Preaching Christ from the Old Testament: An Examination of Three Approaches (Part 1)
Introduction and the First Testament Priority Approach
This series of posts comes from a research paper I wrote for a class at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary.
It should come as no surprise when I say that Christ is the central figure of Christianity. It follows that He is also the central figure of Christian Scripture. As such, all Scripture testifies of Him. As Van Pelt put it, “Jesus is the theological center of the Old Testament. This means that the person and work of Jesus as presented in the New Testament (including his birth, life, teachings, death, resurrection, ascension, and return) constitute the singular reality that unifies and explains everything that appears in the Old Testament.”[1]
This point is almost unanimously accepted among Evangelicals. The disagreements begin to appear when we discuss how Scripture testifies of Christ. This is particularly true concerning the Old Testament. Although there are many approaches in this area, I want to use this paper to focus on three of them. They are the “First Testament Priority Approach,” the “Redemptive-Historical, Christocentric Approach,” and the “Christotelic Approach.”
