I suppose the kind of subtext of my talk this afternoon is to explore, in some sense, is the

relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament.

I think one of the losses, certainly in theology over the last century or two, has been the

inability to use the Old Testament as a fundamental resource

for theological thinking.

There's a lot of reasons for why that has come about not going to be the duty of my lecture

by any means to address all of that.

But the epigram there on the first slide is certainly not chosen

by accident. It very much reflects the thinking of Augustine and the contra faustum. And Thomas

probably draws his inspiration for this from Augustine. Augustine's task in the contra Faustum

is not simply to refute Faustus,

but to try to make a case

the strongest case possible

for how the Old Testament

in, we might want to say,

it's per se voice

to reflect the terminology of Forever childs, I think a very

important scholar on this subject, that the per se voice of the Old Testament has a real material

contribution to make to Christian theology. Okay, the basic point of my lecture is that the shape of Jesus' life as presented in the

prologue of John's Gospel stands in a figural relationship to that of the life we might

want to say of Israel's God in the Old Testament.

This, I think, can be illustrated quite easily, graphically, as my first slide shows,

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