Hermann Spieckermann, «God's Steadfast Love Towards a New Conception of Old Testament Theology», Vol. 81 (2000) 305-327

This article argues in favour of a conception of Old Testament theology that is aware of the different hermeneutical presuppositions due to the different canonical shapes of the Jewish and the Christian Bible, respectively. An Old Testament Theology based on the canon of the Christian Bible has to do equal justice to the Hebrew and to the Greek version of the Old Testament, acknowledging that the Greek version, the Septuagint, is a dominant factor for the emergence of Christian faith. Perceiving the Old Testament from a Christian point of view sheds new light on a central theological issue thus far underestimated in scholarly research: God's steadfast love. The contribution tries to show how this characteristic insight into God's true being is reflected and interpreted in the different parts of the Old Testament.

Septuagint was a book suggestive of the belief in Christ. Otherwise the earliest Christians and the early church would not have appreciated it so much, and Hellenistic Judaism would not have abandoned it.

        To give an example from the Septuagint. How should (still Jewish) witnesses who had come to believe in Christ understand their Greek Bible when they read Ps 135,1 LXX (136,1 MT): ‘O give thanks to the Lord (tw=| kuri/w|), for he is good (o#ti xrhsto/j), for his mercy endures forever’. The ku/rioj is called xrhsto/j ‘good, merciful’. As this term is a homophone of Xristo/j in current Greek language of that time, the two words would be identified. This identification, found not only in Ps 135,1 LXX but also in 33,9 LXX (34,9 MT) and elsewhere, has been put into practice in 1 Pet 2,3. In the verses immediately following this identification, the great promises to Israel and God’s beneficent actions are announced to those who have come to believe in Christ:

But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Pet 2,9-10).

        Nearly every word within these lines and in the context subsists in Old Testament words. ‘No people’ that has become ‘God’s people’ — an allusion to Hos 1–2 — is now understood as the nations, whose relationship with God had not been clearly defined in the Old Testament.

        The mercy the nations experienced consists in Jesus Christ’s suffering and death on behalf of all men’s guilt. The idea of a singular sacrifice as a substitute on behalf of the many’s guilt had been conceived in the Servant’s fourth song, but it was not resumed within the Old Testament. Now, however, it gains significance. When St. Paul wants to present the essentials of Christian faith, he employs the already adopted tradition ‘that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ (1 Cor 15,3-4). This testimony can only be related to the just developing Jewish Bible. St. Paul does not quote certain texts as his testimony, but instead the authoritative writings as a whole are qualified as testimony. Nevertheless, there are allusions to possibly three passages: Isa 53, Hos 6,2 and Jonah 2,1. Theological perception is not dependent on textual quantities. Quite consciously he says ‘in accordance with the scriptures’, and not ‘in accordance with several texts in the scriptures’. This is to perceive the