Marginal Christianity

Those Who Pray the Psalms In this section Bonhoeffer connects Jesus to the Psalms through David, who is credited with most of the psalms in the Psalter (73). He is a type of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer works out this typological connection this way: -David’s life prefigures Christ’s (Acts 2:30ff). -“David was a witness to Christ in his kingly office, in his life, and in his words.” (Heb. 2:12; 10:5; Heb.3:7) “The same words that David spoke, therefore, the future Messiah spoke in him. Christ prayed along with the prayers of David or, more accurately, it is none other than Christ who prayed them in Christ’s own forerunner, David.” (3464-3472) -David’s prayers, then, are not simply personal, but also those of the Christ who indwelt him. “David, remains himself; but Christ dwells in him and with him.” (3476) -though David did not write every psalm in the psalter, yet the psalter as a whole is connected to him. Since Christ indwells David, the whole psalter becomes his words b...

Typology Just to remind us again we are reading Matthew typologically. We explored a bit about what that way of reading the Bible looks like in the last post. Here I want to call attention to a refinement offered by Patrick Schreiner in his recent book Matthew: Disciple and Scribe. [1]   He invites us to reflect on three questions as we consider what Matthew tells us: -How does this echo Israel’s story? -How does Jesus fulfill Israel’s story? -How does it move the story of Israel forward? We’ll follow his advice, then, as best we as we move ahead. Matthew 1:18-25: Joseph in Jesus’ Birth Story [2] Most Bible readers know that Matthew’s birth story is Joseph’s experience of Jesus’ birth. Luke gives Mary’s experience in his gospel. Hers gets more attention because it is a bit more dramatic and she is, after all, Jesus’ birth mother. Joseph, meanwhile is but his step-father. The high-point in Mary’s story is her stirring declaration in response to Gabriel’s a...

Peter Leithart, our mentor to The Mentor’s Gospel of Matthew, provides a detailed overview of his approach to this gospel in an essay titled “Jesus as Israel: The Typological Structure of Matthew’s Gospel.” [1] But since typology is a relatively unfamiliar way of interpreting the Bible I will let Leithart briefly introduce us to this practice. Widely used by the early and medieval church interpreters, typology felt into disrepute and disuse with the rise of modern historical consciousness. Reading the Bible as a window we look through to what is going on behind it as I called it in the first post in this series. Typology is a species of reading the Bible as a piece of stained-glass art. As Leithart says, “Typological interpretation assumes that events and institutions of the Old Testament present (to use Augustine’s terminology) ‘latent’ pictures of Christ, and the Christ to whom the Old Testament testifies is the  totus Christus : Head and Body, Jesus and his Church. I...