Book Review: A House for My Name
In a period when theologians are attempting to read anything and everything into the Old Testament, Peter J. Leithart is reading only one thing: Christ. An ordained Presbyterian minister (PCA) and Fellow of Theology and Literature at New St. Andrews College, Leithart has written prolifically on many subjects.
Primarily his works center on the interaction between Christianity and literature, though he has also written devotional and doctrinal works. His deep understanding of literature and its inner workings has helped to highlight aspects of Scripture that are often neglected and/or misinterpreted by many Christians today. The culmination of his literary approach to Scripture lies within his book, A House for My Name: A Survey for the Old Testament.
Reading the Old in Light of the New
In A House for My Name Leithart attempts “to provide a framework for the whole Bible and particular books that will help readers make sense of individual stories and passages” [1]. He does this by showing how the individual episodes in the “Bible fit together into the single story of God’s works within the creation and especially with Israel” ultimately pointing to Christ [2].
Leithart does not rely solely on a lexical understanding of words and passages, but rather on their literary context—how each passage relates to the ultimate and overarching story of Scripture. The result is a survey of the Old Testament that eschews the disjointedness of much Old Testament teaching and preaching, and provides a more holistic and organic understanding of Scripture.
A House for My Name covers the Old Testament by concentrating only on certain characters and stories. For example, in chapter 1 “Book of Beginnings” Leithart jumps from the creation account to the Tower of Babel, and from Abraham to Joseph, with little consideration of the intervening narrative. By moving in this manner he covers the period from creation to King Solomon’s reign within the first four chapters of this eight-chapter book.
Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the implosion of Israel through idolatry and consistent disobedience. Chapter 7 covers the exile and the rebuilding of the temple, while chapter 8 brings all of his previous assertions together by showing Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament—the prophesied and greater Adam, Son of David, King, and Temple. To grasp Leithart’s interpretive decisions in each of these chapters however, it is essential to consider his introduction.
Historical Old Testament Interpretation & the Infiltration of Classical Liberalism
Leithart introduces A House for My Name by recalling the interpretive methods of the early church fathers and the Reformers. He then asserts that modern Old Testament interpretation has assumed many of classical liberalism’s interpretive methods. Before classical liberalism came on the scene, the Old Testament was often interpreted in light of the New Testament with Christ as is its ultimate subject—a Christocentric approach.
To build his case, Leithart references medieval monks studying the Old Testament to know Christ and “to serve Him, promptly and sincerely” [3]. He also notes that John Calvin viewed the Old Testament as “an exhibition of the gospel under the veil of figures and shadows” [4]. These members of church history are used by Leithart to lend historical weight to his pursuit of a Christocentric interpretation of the Old Testament. However, he claims that modern Christians tend not to approach the Old Testament in this manner.
Leithart explains that modern Christians have been greatly affected by the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century. He writes that theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher effectively brought the early church heresy of Marcionism into the modern age (both Marcion and Schleiermacher saw the New and Old Testaments as antithetical). (Marcion, an early church heretic, taught that the Old Testament’s God differed from the New Testament’s.)
While Schleiermacher did not claim that there were differing Gods in the respective Testaments, he did believe that the connection between the testaments was purely historical. This leads Leithart to state that Schleiermacher treated “the forms of Old Testament religion as rubble that must be removed to find the religious treasure buried beneath” [5]. The effect of separating the Old and the New Testaments in this manner is an overly spiritualized and individualized existential understanding of Christianity.
While most twenty-first century evangelicals are openly hostile to Schleiermacher and others of his ilk, they unwittingly approach the Old Testament in a similar manner. Leithart suggests that this approach to Old Testament interpretation has led to other disturbing trends that are also reminiscent of classic liberalism:
Reading Schleiermacher leaves the evangelical of the late twentieth century with a feeling of eerie familiarity. Attacks on the “external” supports of religion, emphasis on emotional religious experiences, the idea that the kingdom of God is a nebulous and mainly inner reality—all these are themes that can be found in countless books from modern evangelicals [6].
The liberal shoe, unfortunately, fits many evangelical feet. Many of the “new” evangelical models of the Christian life are echoes of the classical liberalism that evangelicals fought against for so long. Leithart lays the blame for much of this assumption of liberal ideology at the feet of Old Testament interpretation (or misinterpretation). By reclaiming a more robust historical understanding of the Old Testament, he believes, we can curb some of these liberal sensibilities.
Using Typology to Reclaim a Historical Approach to the Old Testament
To return to an historical understanding of the Old Testament, Leithart posits, we need to embrace what he defines as typology. He uses this term to “highlight the principle that the Old Testament points ahead to Christ, but also to describe the structure of the Old Testament itself” [7]. While good Old Testament interpretation should begin with grammatical-historical analysis, he suggests, it should not end there.
When a passage is interpreted using the grammatical-historical method, it uncovers and addresses the “literal” meaning of the words within their historical, grammatical, and cultural context. Some form of this method “has been foundational to all biblical interpretation throughout the history of the church” [8]. However, if this is the only approach used when studying the Old Testament, Leithart claims that it “will be reduced to a study of ‘what they did then’ rather than a study of the glories of the Christ who was yet to come” [9].
In effect, the kind of Old Testament interpretation Leithart suggests is simply a more robust grammatical-historical method. If the historical and cultural contexts considered by the grammatical-historical method envelop all of Scripture, it will achieve the goals he is attempting to reach without the need for new definitions. The reason he has couched his approach in a typological setting, I believe, is to depart from the grammatical-historicism associated with classical liberalism, and not historic Christianity.
In this same vein, Leithart also views the actual structure of the Old Testament as best understood typologically. Thus he gives much weight to the use of chiasms and panels in the structure of a passage [10]. And yet again, if the grammatical-historical study of a passage were to extend beyond the immediate passage, there would be no need to define this as typology. However, this concept of interpreting Old Testament passages “typologically” is the foundational element of Leithart’s book.
Throughout the rest of the work, Leithart extrapolates and unpacks this approach to Old Testament study. However, there are also dangers in his approach. He does actually slip into some subjective typological interpretations on occasion [11]. However, Leithart’s intent is to help the reader realize that each passage points to the coming Messiah and the fulfillment of the proto-gospel given in Genesis 3. And though he can err at times, over all he accomplishes this goal.
Conclusion
A House for My Name is in many ways a difficult book to classify. Leithart’s introduction is written much like a scholarly work addressing complex theological concepts and their relation to biblical interpretation. However, the rest of the book is written in a much more dressed down manner. In fact Leithart states in the preface,
The setting I have in mind for my readers is not the library or even the pastor’s study, though I hope this book will be useful to pastors and other teachers. Instead, this book is designed to be read aloud at the dinner table during family devotions, and I have tried to write it in such a way that even very young children will begin to grasp the sweep and beauty of the Bible [12].
In this, Leithart has succeeded. His survey of the Old Testament is deep enough for the trained biblical scholar, yet accessible to the average lay person and family. It is a book that will be helpful in reclaiming an historical Christian understanding of and appreciation for the Old Testament.
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[1] Peter J. Leithart, A House for My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament (Moscow, ID: Canon
Press, 2000), 14-15.
[2] Ibid., 15.
[3] Ibid., 18.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 20-21.
[6] Ibid., 21.
[7] Ibid., 27.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] A chiasm is a poetic device used to highlight certain points in a passage. Their literary structure takes the form of ABCBA where each letter represents an idea. Ideas that are repeated are given the same letter representation (e.g., A and A, B and B). A panel structure takes the form of ABC-ABC sequencing multiple times over the same material. According to Leithart, the chiasm and the panel structures are often clues to “theological significance and sometimes [uncover] the theological point of a passage that may seem to be arranged arbitrarily” (36).
[11] In applying typology to creation, for instance, Leithart claims that God is building a three-story house, which is a type that will recur throughout the rest of Scripture, consisting of the water, land, and sky. Leithart then suggests and gives biblical examples of each of these levels as types: water many times represents the gentile nations, the land pictures Israel, and the sky and heavenly bodies often represent kings and rulers.
However, this typological approach can be helpful in understanding the layout of the tabernacle and temple as well as for interpreting the Psalms and the prophecies of the latter prophets where many poetic devices are used including typology.
[12] Leithart, 15.
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