Cinderblock walls held back the swirling dust outside, and lights dangled by black and red wires flickering just enough light to see the rough-surfaced chalk board. By this point in time, I had grown used to the different classroom environment at the seminary where my family and I were serving. However, I was still regularly caught off guard by the strange questions asked by students as we studied the Old Testament. In this context, the questions were different than the ones I studied in seminary. As I wrestled alongside a cohort of young, bright future leaders, I realized that despite these differences, they were still centered upon how the Scriptures of ancient Israel were relevant to a modern, African Christian context. I did not always feel the same tension as my students because my church tradition back in America had largely ignored the Old Testament text, save a few epic stories. Perhaps I didn’t get where they were coming from because I didn’t take the text as seriously as they did. In that concrete classroom I realized the Christian struggle with the Old Testament was not a culturally specific one, and at that time I decided I wanted to spend my life to researching, learning, and teaching how the Old Testament is indeed Christian Scripture.
In the years that have followed that experience, I have come to understand that even from the earliest moments of church history, followers of Jesus were not in total agreement as to how to reconcile their new covenant status with the Jewish Scriptures (think about the council in Acts 15!). While there might have been disagreement on the method, or even the results, two thousand years of church history bear witness to the fact that Christians have never stopped trying. Jesus read and taught the Old Testament Scriptures as the Word of God, having authority, relevance for his audience, and even pointing toward himself (Luke 24:44). He actually said his coming did not “abolish the Law and the Prophets” (another way of referencing Israel’s Scriptures).
While the desire to read and interpret the Old Testament never left the early Christian tradition, the form it took was quite different from what we have come to know. Early interpreters like Origen and Augustine have become infamous for their allegorical readings of the Old and New Testaments. Their interpretations of Noah’s Ark or the Good Samaritan are now low-hanging fruit for hermeneutics professors seeking to demonstrate the absurdity and outlandishness of allegorical reading. However, if this is so crazy to us, why did it make so much sense to them? In our worst moments, we might actually be guilty of Lewis’s famous indictment of the modern spirit—“chronological snobbery.” They were okay with these allegorical readings, we think, because they just were ancient simpletons and didn’t understand the world—the real world—the way we do nowadays. Hopefully, you can see how patronizing and absurd this is.
A better answer to the interpretive dissonance lies in the realm of metaphysics. Whether we know it or not, we read our own assumptions about reality into the Bible. Having been shaped by the modern—and now postmodern—spirit of the West, we bring these metaphysical categories of reality to bear on the Bible, whether we know it or not. This is why many, if they’re honest, struggle to embrace the supernatural nature of the Bible and the miraculous stories found therein. There is a metaphysical gap between a secular materialistic universe and a divinely infused world where spirits are real, and God reigns supreme. But this gap did not exist in pre-modern times, nor does it exist in much of the world today. For much of human history, the average person has seen the world as a profoundly spiritual place—a place where the unseen and seen converge and causation is not always understood in a closed cause-and-effect chain of events. The dualistic metaphysics of the Early Church led them to see reality as always pointing something beyond what is visible. The world before them was real, but not the most real. The tangible pointed toward the intangible, and it was the intangible that was the most valuable.
Just like us, early readers imported their own metaphysics of reality into their Bible reading. If you live in a world where everything represents something more and points toward something greater, why would you not ask the same questions of the biblical text? The allegorical Old Testament interpretations of church history are not failed, infantile attempts at exegesis. They are evidence of Christians long ago doing what we are doing today—living and reading with our own view of reality, trying to understand how the Old Testament speaks of Christ, and contextualizing that message for a new generation. Instead of snickering at their allegorical constructions, perhaps we can appreciate and learn from their desire to move beyond a simple, plain reading of the text in an effort to plumb the spiritual depths of the Word of God. While we might not agree with their metaphysical assumptions or their interpretations, the impulse and motivation behind the Early Church’s spiritual reading of the Old Testament is the same that moves us today.
William R. “Rusty” Osborne is a visiting professor of Old Testament at Tennent and also serves as Associate Professor of Biblical & Theological Studies at College of the Ozarks. He lives in southwest Missouri with his wife and four children. He has authored and co-edited several books, including The Prophets and the Apostolic Witness: Reading Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel as Christian Scripture (IVP Academic, forthcoming).