Edgework

To this point in our discourse, we have focused on how Jesus read his Bible – which is basically our Old Testament – and noted that Paul tends to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The question we must now consider is whether the example set by Jesus and Paul gives us license, or perhaps even a mandate, to read the Old Testament text in a similar way.

My conclusion at this point is to answer that question in the affirmative. So let’s review the lessons we can learn from Jesus and Paul.

First, we must view the Old Testament as an ancient text written by ancient persons to an ancient audience. In other words, the text emerges from and reflects a pre-modern worldview and perspectives common to tribal cultures of the time. That means that some perspectives it portrays do not fully represent God. This does not require us to jettison the Old Testament, as Marcion did in the second century, but to accept the fact that the text as it stands is not a final revelation about God. Both Jesus and Paul regularly insist that, when reading the Old Testament, we should anticipate a clearer vision about who God is and what God requires.

Most of us have little trouble leaving behind the sacrificial system and Levitical laws. But we have also suggested many texts purporting to be true historical records are, in fact, better perceived as stories told by God’s people in an attempt to make sense of the God they worshiped and the context they found themselves in. So we must be careful when drawing conclusions about God and God’s ways from the Old Testament. We must remember it was not written “to” us to answer our modern questions. But it is fair to say it was written “for” us in that it provides a window into how ancient people of faith related to their God.

Second, we must accept the fact of multivocality in the Old Testament. That is to say that there are differing perspectives about issues and events in different places within the text. For example, sometimes God is portrayed as a jealous, tribal deity out for revenge against all who disobey his will. At other times God is seen as being slow to anger, rich in mercy and abounding in love. The traditional approach to such duality is to suggest that God has two faces and our challenge is to balance God’s justice and mercy and God’s wrath and love. The problem, of course, is that this makes God out to be schizophrenic; so we must approach God in fear because we don’t know which face we will see when.

When we take note of how Jesus and Paul use the OId Testament text, however, we see them leaving behind passages depicting a violent God and drawing forward a vision of God consistent with the character and example of Jesus. That is a fairly direct way of saying that some of the Old Testament story tellers got it wrong; for example, that God never directly commanded the Israelites to commit genocide against its neighbors. And that for us to find visions in the Old Testament of a promised Messiah in the image of the warrior King David misses the intention of God in bringing redemption to the world. So we must insist that any view of God portrayed in the Old Testament that is not consistent with what we see in Jesus is not true to God’s revelatory intent; that it has been discolored by the human story tellers of ancient times.

Third, we must constantly be discerning a difference between those texts that lean toward Jesus and those that lean into the prevailing values and perspectives of ancient tribal culture. That means that we will have to wrestle with the Old Testament text, not expecting it to answer modern questions we bring to it, and especially evaluating all its passages in light of the Jesus event. This is a different kind of wrestling than the kind often undertaken which is to find ways of preaching a relevant message for our times from virtually every chapter and verse of the Old Testament.

Some will argue that to require such wrestling diminishes the Old Testament, withdraws it from the realm of sacred scripture and requires us to bring an unhealthy skepticism to the study of the text. I would argue, on the other hand, that wrestling with the text, as we see Jesus and Paul doing, means that we are taking it seriously.  At the same time it frees us from the necessity of adopting unhealthy ideas about the character of God and condoning ethical behavior that goes against our consciences. We can simply start from the premise, for example, that genocide and infanticide is always wrong, no matter what ancient writers say about it.

Four, we need to acknowledge that, far from being a full revelation of God, the Old Testament text forms a massive territory within which trajectories pointing toward a fuller revelation about God can be launched. We see these trajectories teased out of the Old Testament text by Jesus and Paul, sometimes by actually repurposing the original texts – even using them to say something directly opposite to what the original writers had intended. Without acknowledging trajectories in the Old Testament, the New Testament narrative would simply not have a leg to stand on.

To accept these lessons from Jesus and Paul for how to read the Old Testament is one thing, and a project too daunting for many to even attempt. But the question that remains is whether or not these lessons on how to read the Old Testament have any bearing on how we read the New Testament nearly two thousand years after it was written. We will turn our attention to that question in the remaining essays of this series.