Sublime

CHAPTER

Bible study Luke 1:39–80; 2:25–32 What do the words of Mary, Zechariah and Simeon teach us about the salvation Jesus brings? How do they point to the fulfilment of the following Old Testament passages? Genesis 12:1–3 2 Samuel 7:11–16 Isaiah 9:2–7 Isaiah 42:5–7 Isaiah 49:5–7 Jeremiah 31:31–34 Malachi 3:1 How should we respond?

“The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament” (65).

Thus only in Christ do the law’s aspects and divisions—“dimensions”—become clear.

This process is certainly not linear, and it is often dramatic, but when you watch it unfold in light of Jesus Christ, you can see it moving in a single overall direction; you can see that the Old and New Testaments belong together. This Christological hermeneutic, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him how to understan

a contrast life aimed at communion.

“The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament” (65).

In other words, in much popular modern Christian thought we have made a three-layered mistake. We have Platonized our eschatology (substituting “souls going to heaven” for the promised new creation) and have therefore moralized our anthropology (substituting a qualifying examination of moral performance for the biblical notion of the human vocation