centered focus, take time to think about how God is intending to use the human spokesman,
with all his God-ordained capacities and gifts.
that is instinctively the attitude that a godly person takes toward the holiness of God, as that
holiness is manifested in the word that God speaks.
"What does God mean?" "What does he mean not merely by giving the promise to Adam
and Eve, but by recording it for me as well? God must be indicating that in some way it is
pertinent to me."
about how best to find the meaning of Old Testament texts, whether by allegory or by
theoria. The Reformers disputed with the Roman Catholics about the use of allegory and
the literal sense. But these disputes were carried on within an environment where everyone
was concerned with God's intentionality, not just human intentionality. The Reformers
and the Antiochenes, the people whom we typically identify as more literal in their
approach, found Christ in the Old Testament, in types as well as in direct predictions.
They saw the Old Testament as a book in which God continues to speak today, addressing
us concerning the salvation in Christ and its implications. And in this conviction they were
simply following the Apostle Paul:
through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have
hope. (Rom 15:4)
they did. (1 Cor 10:6)
our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. (1 Cor 10:11)
immediate contemporaries but intended by God for all future ages, including especially and
even pre-eminently the New Testament Christians "on whom the end of the ages has
come." The conviction about divine address carries over naturally into a hermeneutical
practice in which we seek preeminently what it is that God says to us now, even if it was
imperfectly understood by the human author of past ages. This focus on God's speech is
shared not only by the premodern Christian church but by premodern Judaism as well. One
can see it in rabbinic Judaism, in Philo, in the Qumran writings, and in various sects of