Reading Forward to Emmaus: The Case for a Christotelic Hermeneutic

 

At Westminster in 2016, "Christotelic" was the name of the error. Peter Lillback's introduction to Seeing Christ in All of Scripture describes the recent faculty dispute as a contest between a view that set Christ at the organic center of the whole Bible and one that "merely located Christ as the goal of Old Testament revelation."¹ Two years later Daniel Block used the same word for the remedy, reminding readers that every passage takes part in God's agenda that culminates in Christ. My own method uses it that way too. In The Craft of Systematic Theology I call the Christotelic reading of the Old Testament "a canonical necessity," since Scripture has its "hermeneutical center of gravity in the person and work of Christ."² So the word needs defending. A Christotelic hermeneutic reads the Old Testament forward, along lines the prophets themselves laid down, toward a Christ they wrote about.

Westminster's worry was fair, and Tremper Longman's version of the method shows why. In the 2022 Zondervan Five Views volume, Longman says the Christian interpreter must "read an Old Testament text twice": first to hear its discrete voice in its original setting, then again in light of Christ's coming.³ The trouble is what the second reading does. If Isaiah would have been startled by Matthew, as Longman thinks, then the Christological meaning sits in the second reading and nowhere in the first. Meaning has moved from the text to the later reader. Against that version of the method, Richard Gaffin's line lands hard: Christ "is not only its omega but also its alpha, and he is and can be its omega only as he is its alpha."⁴ A goal the author never saw is a goal imposed on him.

Abner Chou's 2018 essay in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology takes a better route. He sets Poythress, Elliott Johnson, and Block in conversation over Genesis 15:1–6, and each supplies something the others need. Poythress wants depth, claiming that Christ reaches "every word in every verse," while insisting the preacher holds "executive authority" to exhort and no "legislative authority" to invent.⁵ Johnson roots Christ in the promise as Moses actually expressed it. Block wants proof, and he has no patience for "cheap and trivializing typologizing and Christologizing."⁶ Chou's synthesis is that all three are after "real thick meaning": thick because the text is theologically dense, meaning because the author intended it, real because an exegete can demonstrate it.⁷

The pivot is Chou's view of the prophets. His Kregel monograph states the thesis plainly: "The prophetic hermeneutic continues into the apostolic hermeneutic, which is the Christian hermeneutic." The prophets, he adds, "wrote better than we give them credit for."⁸ Moses wrote Genesis 15:6 as a development of Genesis 3:15, so the seed Abram trusted for already carried a singular, messianic edge, and the verdict of righteousness, paired with the covenant ceremony that follows, anticipates Romans 4. Peter says the prophets searched out what person and time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating (1 Pet 1:10–11). They were exegetes of earlier revelation, "brilliant theologians" in Chou's phrase, and tracing their allusions is ordinary grammatical-historical work. "We do not need a new method to find Christ in the OT."⁹

The Westminster essays concede more of this than their framing suggests. Poythress asks us to "listen respectfully to the intentionally sparse communications at earlier points," and Iain Duguid denies that "every verse taken by itself contains a hidden allusion to Christ."¹⁰ Sparse earlier revelation, read forward, is the Christotelic program. Gaffin's alpha is also untouched by it. The Angel of Yahweh bears the divine name at the bush in Exodus 3 and is distinguished from Yahweh in Zechariah 1:12. The Son acts inside the Old Testament narrative, not only at its end, and a forward reading sees Him there because Moses and Zechariah put Him there.

Graeme Goldsworthy answered the same three essays in the same issue of the SBJT, and he read Block with less patience than Chou did. His opening question is blunt: "If the OT is not about Christ, what is it about?"¹¹ He denies that his own Christocentric label ever licensed skipping redemptive history, and against Block's demand that a sermon on Genesis 15:6 preach Genesis 15:6 and nothing later authors made of it, he asks, "If Jesus did it, and the Apostles did it, why should we not do it?"¹² The question has an answer. We may do what the apostles did to the extent we can show the path from the text they read, and G. K. Beale's 2019 ETS plenary, published in JETS the next spring, gives that path a shape. Borrowing from Spurgeon, Beale pictures a footpath from a hamlet that joins a village road, then a highway, then the road into London, and asked whether every Old Testament verse concerns Christ, he answers, "Well, yes and no."¹³ The footpath may run away from London for a mile. A Christotelic reading walks the whole route. Goldsworthy is right about the end of the route, though, and his warning that application "apart from Christ tends to lead to legalism or moralism" belongs on every preacher's desk.¹⁴ (His dismissal of dispensational fulfillment as rigid literalism is a separate quarrel, and readers of Stallard will know the caricature.)

Norman Geisler got here in 1979, with more discipline than he is usually credited with. To Understand the Bible Look for Jesus calls a Christocentric reading "not an interpretive (hermeneutical) option" for the Christian, "a divine imperative," and sorts it into messianic prophecy, Levitical priesthood, moral precept, and salvation promise.¹⁵ His real gift is the triage: some texts predict, some embody a messianic principle, some merely picture. On Hosea 11:1 he admits that "Hosea did not here foretell of Christ," and he reads Matthew's use as "the coming to perfection of a Messianic principle."¹⁶ Beale pushes further. Hosea 11 opens with the exodus from Egypt, threatens a return to Egypt in verse 5, and closes in verse 11 with Israel's sons trembling back out of Egypt, and Beale thinks it unlikely Hosea saw the two exoduses as "accidental or coincidental or unconnected." Chou adds that Hosea 11:1 is itself alluding to Exodus 4:22.¹⁷ The pattern Matthew follows runs through Hosea's own hand, which refines Geisler without overturning him. Geisler also knew where the edge was: "It is difficult to draw a distinct line this side of religious fancy."¹⁸ His solution was to keep pictures labeled as pictures.

For the working theologian the payoff is procedural. In The Craft I argue that the New Testament's own use of the Old operates within "a Christotelic reading of the whole," and that a proof-text earns its place only when the exegesis beneath it has been done.¹⁹ A Christotelic claim about Genesis 15 or Hosea 11 has to survive Step Two before it appears in a doctrine of justification or sonship. That is slower than finding Jesus in every tent peg, and far more convincing to anyone who opens the text after us. Jesus did not tell the Jews that Moses might be read as pointing to Him. He said, "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me" (John 5:46). Geisler's line from the same chapter is the right place to stop: "It is not the Book that saves, but the Saviour of the Book."²⁰

Notes

1. Peter A. Lillback, introduction to Seeing Christ in All of Scripture: Hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary, ed. Peter A. Lillback (Philadelphia: Westminster Seminary Press, 2016), 4.

2. J. Neil Daniels, The Craft of Systematic Theology: An Exegetical and Sequential Blueprint for Building a Doctrinal System (Arlington, VA: Sacra Doctrina/Amazon KDP, 2026), xxvi.

3. Tremper Longman III, "The Christotelic Approach," in Five Views of Christ in the Old Testament, ed. Brian J. Tabb and Andrew M. King (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2022), 74.

4. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., quoted in Lillback, introduction, 4.

5. Abner Chou, "Real Thick Meaning and Preaching Christ from the Old Testament," Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 22, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 145.

6. Daniel I. Block, quoted in Chou, "Real Thick Meaning," 149.

7. Chou, "Real Thick Meaning," 151.

8. Abner Chou, The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers: Learning to Interpret Scripture from the Prophets and Apostles (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2018), 22.

9. Chou, "Real Thick Meaning," 150–51, 153–54.

10. Vern S. Poythress, "Biblical Hermeneutics," in Lillback, Seeing Christ, 15; Iain M. Duguid, "Old Testament Hermeneutics," in Lillback, Seeing Christ, 19.

11. Graeme Goldsworthy, "How Do We Preach Christ from the Old Testament? A Response to Daniel Block, Elliott Johnson, and Vern Poythress," Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 22, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 118.

12. Goldsworthy, "How Do We Preach Christ," 121, 126.

13. G. K. Beale, "Finding Christ in the Old Testament," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 63, no. 1 (March 2020): 46.

14. Goldsworthy, "How Do We Preach Christ," 127.

15. Norman L. Geisler, To Understand the Bible Look for Jesus: The Bible Student's Guide to the Bible's Central Theme (1979; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), 31, 51.

16. Geisler, To Understand the Bible, 44, 63.

17. Beale, "Finding Christ," 30–31; Chou, Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers, 37.

18. Geisler, To Understand the Bible, 61.

19. Daniels, Craft of Systematic Theology, 16–17.

20. Geisler, To Understand the Bible, 47.