BOOK REVIEW

JOURNAL OF ECUMENICAL STUDIES

VOLUME 45: 2 (SPRING 2010)

Rein Bos. We Have Heard That God Is With You: Preaching the Old Testament. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2008. Pp. 384. $28.00. Paper.

            Bos’s work gives seminarians and pastors a very creative textbook for Hebrew Bible Hermeneutics and Homiletics, which testifies that “Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ in accordance with the Scripture, without implying that the New Testament church has replaced or superseded Israel as the people of God” (p. xi).

            In Chapter 11, Bos provides a four dimensional hermeneutical model that can serve the contemporary practice of preaching. The first element in this model is the sensus Israeliticus (pp. 168–171), which recognizes “that Christians are not the first intended audience of the words of Moses and the prophets.” Because the first audience was, is, and will be Israel, Bos states, “It is for this reason that I propose to pay attention to Israel, to God’s way with Israel, and to acknowledge Jewish contributions to the interpretation of Moses and the prophets in the first level or dimension of meaning.” The second dimension in Bos’s hermeneutical model is the Christological Sense (pp. 171–174, 214–248), in which “The way apostles and evangelists quote the Old Testament texts provides us with a creative ‘grammar’ for such a Christological recontextualization of Moses and the prophets.” The third dimension is the Ecclesiological Sense (pp. 174–177, 249–287), wherein it is recognized that “In and through Jesus Christ, the Lord is not only the God of Israel but also the God of the Gentiles (Rom 3:29) . . . [C]ontemporary preaching is mandated to extend the dynamics of Moses and the prophets to the farthest parts of the earth.” The fourth dimension is the Eschatological Sense (pp. 177–181, 288–317), wherein “Israel has the right to raise her voice and invite the nations to hold on to God’s pledges” and the prophets’ dreams of another world “is not only, and may not be even primarily, a beatific lie in the hereafter.” For Bos, these four “senses” become the “voices” in “A Four-Voice Choir,” which is the title of the third section of the book.

            The book’s first section, “The Old Testament in the Theory and Practice of Preaching” (chaps 1–7), includes “the homiletical profile of five prominent and often used hermeneutical keys: allegory, typology, salvation-historical approach, promise and fulfillment, and the model of Karl Barth” (p. 12). In the second section, “Ingredients of a New Model,” (chaps. 8–11), Bos recognizes the fourfold sense of Scripture which emerged in the Middle Ages—the literal sense, the allegorical sense, the tropological sense, and the anagogical sense. In the last chapter of the third section, “A Four-Voiced Choir” (chaps. 12–16), the “Four Voices” are utilized in sermon preparation focused on Exodos 3, the Servant of the Lord passages (Is 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12), and Psalm 22.

Thomas F. McDaniel (emer.), Palmer Theological Seminary, Wynnewood, PA