The Whole Story Matters: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on Israel’s Covenantal Life and the Jewish Jesus

Abstract

Recent scholarship has urged Christians to rediscover the Jewishness of Jesus, yet this recovery has seldom transformed the theological imagination of the church. This article argues that the difficulty is hermeneutical: Christians have too often read the Scriptures christocentrically, seeking isolated prophecies and figures that are fulfilled in Christ, rather than christotelically, perceiving the entire narrative of Israel as gathered into its salvific horizon in him. The term “christotelic” is borrowed from Peter Enns, but it is put to different work here. Where Enns locates the telos in the paschal event, the patristic tradition, particularly as lived out liturgically in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, locates it in a person who assumed not humanity in the abstract but the covenantal flesh of Israel. That difference is decisive: a christotelic hermeneutic whose telos is an event restricts Jesus’s Jewishness to a datum of first-century history, whereas one whose telos is a person cannot, since only someone living Israel’s covenantal life from within could carry it to its messianic end. Drawing on Irenaeus of Lyons, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Tyconius, Augustine, and Maximus the Confessor, the article finds a tradition that arrives repeatedly at the christotelic reading and repeatedly fails to hold it, and argues that what the fathers could not hold steadily, Byzantine worship performed: a church that cannot sing without the songs of Moses, that proclaims the genealogy of Christ as gospel, and that keeps the feast of her Lord’s circumcision has confessed in her liturgy what her theology too often forgot. To read Scripture christotelically is to affirm that Israel’s life with God was full from the first, that the Incarnate Word remains irrevocably Jewish, and that the church’s identity is rooted in her grafting among Israel’s natural branches.