Catechesis · Inquirer
The Old Testament in the Church
Catechesis · Inquirer
The Old Testament in the Church
The Old Testament is the Church's scripture. It was the only Scripture Christ read, quoted, and interpreted. It was the Scripture the apostles preached from. The New Testament can…
Question
Does the Old Testament still matter for Christians?
The Old Testament is the Church's scripture. It was the only Scripture Christ read, quoted, and interpreted. It was the Scripture the apostles preached from. The New Testament cannot be understood without it: the Incarnation is the fulfillment of Israel's hope, the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the Passover, the Cross is the fulfillment of the sacrificial system, the Church is the fulfillment of the covenant people. To set aside the Old Testament is to amputate the root from which the New Testament grew.
The Orthodox liturgical year is unintelligible without the Old Testament. The Great Feasts draw heavily on Old Testament typology: the Nativity is prefigured by the burning bush (Moses saw God in fire without being consumed, as Mary bore God without being destroyed by His holiness). The Theophany is prefigured by Elijah's prayer on Carmel and the parting of the Jordan. The Transfiguration echoes Moses on Sinai. Great Lent reads the entire book of Genesis. Holy Week draws on Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Job. The Church lives inside the Old Testament's story even as she has received its fulfillment.
The teaching
Israel, the Church, and the covenant -- continuity without supersession
The Church did not replace Israel as a new institution that took over Israel's property. The Church is the fulfillment of Israel -- the ingathering of all nations into the covenant people of God, through the Messiah who is Israel's King and the world's Lord. Paul's image in Romans 11 is the olive tree: Israel is the natural branches; the Gentiles are wild branches grafted in. The root is Israel's; the tree is one. Jewish Christians did not leave Judaism when they followed Christ -- they found the fulfillment of what Judaism was always pointing toward.
The Old Testament's ceremonial law -- sacrifices, dietary laws, circumcision -- was fulfilled in Christ and is not binding on Gentile Christians (Acts 15). The moral law -- summarised in the Decalogue and fulfilled in Christ's love commandment -- is not abolished but deepened (Matthew 5:17-48). The distinction matters: the Church that ignores the Old Testament's moral teaching has cut itself off from the law's root; the Church that insists on the Old Testament's ceremonial law for Christians misunderstands what the Incarnation accomplished.
The New Testament is hidden in the Old; the Old Testament is revealed in the New. Neither can be understood without the other. They are two rooms of one house, and the door between them is Christ.
Augustine's formula (though from a Western Father, received in the East) captures the Orthodox reading perfectly. The Old Testament without the New is a locked room full of promise unfulfilled. The New Testament without the Old is a room built on no foundation -- all fulfilment with no context. Christ is the door: to stand in Him is to stand in both rooms at once, seeing the Old Testament's depth and the New Testament's meaning simultaneously.
After St. Augustine
Questions on the Heptateuch 2.73 · c. 419 AD
The Burning Bush
How the Old Testament theophanies reveal the pre-existent Son
The burning bush (Exodus 3) is one of the most important theophanies in the Old Testament for Orthodox theology. Moses encounters the Angel of the Lord in a fire that does not consume. God reveals His name: "I AM WHO I AM." In the Orthodox reading, this is an encounter with the pre-existent Logos -- the Son of God before the Incarnation, revealing Himself in the form that the economy of the Old Covenant permits. The Church Fathers universally read the Christophanies of the Old Testament as appearances of the Second Person before His taking of flesh.