A contemporary collection of theological essays on the need for a Christotelic hermeneutic in contemporary Old Testament preaching.
The presence of Christ in the Old Testament is unquestionable. The general consensus is that Christ can be found in the Old Testament and should be preached from the Old Testament. However, not everyone agrees on how to find and preach Christ based on the first part of divine revelation.
Currently, there are at least two hermeneutical approaches that summarize this issue. On the one hand, there is Christocentrism, which seeks to find and preach Christ in all or almost all passages of the Old Testament, and on the other hand, there is Christotelism, which understands that the Old Testament as a whole points to Christ, even if each passage does not deal with him explicitly. Both approaches essentially employ a historical-grammatical hermeneutic, but Christocentrism adds other interpretive methods that affect the way the Old Testament is read, thus endangering the very intention of the original author. This book advocates for Christotelism as the hermeneutic that anticipates the Christ whom the New Testament identifies as Jesus (Mt 26:63–64; Jn 1:41, 45) without having to force him into every passage of the Old Testament.
Christ rebuked the disciples on the road to Emmaus for not understanding "what the Old Testament said about him" (Lk 24:27), for they should have been able to find him in the first part of divine revelation according to "all that the prophets have spoken" (Lk 24:25). If Christ believed that the Old Testament required other interpretive methods to find a different meaning or a deeper sense, he would not have reacted that way. Therefore, Christ's hermeneutic is a historical-grammatical hermeneutic that respects the intention of the Old Testament authors because their writings are divine revelation (2 Tim 3:16; 1 Pet 1:10–12).
To find and preach Christ in and from the Old Testament, it is necessary to read it carefully, precisely in the same way Christ did.
