DANIEL AND APOCALYPTIC
3. No special hermeneutic method is necessary to see the whole diversified movement of the Old Testament saving events, made up of
God’s promises and their temporary f&ems, as pointing to their future fulfrlment in Jesus Christ. This can be said quite categorically.
The coming of Jesus Christ as a historical reality leaves the exegete no choice at all; he must interpret the Old Testament as pointing to Christ, whom he must understand in its light. This continual flow of reciprocal understanding is plainly laid down, both by the historical importance of the New Testament saving event and by the ceaseless movement of promise and fulfrlment in the Old Testament. The only question is, how far can Christ be a help to the exegete in understanding the Old Testament, and howfar can the Old Testament be a help to him in understanding Christ?
III this connexion some further observations must be made about the Old Testament’s statements on the hiddenness of God and on faith.
(a) The mark of the New Testament saving event is a deep hi&n- ness on God’s part. In Christ, God divested himself of his power and glory, indeed, he did his work among men sub specie contraria, veiled, and in weakness and shame. Ancient Israel also had to bear the mystery of God’s withdrawal, and often spoke of the experiences and trials which this entailed. The whole history of the covenant is simply the history of God’s continuous retreat. His message that Israel was the one in whom he was to be glorified, and that his salvation and judgment were henceforth to be determined by the attitude adopted towards his historical saving work in Israel (“I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse,” Gen. XII. 3), is the message of a God who was hiding himself from the world. The enigmatic quality of this peculiar divine plan in history appears in another quite di&rent form in, for example, the extravagant attributes predicated to the Messiah.
The man whom the royal psalms envisage as designated by God to be king of the whole world (Pss. II, LXXII), the anointed who redeems all victims of oppression and violence, and in whose sight the blood of the very poorest is precious (Ps. L-. 14)~ is a man who carries little conviction in the world of power politics. We do not know how con- temporary Israel got round this contradiction; possibly she was not greatly troubled by it. But this does stress the fact that a petty Judean king was given in God’s name a claim to world-wide dominion and a s&n@ of&e which he could not nossiblv fulfil. After his death this
T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T S A V I N G E V E N T 37s mandate had to be handed on to his successors, along with the question,
“Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
There must have been times in Israel when certain groups of people became keenly aware of the mysteries and paradoxes of God’s action in history and gave their awareness particular expression. Actually, the story ofAbraham as given in JE has as its subject the delay of fulfilment : it shows how, although the promise was solemnly announced, its earlisation was constantly imperilled, and how it constantly eluded its recipient’s grasp. The offering of Isaac was a far greater trial than any that had previously been recorded, for it advanced into the realm of extreme experience where God declares against his own work and which seems to have only one possible climax-complete abandonment by God. The fulfilment of all God s promises was vested in Isaac, and Abraham had been ordered to give him up. But who were the people in Israel who had such experiences with God? How did these experi- ences come to them, and under what circumstances? Or should such experiences be regarded as premonitions of extremities inherent in any such relationship with God?
Jahweh’s hiddenness is given new and still more mysterious traits in the preaching of the prophets. One has really only to look at the range of extremely bold similes which they apply to him in order to gain a view of this aspect of their message; Jahweh, the unsuccessful lover (Is.
‘v. I-7), Jahweh, the b b (Iar er s. w. 20), Jahweh, the rock of stumbling for Israel (Is. WI. I4), Jahweh, rottenness for Israel (Hos. v. Iz), Jahweh, the adoptive &her of an adulterous foundling (Ezek. XVI. 4fK), Jahweh, who searches the houses of Jerusalem with a lamp (Zeph. I. 12).24
Israel’s cult strictly forbade her to worship God in the form of images:
but the interpreters of his action in history represent him in terms which seem to mock the divine dignity and holiness. The fact that it was possible to speak of him in a manner which outraged pious feeling, and that this was, indeed, essential if the people were to see him as he really was, indicates how deeply he had withdrawn. As early as Isaiah, the prophetic message is characterised by complete lack of success.
Indeed, the purpose of his calling had been to produce obduracy. Yet he took up the task. He must have been appalled as he voiced the word of the God who was to bring about a “strange, alien work” in Israel 24 J. Hempel, “Jahwegleichnisse der israelitischen Propheten,” in Z.A. W., ~LII (r924), pp. 7& The word WV in Hos. v. 12 does not mean “moth” but “putrefaction”:
see Kidder, Lexicon, p. 743.
376 T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T A N D T H E NEW
(IS. XXVIII. 21). Yet even after the fast phase of his mission, Isaiah spoke another extremely paradoxical word. The gloom was visibly closing in on Israel, but he said that he looked hopefully “to the God who has hidden his face from the house of Jacob” (Is. vrrr, 17). And the same message occurs at the end of his ministry :
Therefore I again do marvellous things with this people,
marvellous and wonderful; so that the wisdom of their wise men perishes,
and the discernment of their discerning men is hid.
(Is. xxrx. 14) The focal point of revelation at which the Old Testament prophets had to take their stand went however further than Isaiah, even though his insight had reached a pretty final conclusion. Isaiah still envisaged God’s coming as an event which lay outside his own experience and that of the people as a whole : but with Jeremiah a crisis overtook the prophetic oflice. Jeremiah is no longer merely an ambassador : the office laid upon him invaded his own personal humanity. He himself became the scene of God’s tremendous encounter with his people. His own soul, and even his own body, had to bear the weight of this clash. Thus, at a ftily late stage in the development of prophecy, a possible new re- lationship between God and his prophets was developed. It is the way into a dimension of quite exceptional suffering; for, as we have seen, Jeremiah bears God’s s&ring and at the same time that of his people.
It is also the way, however, into a quite new form of responsibility, for the prophet, who is a watchman, answers for the rest of the people with his own life (Ezek. xxxrrr. off.); everything depends upon-his going up into the breaches (Ezek. ~III. 4f). All this is set out with the utmost restraint, the restraint of an earnest fmality. The men who resign themselves to the endurance of such vicarious suffering have no halo given them. Only in Is. LIII is there a glimpse of something lying beyond this suffering, a place from which it is possible to look back and see the recognition given by the nations to God’s Servant. Here-and not in Jeremiah-are the first outlines of the New Testament theologiu crucis.25 Where else do we fmd anything which corresponds to the fate over- taking these men? The problems outlined in their conflicts are Christo- 25 “Hae sunt propheticae tentationes in quibus degustant Prophetae passiones
Christi, quas etiam significant hi terrores.” Melanchthon on Jer. xx. 14ff., Corp. Re$
XIII. 810 (quoted by Sick, Melanchthorz, p. IIZ).
377 logical. Here is the foundation for that insight into the 8~2 which occurs so often in New Testament tradition, particularly in Jesus’s sayings about his passion and his acceptance of the necessity of suffering.26 There is an analogy-seen particularly clearly by Luke-between the road followed by Jesus and that followed by the prophets. In the case ofJesus too, this road led to suffering and death.
There is, however, another body of Old Testament sayings which was cited by the New Testament in order to explain the necessity of Christ’s sufferings. These are the psalms of lamentation. They tell of a particular experience which God forced Israel to endure, namely the trial of the suppliant who was isolated from his fellows and who felt that he was increasingly being abandoned by God.27 It was a bitter experience to fmd that the very people who had cast themselves entirely on God’s mercy, who saw in Jahweh their only refuge fi-om distress, sickness, and the assaults of their enemies, were those whom God had forsaken in the eyes of the whole world. Israel’s hardest burden was probably that God had hidden himself so completely from the despairing man who had trusted in his mercy. Yet in the Gospels these utterances of suffering, especially those in Psalm xxu, accompany Christ’s path right up to his death on the cross. In all four Gospels the descriptions of the passion are meant to show that these words of prayer about the abandonment of the righteous only reached ftihent in the sufferings of Christ. So completely had he stripped himself of his glory that he could enter straight away into these sufferers’ words, so that they expressed his own suffering.
All true knowledge of God begins with the knowledge of his hiddenness?8 Israel’s experience had already taught her this in very many different ways. The time at which she became fully conscious of this truth theologically is, of course, another matter. We owe the clearest statement in the Old Testament to Deutero-Isaiah:
Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself, thou God of Israel, the
Satiour. (Is. XLV. IS)
Yet the words of First Isaiah about the nature of God’s strange work 26 On this 8~; see W. Grundmann, Th. W.B.N.T., VOL. I I, pp. 21ff.; L. Goppelt
“Allegoric,” in R.G.G., pp. gof., 126. Paul too however seems to take hold of a similar idea when he says that Jesus Christ died “in accordance with the scriptures”
(I Cor. xv. 3f.). 27 See V O L. I, p. 398.
28 Barth, Dogmntics, VOL. II, Pt. I, p. 183.
378 T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T A N D T H E N E W
which confounds all the wisdom of the wise also presupposes a theo- logical awareness; and even the Jahwist must have had some idea of the hiddenness of God’s ways, or he could not have organised the material in the patriarchal stories as he did. And even in her earliest days Israel knew that to see God face to face meant deathFg
(b> So far as Israel’s theories on God’s withdrawal are concerned, we have to reckon with a relatively late cognitive clarification of the data, though it was founded on long experience; even so, the knowledge that faith was Israel’s only possible answer to the offer which this God made her seems to have been common to all times. In speaking of Israel’s
“faith,” we have, of course, to begin with the terminological dif6culty constituted by the fact that the Old Testament knows no such word as signifies man’s turning to God with the whole of his being, and to which every writer could have recourse. Certainly, the verb r724iI is of great importance because of the special emphasis and content which it received in a few prominent passages : but this same thing was expressed in a different way at different times and by different people, and quite often it was not spoken of in conceptual terms at all-people simply told a story. Studies of Israel’s faith which have recently appeared rightly make the term t’Z%iI central; the word was in fact more frequently used than any other to convey succinct statements about ftith.sO Nevertheless the presence or absence of any particular term in the Old Testament is an external criterion, and we must also raise here the question of method. Can investigations which tabulate more or less completely the occurrences of these terms really explain the facts of the case? Can they, for example, bring out how far the
“faith” which was demanded by Isaiah became in Jeremiah’s time rebellion against God? It can certainly be said that the object of Israel’s faith was Jahweh and his action; but Jahweh and his purposes changed -and for the prophetic preaching they changed with every change in the political scene. Thus, the proper approach to the particularly complex question of faith, as this arose in Israel, is, in principle, to consider Israel’s peculiar existence in the context of saving history.
The Old Testament has an extensive literary category of stories 2g Gen. XVI. 12[13], xxm. 3o[2g]; Ex. xxw. II; Jg. VI. 22, XUI. 22.
3o For descriptions of the Old Testament concept of faith, see R. Bukmann and A.
Weiser, Faith, trs. D. M. Barton, London 1961, pp. d; G. Ebeling, Word and Faith, trs. J. W. Leitch, London 1963, particularly pp. 2o6ff.; E. Pfeil%r, “Glaube im Alten Testament” in Z.A.W., 71 (Igsg), pp. 151ff.
T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T S A V I N G E V E N T 379
which have wars as their subject; they tell how from time to time Jahweh rose up to protect his people, and their theology is still com-
pletely determined by the old ideas connected with the holy wars.
These stories are not, however, contemporary with the events of which they tell, for in that the victory is represented as an absolute miracle wrought by Jahweh, to which the fighting men themselves make no contribution at all, they present the action in an idealised form. In consequence, Israel’s participation is important more as a confession of faith than as an act of war. Wherever these st’ories reflect on the dis- position and attitude of Israel as the human partner in these events- and this di&rs from story to story-they are dealing with faith. The story of Gideon (Jg. vn) points to this particularly forcefully although no special word indicates it.31 But the mot$of faith is also to be heard in the story of Rahab, the Canaanite woman, who makes confession of Jahwehas th h p pl ppe c osen eo e a roaches (Josh. II. 9ff.). The story of the
miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, whose theological build-up sets it completely within this category of stories, speaks-though it is rather an exception--expressis verbis of Israel’s faith in Jahweh. Indeed, the doxa of this event was so great that even Moses, who functioned as the means by which it was brought about, was caught up into the doxa and therefore became an object of faith as well: Israel “believed in Jahweh and in his servant Moses” (Ex. XTV. 3 I).~~ The term also appears in the story of the spies (Num. MV. I I). It does not occur in the story of David and Goliath; nevertheless, David’s words that he came not with weapons but in the name of his God, are to b’e taken as a high water mark in the series of Old Testament utterances on the subject of faith
(I Sam. XVII. 45). David’s speech here is the first of the series of war- speeches which contain a brief exhortation to the warriors about the battle they are on the point of fighting and about their faith. They appeal to them for faith as an act of obedience which Israel owes to her God because of his promise to protect her?3 In principle, this faith looks both backwards and forwards. They appeal to an historical event, to a call received, or to guidance experienced, but on the basis of these look towards the future and have faith in the God who promises an act of deliverance or salvation that will only come to pass in that time.
31 On Jg. VII see VOL. I, pp. 328f.
32 The incorporation of Moses into the cre&ndu in Ex. XIX. g is even more forcible -“that they may also believe you for ever.”
33 Deut. xx. zf., IX. 1-6, XXI. 3-6, 7-8 ; Josh. I. 1-g; see VOL. I, p. 17.
380 T H E O L D T E S T A M E N T A N D T H E NEW
The Abraham stories show this clearly, for they go far beyond, for example, the programmatic words of Gen. xv. 6, and their theme of the delay of fulfilment greatly modifies the faith mot$ Abraham assented to a promise God made him, he believed the historical plan which Jahweh outlined to be something real, and consequently he was set on the road to a fulfrlment. The same is in principle also true of Isaiah, the only difference being that the “work of Jahweh”
to which faith looks here, Jahweh’s fmal revelation, is sharply dis- tinguished &om all the previous saving history and looks out over a much deeper gulf. In Isaiah faith means “looking to” Jahweh, that is to say, not relying on the political relationships of the day. The great powers outside Israel can offer no salvation; indeed, things will become worse (“for from the serpent’s root comes forth an asp, and its fruit is a flying fiery serpent,” Is. XIV. 29). No “reliance” can be placed on these powers.34 Deliverance is for that man alone who knows how to leap ahead of the present and take refuge in the coming saving event which Jahweh “is to finish on Zion” (Is. x. 12). This offer of salvation on Zion is no longer mentioned in Jeremiah; in his time Nebuchadnezzar was given full power and lordship over the whole world (Jer. XXW. 6). The eschatological perspective was completely changed; the demand that the people should resort to faith falls into the background ofJeremiah’s preaching. With this prophet the question of faith turned inward, and became, in the Confessions, the question of his own existence. This raises a hard problem: faith can no longer keep in step with a God who hides himself ever more deeply.
Again, and in a quite different way, the Deuteronomic histories pass a negative judgment: the kings of Judah were not “perfect” with Jahweh, their hearts were not “wholly true”; only one of them--King David-“walked [before Jahweh] with integrity of heart and upright- ness’ (I Kings Ix. 4.
It has been truly said that faith in the sense just mentioned is always directed to a person. It is faith in Jahweh, not in facts.35 Further, this faith always implies a total concern, a man’s existence; by its very nature it always means “an abandonment of oneself? There is no
34 In Isaiah the term “placing one’s reliance upon” (tYW?l) has become parallel to
“having faith” (Is. x. 20, xxx. 12, m. I). The term is given fresh currency in the Chronicler’s history (JI &-on. XIII. 18, m. IO, XVI. 7E).
35 Bultmann and Weiser, op. cit., p. II ; Ebeling, op. cit., pp. 2oof.
s6 This formulation is taken from Ebeling : “Faith in the Old Testament sense dose
THE O L D T E S T A M E N T S A V I N G E V E N T 381 difference in the New Testament. There too faith is directed to God and his acts; it has an act of God, the coming of Christ in the flesh, as its precondition-and at the same time, on the basis of this, it holds itself in readiness for an eschatological ftiilrnent. To this extent the existence of the old Israel in which everything centred on faith, is repeated in the Christian Church. On the other hand, however, it is radically changed because of the fact that God’s action took place in the person of Jesus Christ, and because faith, by now becoming faith in Jesus Christ, was given a completely new form of personal confrontation and also a completely new eschatological perspective. At this point the Old Testa- ment and the New part company. 37 Old Testament faith was faith in Jahweh; even in its eschatological orientation it remained faith in Jahweh. For example, in Messianic prophecy it never in any way
became faith in the Messiah.
There is, however, something more, to say that Israel’s faith was always faith in Jahweh is not enough. Who was this Jahweh? How, and where, was he present for men? Let us remember what was said above about the disconcerting lack of continuity in Jahweh’s relation- ship to his chosen people. The Old Testament tells of sacral institutions set up and then destroyed, of calls solemnly given and rejections which immediately followed_them; possibilities of cultic communion with God were opened up and then shattered. There is the Jahweh who commands sacrifice and then abruptly rejects it, and the Jahweh who,
as time goes on, hides himself ever more deeply from his people, who kills Israel in order to bring her to life again. Only here, in the encounter with this God, does the Old testament find its specific d&&y with the question of faith. How often was it not God himself who drove Israel out of her religious heritage; how often was she .called upon, explicitly or implicitly, to “remember not the former things” (IS. XLIII. 18) ! This always happened when she was complacent about her f&h, when she debased it, or when she misused her knowledge of Jahweh to assert herself before God. Israel was not to depend on some
not mean thinking something about God, but expecting something from God. It does not believe in the presence of God, but in the coming of God.” Ebeling, op. cit., p. 214.
87 Cp. here Buhmann and Weiser, op. cit., pp. 82ff. Of course, in this contrast between faith in the Old Testament and faith in New, full justice is not done to the new ground broken by the preaching of the prophets, its break with the past and the radical reference of faith to eschatology.