“Jesus and Israel: One Covenant or Two?” by David E. Holwerda (Eerdmans, 193 pp.; $12.99, paper); “Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament,” by Christopher J. H. Wright (InterVarsity, 256 pp.; $14.99, paper); “The Messiah in the Old Testament,” by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. (Zondervan, 235 pp.; $17.99, paper). Reviewed by Frank Thielman, associate professor of divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama.
John’s gospel tells us that the Pharisee Nicodemus once stood up for Jesus by reminding a group of his colleagues that they could not arrest the Galilean rabbi without giving him a hearing. They were not pleased with this reminder. “Search the scriptures,” they retorted, “and observe that no prophet comes from Galilee” (John 7:52).
That was one of the earliest recorded salvos in a battle that has continued for many centuries over precisely how, if at all, Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. Today most Jews do not believe that Jesus fulfilled their Scriptures in any sense, and many view Christian claims that Jesus fulfilled this or that verse in the “Old” Testament as attempts to wrest Jewish traditions from their rightful owners. Christians, on the other hand, agree that Jesus and the church represent God’s faithfulness to his promises in the Old Testament, but they often disagree on the specifics.
Have God’s promises to Israel in the Old Testament been fulfilled in Jesus and the church in some way not immediately obvious to the authors of the Old Testament themselves? Or do some promises concerning Israel still await precisely the fulfillment that the authors of the Old Testament seem to have intended?
Three recently published books address these important issues. In “Jesus and Israel: One Covenant or Two?” David Holwerda tackles both Jewish concerns about Christian “plundering” of Jewish tradition and the debate among Christians over the relationship between Israel in the Old Testament and the church in the New Testament.
In the first chapter, Holwerda surveys recent assessments of Christian fulfillment theology and expresses dissatisfaction with each assessment; but here he only hints at his own understanding. Other issues demand discussion before he can describe his own provocative perspective in detail.
Holwerda begins discussion of these issues with the critical question, “Who is Israel?” and claims that the New Testament, Matthew in particular, has a ready answer. Israel is Jesus. Jesus broadened God’s redemptive work to include all ethnic groups, not simply physical descendants of Abraham. In doing this, he fulfilled the promise to Abraham that through him all nations of the earth would be blessed and so became Abraham’s true son, the true “Israel.” Matthew’s subtle identification of Jesus himself with Israel confirms this understanding: both came out of Egypt, both were God’s servant and son, and both were tested in the wilderness.
Other parts of the New Testament extend Jesus’ work of fulfillment to the prophetic visions of a restored temple in Israel’s future. Jesus becomes this temple as he forgives sins, purifies the unclean with his touch, and heals the sick, all functions of the temple’s sacrifices and priests. In addition, the New Testament teaches that the followers of Jesus have taken over the role of the glorious temple of prophetic prediction by showing that Jesus’ followers in some sense take their master’s place (John 17:22) and by explicitly identifying the local expression of the church with the temple (1 Cor. 3:16).
Holwerda then turns to the Old Testament promises that one day God would give back to scattered and exiled Israel the land that they had once won from the Canaanites and occupied during the monarchy. The New Testament, he says, does not spiritualize these promises so that they become mere allegories of some “higher” reality but instead universalizes them so that they apply to more than a single ethnic group. Thus Paul calls Abraham the inheritor not simply of Judea and Samaria, but of the world (Rom. 4:13); and when he quotes the promise section of the commandment to honor father and mother, he transforms it from a promise that all might go well in the land that God was giving to Israel (Deut. 5:16) into a simple promise that the believer might live long upon the earth (Eph. 6:2-3).
The church is also the recipient of the Old Testament law, although in a new form that removes its ethnic distinctiveness and makes it valid for all who believe the gospel, regardless of national affiliation. In addition, believers follow this new form of the Old Testament law by imitating Christ. This less specific ethical demand provides a helpful safeguard against legalism.
Does all this mean that unbelieving Jews have no place in the gracious plan of God? Holwerda, surprisingly, argues that despite the identification of Israel in the Old Testament with the church in the New, and despite the “universalizing” in the New Testament of many Old Testament promises to ancient Israel, unbelieving Jews continue to hold a special place in God’s saving work. “Disobedience,” he says, “need not cancel future hope rooted in God’s electing grace.” And so in Paul, he finds hope extended to unbelieving Jews that God, in faithfulness to his Old Testament commitment to his people, will extend mercy to many by opening their hearts to Messiah Jesus (Rom. 11:25-27).
Although the purpose of Christopher Wright’s “Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament” is different, his own approach to the Old Testament frequently coincides with Holwerda’s. Wright hopes to explain Jesus’ person, mission, and theology in terms of the Old Testament, for “without the Old Testament,” he says, “Jesus quickly loses reality and either becomes a stained-glass window figure colourful but static and undemanding, or a tailor’s dummy that can be twisted and dressed to suit the current fashion.” Like Holwerda, Wright believes that Jesus viewed himself as the inheritor of Israel’s sonship, and that where Israel failed in its mission to be the vehicle of blessing to the Gentiles, Jesus succeeded.
Also like Holwerda, Wright is not happy with the notion that every prophecy about the future restoration of Israel must be literally fulfilled in national Israel. The Old Testament is more a book of promise than of prediction, he argues, and, unlike predictions, promises can be fulfilled in ways that people alive at the time of the promise may never have imagined. Thus the promise to Abraham was fulfilled provisionally in the Exodus and at Mount Sinai when God constituted the nation of Israel and declared them to be his special people. The promise was reissued at Sinai in terms of settlement in the land, and fulfilled provisionally again in the next generation’s conquest of Canaan. It was reissued again at the time of David with the promise that David’s son would reign on the throne eternally, and that promise received fulfillment in the coming of the Messiah Jesus. Thus, the promises of the Old Testament have a “transformable quality” that allows them to be fulfilled in ways different from those in which they were originally understood.
If Wright is correct about this, he provides some basis for Holwerda’s approach. Holwerda’s claim that the New Testament “universalizes” the prophetic promises of a geographically restored Israel and a gloriously restored temple may be examples of how the Old Testament promises could be fulfilled in ways that were not readily understood at the time they were given.
Wright’s book is much more than a discussion of how the New Testament uses the Old, however. It is a brief theology of Jesus and his teaching in light of the Old Testament. It begins with a survey of the prominent theological themes of the Old Testament and includes, along with a discussion of the theoretical relationship between the Old Testament and the New, chapters on Jesus’ “identity,” “mission,” and “values.”
Jesus is God’s Son in the Gospels in the same way that Israel is God’s son in the Old Testament, with the crucial difference that whereas Israel rebelled against its Father, Jesus was obedient. Jesus’ mission is best comprehended under the Old Testament categories of Son of Man and Suffering Servant, again titles applied to Israel in the Old Testament, but melded together in Jesus’ mind so that Jesus as the Son of Man is not only the victorious Savior and coming Judge, but one who suffers in place of others and in obedience to God.
Jesus’ “values,” by which Wright seems to mean his ethical teaching, are also drawn from the Old Testament, whose emphases can be summarized in three statements: “God comes first,” “persons matter more than things,” and “needs matter more than rights.” Far from abrogating the Jewish law, Jesus emphasized precisely these issues and so brought “into full clarity the inherent values and priorities of the Torah.”
Walter Kaiser’s “The Messiah in the Old Testament” focuses upon every passage in the Old Testament that Kaiser considers a “direct prophecy” of the messianic age. Kaiser’s interpretive perspective stands in contrast to that of Holwerda and Wright. He believes that each of the passages he considers was intended to refer to the Messiah by the author who penned it and could have been understood as messianic by those who first read it. Modern readers of the Old Testament who fail to see how the original authors and readers of such texts could have understood them to be messianic are, like the two on the Emmaus road, “ignorant and slow in heart to believe everything the prophets spoke” (Luke 24:25).
After explaining this approach, Kaiser’s book engages in a thorough, and often technical, commentary on each direct messianic prophecy in the Old Testament. He proceeds chronologically through the Pentateuch, to passages written before and during the Davidic monarchy, to the rest of the Psalter, and finally to the Prophets.
Many readers will remain unconvinced that every passage in Kaiser’s volume was understood to be messianic by its original author and readers. It is particularly hard to see how the enmity between serpent and woman in Genesis 3:15 could have been understood this way by its author, or how David’s imprecations upon an enemy in Psalm 109:6-19 could have originally referred to the opponent of the last of David’s line (Judas). The difficulty in seeing such texts as references in their original contexts to the Messiah and the circumstances of his life seems to demand some other approach, and the perspective of Holwerda and Wright fits the exegetical facts without sacrificing Scripture’s trustworthiness. Their perspective will probably prove more satisfactory to most readers.
All three books, however, make a significant contribution to the evangelical debate over how best to understand Jesus’ fulfillment of the Old Testament. Each comes from a senior evangelical biblical scholar whose experience in the classroom and years of learning lend maturity to his work. There is no youthful extravagance here, no experimentation, simply the fruit of years of thinking about a critical theological issue. Students, pastors, and laypeople interested in the relationship between Old and New Testaments will benefit from thinking through Kaiser’s perspective and learning from his detailed analysis of the relevant passages, from Wright’s illuminating examination of Jesus’ person and teaching in light of their Old Testament background, and from Holwerda’s fresh perspective on the age-old problem of Jesus and Israel. All three books illuminate Jesus’ person and identity. All three are worth buying, reading, and keeping handy for future reference.
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