What does it mean to have a Christ-centered reading of Scripture? I have a post in the works where we will work through this question a bit. Let me just foreshadow that post by offering a simple reflection of what I think this might mean.

A Christ-centered reading of Scripture does so with the full realization that nothing else, for a Christian, could ever be the same when engaging with the text of Scripture. We don’t read the Scriptures as Rabbinic Jews, we don’t read the Scriptures as modern Jews; instead we want to read the Scriptures the way the Apostles did, as if the whole Old Covenant and its promises finally makes ultimate sense in light of its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. So for me, a Christ-centered reading of Scripture involves careful attention to the way the Apostles and the New Testament authors read the Old Testament, and attempting to understand what kind of Jewish modes of interpretation these early Jewish (Apostolic) Christians employed in their arsenal of demonstrating that Jesus is indeed the promised Messiah of Israel, the promised new Prophet (Moses) as it were. Within this linear reading, I also understand a Christ-centered reading to be one that pays attention to the ongoing conversation Christians have been having with the living voice of God and Christ encountered in Scripture over the centuries. So this kind of reading places the  early-Apostolic reading within a larger-living metaphysical frame wherein it should be understood that Jesus is actually the living text that gives the language of the text its reality and meaning. And so a Christ-centered reading for my money must be aware of both of these prongs; the linear-historical, and what Matthew Levering calls the participatory-historical. The ultimate shaping frame of this kind of Christ-centered reading of Scripture is provided by the realization that the text is given orientation and sense by the reality of Deus dixit ‘God has spoken’ (of which the history of interpretation in the Christian church provides attestation), and the filling out of what it means for God speaking is provided traction by way of the text’s Apostolic interpretation deposited in the New Testament; and the New Apostolic interpretation is also a result of a special kind of encounter that the Apostles had with the living voice of God in their seminal context.

I am incorporating some stuff I have been reading from various authors like: Levering, Webster, Barth, Torrance, Blomberg, Gibson, Nigh, Bavinck, et al. I look forward to fleshing this out further.