really spoke to their own times. The Antiochene Fathers were right to insist on this (see Antioch and Alexandria). Typology in particular, as distinct from a free allegory, requires the historical reality of the type: the crossing of the Red Sea can prefigure baptism only because Israel really crossed the sea (Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, Newman Press, 1960, on typology’s dependence on real history). The christological key is thus not a solvent that dissolves the Old Testament into ideas but the light in which its full meaning appears — the meaning God intended in the events themselves, now disclosed in their fulfillment. To read Christ as the key to the Scriptures is to read the whole Bible as the one story of the one God saving His people, culminating in the Word made flesh, and to find in every part of it the burning-hearted recognition the disciples knew at Emmaus (Luke 24:32; Breck, Scripture in Tradition, 2001).

See Also

References

  • Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition: The Bible and Its Interpretation in the Orthodox Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Part I; the christological key; Emmaus as the model of reading.)
  • Daniélou, Jean. From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers. Trans. Wulstan Hibberd. London: Burns & Oates / Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960. (Typology’s dependence on real history.)
  • Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies 1.27; 4.26.1; 4.34; and Book 4 on the one economy and recapitulation (Ephesians 1:10).
  • Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea (Formation of Christian Theology, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (The early christological reading of the Old Testament.)
  • Augustine of Hippo. Questions on the Heptateuch 2.73 — “the New in the Old concealed, the Old in the New revealed.”
  • Scripture: Luke 24:13–35 (Emmaus); John 5:39, 46; Hebrews 10:1; Colossians 2:17; Galatians 3:16, 24; Ephesians 1:10.