Today When You Hear His Voice

Scripture, the Covenants, and the People of God

Gregory W. Lee

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780802873279
• eBook ISBN: 9781467445320
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

Presents a doctrine of Scripture based on Hebrews in dialogue with Augustine and Calvin
 
What vision of biblical authority arises from Scripture's own use of Scripture? This question has received surprisingly little attention from theologians seeking to develop a comprehensive doctrine of Scripture. Today When You Hear His Voice by Gregory W. Lee fills this gap by listening carefully to the Epistle to the Hebrews.
 
Lee illuminates the unique way that Hebrews appropriates Old Testament texts as he considers the theological relationship between salvation history and scriptural interpretation. He illustrates these dynamics through extended treatments of Augustine and Calvin, whose contrasting perspectives on the covenants, Israel, and the literal and figural senses provide theological categories for appreciating how Hebrews innovatively presents Scripture as God's direct address in the contemporary moment.

Chapter 1

Augustine of Hippo: Signs and Realities

Introduction

Augustine’s understanding of the Old Testament, like the entirety of his theology, develops through a series of personal experiences and continues to evolve throughout his life. Upon his discovery of Cicero’s Hortensius, the text that sparked his lifelong quest for wisdom, Augustine turned immediately to Scripture, only to turn just as quickly away, judging its undignified prose inferior to that of the classical writers.1 Yet Augustine’s problems with Scripture ran deeper than rhetoric. Manichean critiques of the Old Testament’s “barbarities” — materialistic depictions of God, polygamy, animal sacrifices2 — would leave a lasting impression on Augustine long after he abandoned the sect.

The key figure who helps Augustine address these challenges is Ambrose, bishop of Milan. Ambrose is not as eloquent as the Manichean teacher, Faustus, but he is more substantive,3 and his great contribution to Augustine’s life is to demonstrate the intellectual viability of the Catholic faith through the figural reading of the Old Testament. As Augustine recounts in Confessions:

This realization was particularly keen when once, and again, and indeed frequently, I heard some difficult passage of the Old Testament explained figuratively (aenigmate soluto); such passages had been death to me because I was taking them literally (ad litteram). As I listened to many such scriptural texts being interpreted in a spiritual sense (spiritaliter) I confronted my own attitude, or at least that despair which had led me to believe that no resistance whatever could be offered to people who loathed and derided the law and the prophets.4

In future writings, Augustine will develop a variety of arguments in defense of the Old Testament, but the determinative importance of the spiritual sense will remain. In this chapter, I argue that the spiritual sense also bears significantly on Augustine’s broad construal of salvation history and the people of God across the testaments. Redemption unfolds for Augustine according to a two-­tier architecture of sign and referent that generates a series of ordered relationships between the Old and New Testaments, Israel and the church, and the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture. I will consider each in turn.

Covenants Concealed and Revealed

As Augustine’s understanding of the relation between the testaments matures, a consistent theme emerges: the Old Testament exists to signify the New. If Augustine originally develops this argument with reference to the promises and practices of the Old Testament, the eventual result is a more fully orbed account of the fear and bondage of the old covenant and the love and freedom of the new. In this part, I will consider this dynamic first in Augustine’s anti-­Manichean writings and then in his anti-­Pelagian The Spirit and the Letter. In the last section of this part, and the entirety of the next, I will turn to a challenge for Augustine’s theology of the covenants that emerges directly from his sign–­referent framework: the question of the Old Testament saints.

Against the Manichees

Augustine’s most substantive treatment on the relation between the testaments is Answer to Faustus, a Manichean (late 390s–early 400s), written against the bishop Augustine once hoped would resolve his questions about Manichean doctrine.5 This text is by far the longest of Augustine’s anti-­Manichean works, a somewhat surprising detail given Augustine’s negative depiction of Faustus in Confessions (397-401) and the fact that Faustus was already dead when Augustine wrote his reply. Yet a closer look at Confessions reveals that Augustine had enjoyed a fairly close personal relationship with Faustus and was more disappointed with Faustus’s ability to defend Manichean doctrine — which was simply indefensible — than with his intellectual abilities or person.6 Indeed, Augustine seems to have taken Faustus’s objections against the Old Testament seriously precisely because they were the issues that had vexed Augustine during his own Manichean days.7 Answer to Faustus addresses a series of objections Faustus had raised in a now-­lost book called The Chapters (Capitula), written between 386 and 390.8 For our purposes, Augustine’s response may be taken as a fairly mature statement of his position on the relation between the testaments, which he substantially retains throughout his later writings.9

Faustus forced Augustine to address a significant and (from Augustine’s perspective) irritating accusation: the Catholics were hypocrites. “Semi-­Christians” (semichristiani)10 who failed to recognize the basic incompatibility between the two testaments, Catholics claimed to accept the authority of the Old Testament but demonstrated no inclination to observe its laws about circumcision, sacrifices, clean and unclean foods, Sabbaths, or feasts.11 Such an awkward position could only produce mutual adulteration, like mixing vinegar and honey, or water and wine.12 Better, Faustus charged, to be like the Manichees, who were at least consistent and honest in their rejection of the Old Testament. “Both of us reject the Old Testament. If, then, you should ask what the difference is between your faith and mine, it is that you choose to lie and to act like a slave by praising in words what you hate in your mind. I have not learned to lie; I say what I think; I admit that I hate those who command such shameful things as much as the commandments themselves.”13

Augustine’s response is to delineate the Old and New Testaments according to the distinction between sign and reality. The signs (signa, sacramenta) of the Old Testament have been re...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Augustine of Hippo: Signs and Realities
• 2. John Calvin: The Unitary Covenant of Christ
• 3. The Epistle to the Hebrews: God’s New Covenant with Israel
• 4. The Epistle to the Hebrews: Approaching the Psalms
• 5. Hearing the Living Word: Scripture and the Divine Address
• 6. Witnessing the Living Word: Scripture and Tradition
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index