The Old Testament Is Dying (Theological Explorations for the Church Catholic)

A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment

Strawn, Brent A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781441244833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The Old Testament constitutes the majority of the Christian Bible and provides much of the language of Christian faith. However, many churches tend to neglect this crucial part of Scripture. This timely book details a number of ways the Old Testament is showing signs of decay, demise, and imminent death in the church. Brent Strawn reminds us of the Old Testament's important role in Christian faith and practice, criticizes current misunderstandings that contribute to its neglect, and offers ways to revitalize its use in the church.

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The Old Testament Is Dying

A (Non)Telling Vignette

Like many others who make their living as theological educators, I do a fair amount of teaching in local church settings. It is often and increasingly the case that the majority, if not the entirety, of the audiences at these events are senior citizens, with most more than a bit beyond the fifty-five-year age minimum to get cheaper coffee at McDonald’s. Since I myself have school-age children at home, I understand and can sympathize with the fact that parents with children are stretched very thin, and if they aren’t altogether absent from church that day due to soccer practice, cheerleading, or a debate team competition, they are perhaps assisting in children’s worship, Sunday school, teen activities, or the like. While I have no doubt that this may very well be the case, the fact that so many of the regulars at the church events where I speak are septuagenarians, if not octogenarians or nonagenarians, is of great significance for the diagnosis that I offer here because one of the primary signs of language death is when only the elderly speak it.

Now let me be clear: I’m very thankful for the opportunities I get to teach, and I’m very thankful for any who will listen, whatever their age. Moreover, the elderly who so frequently predominate at my talks are, to borrow a churchy term, “the saints”—and that means that even if they aren’t particularly holy, they’ve at least been around the church barn a few times. The odds are that they are fairly faithful people, on various fronts, that they know their Bibles decently well, and, although they may not like what’s happening in the contemporary service, they’ll almost certainly be back next Sunday along with their tithe envelopes. Then too there is the additional fact that the saints, especially the quite elderly ones, always seem happy to have someone—especially someone (relatively) younger—come and spend some time talking to them.

But as I was teaching in a church in metropolitan Atlanta a summer or two ago, something shocking took place that I had never experienced before. I admit to being momentarily dumbfounded when it happened, but the full significance of what transpired didn’t hit me until later. I was teaching a two-week series on biblical poetry and was introducing the topic by pointing out the use of poetry at certain key junctures in the Bible. I had mentioned several examples from the Old Testament and had just turned to the New Testament. I began with the role of prophetic poetry at the start of Jesus’s ministry (the citation from Isa. 40:3; Mal. 3:1; and Exod. 23:20 in Mark 1:2) and then moved to the Passion Narratives, at which point I quoted Jesus’s well-known “cry of dereliction” from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—in the King James Version, no less (to tap the recall of the elderly audience). Given what I had just said, I figured the class was following me and that it was relatively clear that this saying from the cross was (a) poetic and (b) a citation from the Old Testament. So I asked the class of hoary heads what Jesus was quoting. Where, I questioned, did his words come from?

Total silence.

No one knew. Or if they did know, they certainly weren’t telling. But the pause was long enough and the silence deafening enough to make it clear to me that this wasn’t a case of being tight-lipped. It was a case of not knowing. One sweet-faced, white-haired woman finally shook her head, confirming my suspicion. No, they did not know the answer to my question. Not even this elderly group of “saints” knew that Jesus’s cry was a direct quotation of Psalm 22.

That’s when I realized, in a way that I had never realized before, that the Old Testament was dying.

The Diagnosis, in Brief, with a Caveat

That, in brief, is my claim—or to employ a medical metaphor, my diagnosis: the Old Testament is dying. Much needs to be said about this claim to explain it, let alone establish it, but for now let me gloss it further by stating my firm belief that for many contemporary Christians, at least in North America,1 the Old Testament has ceased to function in healthy ways in their lives as sacred, authoritative, canonical literature. These individuals—or in some cases, groups of individuals (even entire churches)2—do not regard the Old Testament in the same way (or as highly) as the New Testament, do not understand the Old Testament, would prefer to do without the Old Testament, and for all practical purposes do exactly that by means of their neglect and ignorance of it, whether in private devotion or public worship or both. All of that is what I mean by the shorthand claim “The Old Testament is dying.” Indeed, in many circles, the claim “The Old Testament is dying,” as stark as it is, is not nearly stark enough. “The Old Testament is dead” is far more accurate.

Before going further, I want to clarify what I do and do not mean by this claim that the Old Testament is dying if not already dead. First and foremost, I do not intend any connections with the earlier (in)famous “God Is Dead” controversy of the 1960s.3 Given the not-so-serendipitous convergence of the language, I admit to having entertained a different title for the present book by rephrasing it altogether as a question, “Is the Old Testament Dying?” While I have opted for the indicative formulation, it is nevertheless true that what follows is an essay, not a final or definitive statement, and it is the nature of all such claims to be contestable.4 Some will no doubt challenge what I present here, and that is well and good. I would be beyond delighted to be proven wrong—indeed, to borrow words from Bill McKibben,5 it is my prayer to be proven wrong, but thus far my prayers have gone unanswered, and so I remain convinced that my diagnosis is correct. I have based my assessment on the available data at hand and my interpretation of those data, but I admit that “the parties” involved in my study—the Old Testament and its life within contemporary Christianity—are very large subjects, and so any one person’s assessment cannot help but be limited, perspectival, and to some degree anecdotal.6

Let me be clear: I have no doubt that the Old Testament is read, at least occasionally, by many Christians and in many churches, but part of my larger point—not to mention the larger problem—is not simply if the Old Testament is present (somehow), read (intermittently), or preached from (sporadically), but how it is present, read, preached from, and so on and so forth. The Old Testament was also present in Nazi Germany, at least for a while, but how?—which is to ask, To what end?7

Further, even at the points where I do make firm claims, where I do mean to describe the terminal state of the Old Testament among certain people or groups, my argument should not be confused with an affirmative or prescriptive statement on my part. As will be obvious in what follows, the death of the Old Testament is not something I endorse. Far from it! Instead, it constitutes my greatest sadness.

The Old Testament Is (Like) a Language

My diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying, if not already dead, depends on a linguistic analogy. The analogy is that the Old Testament is a language or very much like a language; hence, like other languages, it can die out relatively quickly, even definitively, never to return in living form. But what does it mean to say that the Old Testament is a language or very much like one? I begin with what I do not mean by this statement.

First, I do not mean to discuss the language of the Old Testament itself, which, in truth, is not one language but several. When studying the Old Testament “in the original,” one must actually reckon with many ancient languages: Classical (or Biblical) Hebrew primarily, of course, but also Biblical Aramaic for those bits of Genesis, Jeremiah, and especially Daniel and Ezra that exist in that language. Next in importance, though very important in and of itself, is the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX), which in turn is a complex entity comprising “one” (yet again, one out of many) of the most important textual witnesses to the Old Testament, together with those apocryphal or deuterocanonical books that survive exclusively or primarily in that language.8 This listing doesn’t yet include the many other languages that have preserved important versions of the Old Testament—the Latin Vulgate, for instance, or the Syriac Peshitta, both of which contain additional deuterocanonical material—nor does it include certain languages that have proved to be particularly useful for the study of the Old Testament in terms of understanding low-frequency words, analyzing poetry, or providing crucial historical and cultural contexts for the biblical texts. One thinks here of the ancient Near Eastern languages, especially of Hebrew’s close Northwest Semitic cousin, Ugaritic, but also and especially the massive gold mine that is Akkadian in its various dialects and periods.

All of these languages are important, and the most competent biblical scholars work with several at a time, but it should be quickly admitted that a thorough knowledge of even just one, even Biblical Hebrew itself, while of great help, does not (re)solve every problem one encounters in the Old Testament. Part of why that is the case is precisely due to the nature of these languages and how they differ from our own.9 Walter Brueggemann has this to say about Biblical Hebrew specifically:

Of all that could be said of this script [the Bible], my initial point is a simple but crucial one. It is in Hebrew, not Latin. I do not say that to suggest that one cannot read it without knowledge of Hebrew grammar, though such knowledge is a good idea and a real advantage. I say it rather to make the point that this text, in its very utterance, in its ways of putting things, is completely unfamiliar to us. . . . Hebrew, even for those who know it much better than do I, is endlessly imprecise and unclear. It lacks the connecting words; it denotes rather than connotes; it points and opens and suggests, but it does not conclude or define.10

Or, as another Old Testament scholar, Peter Enns, has written: “Knowing the original Hebrew does not always make the text ‘come alive’! It often introduces obscurities that English readers are not aware of.”11

The point here, however, is not the number of languages necessary for a minimally adequate interpretation of the Bible; neither is the point how difficult these various languages can be. Despite the truism about how much is “lost in translation,”12 one hopes that one’s native vernacular will suffice for much biblical interpretation (particularly if we are speaking of minimum competency), especially given the large number and range of excellent translations of the Bible into English, not to mention the countless resources for the study of the Bible that are based on its original languages, even for those who know none of them.13 Instead, my point is that the Old Testament itself is a language, or, to back off ever so slightly, very much like a language.

What I mean by this linguistic analogy, then, is that the Old Testament, like any other piece of literature or art—like any other way of figuring the world—is, or at least can be, a way of constructing reality, a way of understanding the world, a way of perceiving all that is, including ourselves.14 Just as language—preverbal, nonverbal, and verbal—allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves, t...