2025 Old Testament Symposium

The Evangelical Foundation for Biblical Research will invite a small group of Old Testament scholars to a symposium focused on how to guide the laity in finding christological passages in the Old Testament. This year’s event will be held at the Glen Eyrie Conference Center in Colorado Springs, CO, within the Garden of the Gods landscape. All participants will receive full funding for their travel, meals, and accommodation. Full participation in the symposium is required from Thursday dinner through Saturday afternoon (May 29, 30, 31). An additional night of accommodation will be provided for those who wish to explore the area on Sunday, June 1. Spouses are welcome to the accommodations, communal meals, and excursions in the area during the participants’ sessions, but their travel would be at the participant’s expense. As in previous years, it is anticipated that our meeting will result in a rich volume of essays designed to help the local church. So, upon submission of a revised version of the paper for publication, an honorarium of $500 will be issued.

How Does One Know? Inductive Criteria for Identifying Christ in Specific Old Testament Texts

This symposium addresses how one knows and accurately models the discipline of seeing Christ in specific Old Testament passages. Its core emphasis is how best to guide church leaders and the laity in determining their conclusions that specific passages are christological in their wording and immediate context. Invited participants in this symposium will share the assumption that there are christological and non-christological passages in the Old Testament. So, exactly how does one decide that a passage is connected to Christ Jesus? What should be one’s exegetical reasoning and method to guide the less theologically educated?

The uniqueness of this symposium is its intense interest in the reasoning and exegetical and contextual support for identifying christological passages. In other words, the prescribed approach is inductive, not deductive. It starts with analyzing particular passages to see whether patterns have developed in exegetical analyses that form a cumulative and common epistemology when concluding a passage is christological, rather than beginning with typical biblical theological or hermeneutical approaches from which Old Testament christological texts are deduced (e.g., salvation history, covenant theology). Though theological and hermeneutical structures can be helpful, discussions/publications on this approach are not sparse. However, the intrinsic markers within a passage itself that signals a christological connection is often missed in the discussions.