Why Is The Old Testament In The Bible?
I was speaking in church yesterday in week four of a six-part series on the Bible, as a kind of ‘overview’. This week was the New Testament (‘NT’), specifically the Gospels. I started by comparing and contrasting it at a ‘headline level’ with the Old Testament (‘OT’), which we’d covered in previous weeks.
For most Christians, the OT is far harder to understand and relate to. For one thing, it’s further away in time—the last book in the OT was around 500 years before the first book of the NT. The OT covers 1500+ years; the NT less than 100 years. It’s about three times as long—around 75% of the whole Bible compared to the NT’s circa 25%. And the plot line of the content seems much harder to follow than the NT’s simple three-part formula of the life of Jesus (‘the Gospels’), the development of the early church (‘Acts’), and the pastoral letters (‘the rest’).
I think it’s fair to say that for most Christians, our challenge with the OT is the absence of Jesus. Yes, I know there are prophetic references looking forward to the Messiah—that Christians identify with Jesus—but there aren’t that many relative to its length. And few, if any, of those references are to do with the nature of a personal relationship with Jesus, which is most evangelical Christians’ particular interest.
Bottom line, we don’t always know what to do with an Old Testament that doesn’t have Jesus in it! The OT is set within a relationship with God that seems very different indeed from our relationship (given its silence in relation to Jesus and, mostly, to the Holy Spirit as well).
Christians and non-Christians alike tend to have more questions about the OT than the NT. Firstly, there’s the perennial question of a literal six-day creation. Can people believe that, in an age of science? Christians have either to defend it (“God knows better than modern scientists”) and lose all credibility, or, resort to some variation on “A ‘day’ doesn’t necessarily have to mean a literal period of 24-hours” or (more radically) “Genesis was never intending to offer a scientific account of ‘how’—only a theological account of ‘why’ and ‘who’. It simply chose easily memorable picture language to convey that.” But the mere fact that there is no single ‘Christian’ response to the first big question that people have about the OT is problematic. And there are plenty more where that came from.
Many other questions—equally or more uncomfortable than creation—flow from the OT for Christians today. Let me articulate a few and see to what extent they resonate—perhaps you’ve wondered about some of them yourself; perhaps you’ve even asked some. But given evangelical passion for the Bible—and especially, the strident evangelical insistence on some very big claims for the nature of the Bible, such as its ‘inerrancy’ and its ‘supreme authority’ for beliefs and practice (the Old Testament included)—awkward questions about the Bible’s content are often not welcome in that world. Partly because ‘asking awkward questions’ is viewed as ‘being difficult’ and antithetical to just ‘having faith in the Bible’ (“One day, we shall know these things, but for now we just have to trust”). That kind of response might sound persuasive within a hermetically-sealed Christian world, but unfortunately, it doesn’t get off first base credibility-wise in the wider world!
Questions such as:
“Why did God choose one nation (biblical Israel) to be his people? What about the millions of people from other nations, across thousands of years, who were left out of relationship with God before Jesus (‘the gentiles’)? Didn’t God love them and want them to know him during that time? Was God not active amongst the gentiles?”
“Why did God give his people Torah (‘the law’) as their covenant charter (the 613 commandments that were the ‘written constitution’ defining what being ‘right with God’ and ‘right with others’ looked like) and ask them to believe and trust in Torah for 1,000 plus years before Jesus?” Either Torah was efficacious, with its promises to be taken at face value—in which case, Calvinist and Reformed Christians who rubbish it, based on their reading of Paul, are wrong—or, it wasn’t efficacious in the first place. In which case (as one theologian challengingly put it) God ‘played a cruel trick on Israel’ by allowing them to believe Torah was efficacious for so long. Or did it start efficacious, but then somehow lost its efficacy with the coming of Jesus?”
“If Calvinist and Reformed Christians are reading Paul right, why would God have bothered with Torah in the first place? Why did he not simply have Jesus come earlier, averting the need for all that Torah and Israel stuff?”
“How could those who believed and trusted in the God of Israel during OT times—who were following and obeying him as best they understood, within the parameters they had been given—be ‘saved’ before Jesus (if knowing Jesus personally is the only way for anyone to be saved)?”
“The OT has many, many stories of people knowing God pre-Jesus: God ‘calling’ them, speaking to them, and even being friends with them—for example, Abraham (James 2:23) and Moses (Exodus 33:11). How can that be, if—as the standard evangelical gospel asserts—humanity and God are separated by sin, as a chasm we cannot cross, and knowing Jesus is the only way to the Father?”
“I understand the ‘new covenant’ relationship with God through Christ, which opened up relationship with God to gentiles. I also understand the covenant with the Jewish people through Moses (the covenant defined by Torah). But what was the basis of people’s relationship with God before that— people like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? God even called himself ‘The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’. But how could such relationships be possible, pre-Jesus? What ‘enabled’ those relationships?”
As you might imagine, I have answers (that work for me, at least) to most if not all of these questions. So, too, I have an inkling of the standard evangelical responses to many of them; and perhaps those are right, but they will not likely be taken to be self-evidently persuasive answers in many people’s minds.
Let’s just extend those questions a little further.
Many, or even most, Christians read the Bible to gain insights inter alia into the nature and character of God; how to understand God better; how God feels about things; and how God engages with people in this world. They draw those insights from the interactions with people that they see in the Bible. But how does what we see in the Old Testament figure in that? Should we expect OT insights to be the same as those in the NT (it’s the same God, after all)? But how can they be the same if (a) Jesus isn’t there, and (b) the context of the covenantal relationship was different? Is the goal to harmonise apparently inconsistent OT and NT insights, and if so, how exactly?
I pose these questions because, for many Christians, if we’re honest, the God of the OT does sometimes appear to be different from the God we see in Jesus. So an important question is . . . why does it appear so? Why does the Word of God permit that?
Much of what we read in the Psalms seems compatible with our relationship with the Jesus we know from the NT (certainly the parts that get quoted by Christians). But . . . not all of it does . . . And nor does the warrior God we see in the Canaanite conquest seem compatible. And nor does the God whose wrath against human sinfulness we see breaking out against Sodom and Gomorrah seem compatible. And nor the God who wiped out everyone apart from Noah and his family, in the flood.
If it’s OK to “copy and paste” verses from the OT into our present understanding of God, as ‘timeless biblical truths’, are we really saying that this applies only to certain, selected OT verses? If so, how do we know which ones? And what about the others, the ones that are ineligible for copying and pasting from “then” to “now”? Where does that leave them, as “inerrant” and “supremely authoritative” for Christian beliefs and practice?
For anyone interested in thoughtfully exploring these kinds of questions, which a short blog doesn’t permit, I recommend my book, How To Read The Bible Well, especially chapter 4, ‘The God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament’, and chapter 5, ‘Does the Old Testament Apply Today?’
Feel free to drop me an email with your thoughts on these questions (and on any other blog subjects for that matter). I’m genuinely interested in how you perceive the answers. And even whether they bother you. Maybe it’s just me, with a morbid fascination . . .!