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How, if at all, is the Old Testament, as well as the New, to be used as a normative authority for determining the appropriateness of Christian witness and theology?

Wiki MarkupBecause the real canon of the church is "the canon _before_ the canon" (i.e., \ [1\] the earliest instances of the Jesus-kerygma; and \ [2\] the earliest instances of the Christ-kerygma as somehow making explicit the claim that the Jesus-kerygma implies), it is solely under the primary authority of these earliest instances of Christian kerygma, and hence under the meaning to be discerned in them, that the OT, like the NT, may be used as a normative authority for determining the appropriateness of Christian witness and theology.

But what sense does it make to say this in the case of the OT, considering that its writings do not expressly have to do with Jesus or Jesus Christ in the way in which the NT writings all do? Clearly, the OT writings do not bear witness to Christ prophetically, in the sense in which the early church understood them to do in canonizing them, any more than the NT writings bear witness to Christ apostolically in the formal meaning of the term that the early church clearly had in mind in canonizing them, as distinct from the merely substantial meaning of the term. But how, then, is the OT to be used as a normative authority at all, even in the highly qualified way allowed for by what has just been said?

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Because this is so, however, there is a further reason to hold that, even in my view, the traditional scriptural canon of the OT as well as the NT retains a unique place with respect to the tasks of bearing Christan Christian witness and doing Christian theology. For if the NT is the sole primary source in which the primary authority for Christian witness and theology is to be found, the OT is the sole primary source of the most fundamental assumptions of that same primary authority.

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