Fredrick Holmgren: The Old Testament and the Significance of Jesus

Fredrick C. Holmgren, The Old Testament and the Significance of Jesus: Embracing Change—Maintaining Christian Identity: The Emerging Center in Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 195 pages.

I like to start every book by reading its foreword, and that is what I did with this text. I was delighted to find that Walter Bruggemann who penned the foreword was a seminary student with Holmgren in ancient days, and that he remembered Holmgren as the most quiet and most irenic member of their graduate class. I like people like that since they generally let me do all the talking. However, the foreword concludes with “There is so much to unlearn and then to relearn. Holmgren teaches us along the way” and I knew that sentence to be true. I opened my senses and proceeded.

My interest in this book began when I scanned its table of contents which indicated the book covered a subject that has been elusive for me over the past 40 years—finding the fulfillment and foretelling of Jesus in the Old Testament. Since I have always had difficulty in this search I put the book in my shopping bag and took it home.

Holmgren approaches his subject from several aspects: First he starts with an assessment of how things really are in the Jewish and Christian communities and emphasizes the dialogues between these communities which he discovered as he researched the subject. Next we read of his interpretation of how the early Jewish Christians approached the Scriptures and found Jesus therein. I found this treatment fascinating for it paralleled my own personal experience. I came to a saving knowledge of Christ when I was 30 years old. I had no background in the Scriptures at that point in life. I went with a friend to hear Billy Graham preach in Philadelphia in 1961. I did not know who Graham was, let alone what he was talking about, but I found immediate and total redemption and when I opened the Scriptures for the first time, I was already a believer in Jesus Christ.

That position which I did not understand intellectually at all back then and still to a large extent do not understand today gave me a mind set similar to the one Holmgren described in the early Jewish believer. After I knew Jesus, I somehow knew that He was the reason for the Scriptures and that they were qualified to accomplish what God intended them to do. They were God breathed and I knew that. Holmgren posits that the early Jewish believers went through a similar experience, that after they met the Savior, they suddenly could find Jesus in the depth of the Old Testament. The New Testament writers read the Old Testament and wrote what they knew out of their Christian experience. They found Jesus separately from the text, they met Him on the highways and byways of life, then knowing him they returned to the text and there He was. They did not read the text and thus discover Jesus, they found Him in the text after they had discovered Him to be the Son of God.

Holmgren then discusses the real meaning of the New Covenant in Jeremiah 31:31-34. What does new really mean? Is it a new covenant or is this new covenant actually restated faithfulness to what already was there? We are treated to Holmgren’s view of the tension between the original meaning and the depth interpretation that so many Christians have presumed to be normative. Holmgren moves on to probe the propriety of the use of Old Testament and New Testament as names for the two portions of Scripture. As I read on, I thought of how Jews do not use the term “Old Testament” since using the term implies that there could be a “New Testament.” Don’t we do wonderful things to ourselves and each other?

Holmgren concludes with a provocative systematic study of the humanity and divinity of Christ, and then reverts to where he started “In the Beginning, the Experience.” So much to unlearn and to relearn. May we ever be willing to do this for when we refuse to do so, we lose our vitality and value to our community and to our God who so wonderfully gave us His Son.

Good reading! You will find the book vital and valuable, just like we all want to be.

Reviewed by H. Murray Hohns

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