Creation to New Creation: The Pentateuch

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Instructor

Chad Steiner

Instructor

Vern Steiner

Creation to New Creation: <em>The Pentateuch</em> — *Reading Torah with a ‘yad’ (Hebrew: ‘hand’)*

*This course is now available to take online at your own pace.

At the heart of our course offerings is a book-by-book journey through the entire Bible, from Creation to New Creation—Genesis to Revelation. We break it up into manageable, ten-week sections and spread it out over three years. (Students are naturally not required to commit to an entire three-year program; they may take as many or as few of the ten-week sections as fit their schedules.)

This signature stream of courses is designed to familiarize the student with the overarching structure and message of the whole Bible, which is unique among the holy books of the various religions because it comprises two testaments, and thus speaks to us in two different “registers” rather than one. So this stream of courses focuses specifically on two questions:

How does each book contribute to and interact with its own Testament? (For example, how does the book of Isaiah affect the overall message of the Old Testament, which begins with Genesis and ends with Malachi?)

How does each book and its role in its Testament contribute to the overall message of the whole Bible? (For example, how does the message of Genesis in the Old Testament affect the meaning of the Gospel of Matthew or Luke in the New Testament?)

We begin the journey with the first five books (often called the ‘Pentateuch’): Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Since “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), students can expect this course not only to inform their understanding of the Bible, but also to form and to transform their lives as women and men of God in the community of faith.

Required Texts:

Sacred Scripture, the Bible (preferably ESVCE [English Standard Version, Catholic Edition] or RSVCE 2nd edition [Revised Standard Version; Catholic Edition])
Instructor’s notes (provided and included in the registration cost)

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Comments (Add your own)

Further to my comments on prayer from last evening’s class, here is a brief and readable resource on prayer by Armand M. Nigro, S.J.

In regard to last evening’s class (9/30/19):

An essential aim of interpreting a text of Sacred Scripture is to discern how the text shapes our understanding of Jesus, because as he himself declares:

John 5:39 “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”

Jesus is here referring to the Scriptures that would later come to be called ‘Old Testament’. At that time, the New Testament had not yet been written, and the Old Testament was not sufficiently old enough to be called ‘Old’. So it was just ‘the Scriptures’. If the [Old Testament] Scriptures “bear witness” to Jesus, but in our interpretation of them we do not see how they do, then we have not yet interpreted them according to their own aim.

Likewise, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus asks the disciples with whom he is walking but who do not yet recognize him:

Luke 24:26 “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Here again we find that Jesus’ own perspective is that ‘all the [Old Testament] Scriptures’ have something to say about him.

As we proceed through our survey of the whole canon of Sacred Scripture in our Monday evening classes, one of our aims is to draw out with specific examples from each book how the Scriptures bear witness to Jesus—even those that do not mention his name or present him directly in the way the Gospels do. For many of us, this has involved learning some new words and concepts. So we’ve been discussing together the ideas of ‘typology’ and ‘figuration’:

Typology - similarities between two or more distinct historical events (e.g., between Passover and Easter; or between the ark through the flood, the exodus from Egypt through the sea, and baptism; or between Abraham’s beloved son Isaac carrying the wood up the mountain and God’s beloved son Jesus carrying the cross up to Golgotha); texts which are written in such a way as to denote such similarities.

Typology is a feature—often a literary feature that denotes a relationship between two or more texts or events.

Figuration - God’s providential shaping of one historical reality into the form of something else (e.g., the historical event of the Passover as a figure of Easter; Israel’s journey through the sea into the wilderness for forty years as a figure of the Israelite Jesus’ own journey from his baptism in the Jordan into the wilderness for forty days; the Binding of Isaac as a figure of Christ’s Passion).

Figuration is an activity—God’s activity of ordering one historical reality to resemble another.

Last evening, with these concepts in mind, we noted how the book of Joshua “figures” Joshua in the form of Jesus as the leader of God’s covenant people, and how the biblical story of Canaan presents the land of Canaan as a figure of heaven. We considered the possibility that the movement of the Israelites led by Joshua from the wilderness through the Jordan into Canaan is figured in the form of Christ on Holy Saturday, gathering all the waiting souls—from Adam to the thief on the cross—and leading them from Hades, “over the Jordan” of a formerly uncrossable chasm to Heaven, whose gate Christ unlocks for the first time.

This is “figural exegesis,” which takes note of typologies throughout Sacred Scripture and sees in them God’s self-involvement, whereby he who is the author both of the text and of the history about which it speaks, orders the latter to unfold according to his very good purposes, and the former to tell us all about it.

I missed last week because we were at the Ranch gathering & working the cows & calves. I was hoping to find last weeks hand out on line, perhaps I just don’t know where to look. Could you send them to me? I will see you tonight.
Shirley

This article here on the site addresses the question of agency (who made it happen) in the case of Pharaoh’s hard heart.

Chad,

Great class tonight. Can you provide some insight on the discussion between Jesus, Moses, and Elijah when they spoke about Jesus’ exodus which He was about to accomplish in Jerusalem? Lk9:31

Thanks.

jim

Thank you, Jim,

That pericope in Luke has been well served by commentators (e.g., Pablo Gadenz in the Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture series and Alan Culpepper in the New Interpreter’s Bible series), who have compiled fairly full lists of the numerous figural allusions it contains.

Most commentators note, for example, that Moses represents the witness of the Law in the OT (i.e., the Pentateuch) while Elijah represents the witness of the Prophets. Together, ‘Law and Prophets’ are frequently used to indicate in shorthand the entirety of the Old Testament witness.

In this case in Luke 9—especially given the cluster of other allusions—the implication is that the Old Testament (‘Moses’ and ‘Elijah’) is speaking not only about the historical realities of its own era(s) (e.g., Israel’s s exodus from Egypt and eventual ascent into the Promised Land), but about the larger form with which those historical realities have to do: namely, the Israelite Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and ascension into Heaven.

In this light, what we want to note in our class is not so much how the Old Testament speaks proleptically about Jesus (i.e., in anticipation of some later figure and event—though that’s entailed), but how the Old Testament presents its version of the historical realities in a way which reveals the reality of Jesus’ presence and active involvement then and there.

Please feel free to pop by the office and grab one of Josh’s Luke commentaries down from the shelf for a fuller development!

In the grace of Christ,

-Chad

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