Do We Need the New Testament?

Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself

John Goldingay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898473
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Do we need the Old Testament? That's a familiar question, often asked. But as an Old Testament scholar, John Goldingay turns that question on its head: Do we need the New Testament?What's new about the New Testament? After all, the Old Testament was the only Bible Jesus and the disciples knew. Jesus affirmed it as the Word of God. Do we need anything more? And what happens when we begin to look at the Old Testament, which is the First Testament, not as a deficient old work in need of a christological makeover, but as a rich and splendid revelation of God's faithfulness to Israel and the world?In this cheerfully provocative yet probingly serious book, John Goldingay sets the question and views it from a variety of angles. Under his expert hand, each facet unfolds the surprising richness of the Old Testament and challenges us to recalibrate our perspective on it.

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Do We Need the New Testament?1

So why do we need the New Testament? In what sense is the First Testament incomplete? What’s new about the New Testament? What difference would it make if we didn’t have the New Testament?

Salvation

We need the New Testament because it tells us about Jesus. As regards what it vitally tells us about him, the New Testament itself suggests that the answer lies in what Jesus did and what happened to him. Half of the New Testament is occupied with telling his story (four times), with a special focus on his execution and his resurrection. Much of the other half of the New Testament focuses on explaining the significance of that story, with an even sharper focus on his execution and resurrection. His letting himself be killed and his resurrection were the ultimate expression of God’s love and power. In these events God let humanity do its worst to him, and declined to be overcome by its actions; God was both willing and able to overcome it. The submission and the overcoming meant something for God. They constituted God’s refusal to be overcome by humanity’s rejection or rebellion. God was insistent on bringing to a consummation the purpose he had initiated from the beginning. To use Jesus’ language, God was insistent on reigning in the world and on not letting humanity get away from him. So the submission and the overcoming were important for God. Because they embodied those facts about God, the execution and the resurrection also meant something for humanity. They indicated to us the far-reaching nature of God’s willingness to submit himself to us and the far-reaching nature of God’s power.

What if God had not sent his Son into the world or not collaborated in his Son’s submitting himself to execution or not brought about his resurrection? And what if we had not known about those events—what if the Gospels had not been written?

In a sense God did nothing new in Jesus. God was simply taking to its logical and ultimate extreme the activity in which he had been involved throughout the First Testament story. All the way through, God had been letting humanity do its worst. He had especially been letting the people he adopted do its worst, and had been refusing to be overcome by its rejection and rebellion, declining to abandon it or destroy it. God had been paying the price for his people’s attitude to him, sacrificing himself for this people, bearing its sin. He had been absorbing the force of that sin, carrying it in himself rather than making Israel carry it. This carrying did not exclude disciplining Israel; but when God brought trouble on Israel, the trouble-bringing was an act of discipline within the context of an ongoing relationship like that between a parent and a child.

The fact that God had been acting in this way through Israel’s story didn’t make it redundant for God to bring his self-sacrifice to a climax in Jesus. This last self-sacrifice was the logical and inevitable culmination of that earlier way of acting and letting himself be acted on, the final expression of it. To be a little paradoxical, if God hadn’t acted in this way in Jesus, he wouldn’t have been acting in that way in Israel’s story and in the world’s story.

Through the story of the nations and through Israel’s story God had been declaring that he was king, and he had sometimes been acting like a king in imposing his will on the nations or on Israel. That declaration and action was inclined to draw forth human resistance. The nations and Israel preferred to make their own decisions. The coming of Jesus constituted another assertion that God was king and that he intended to behave as king in relation to the nations and to the world, an assertion made in acts and in words. Predictably, Jesus’ coming and his declaration about God reigning drew forth a response of resistance. The resistance was expressed in the execution of God’s Son, which appropriately involved both the nations and the people of God. It constituted the ultimate expression of human wickedness. It thus drew forth the ultimate expression of God’s submission to humanity. God remained sovereign Lord; he was not compelled by any factors outside himself. Yet God deliberately let humanity do what it wanted to him, and did so under a compulsion that came from inside himself. It was a compulsion that derived from who he was, a compulsion to be himself. He could not deny himself or be untrue to himself (2 Tim 2:13). By the same dynamic, when we insisted on executing God’s Son, this act also drew forth the ultimate expression of God’s faithfulness and God’s power, in resurrecting Jesus. One might almost say that God had to provoke humanity into its ultimate act of rebellion in order to have the opportunity to act in a way that refused to let this ultimate act of rebellion have the last word.

By the same dynamic again, our subsequent continuing resistance to God’s reign as nations and as the people of God means Jesus must come back to implement that reign.

God’s submitting his Son to execution was thus necessary for God’s sake and for humanity’s sake. It was necessary for God to be God in this way to fulfill his purpose and overcome human rebellion. In letting his Son die, God was being true to himself in undertaking this ultimate act of submission to human self-assertiveness, and refusing to be frustrated by it or to abandon humanity to its sinfulness or to surrender his relationship with humanity. It was necessary for humanity’s sake in order to bring home to humanity the truth about itself and about God, and to draw it from rebellion to submission, from resistance to faith. As the point is classically put, the act of atonement had an objective and a subjective aspect.

Insofar as God’s act was undertaken for God’s sake, there was no great need for humanity to know about it. It could have been done in secret or not recorded. But insofar as it was undertaken for humanity’s sake, as a dem­onstration of divine love, it needed to be done in public and it needed to be recorded, so that people two thousand years later can still be drawn by it.

So do we need the New Testament? It has been argued that “to say that the Hebrew Bible has complete integrity over against the New Testament is to cast grave doubts upon the unity of the Christian Bible. It is like saying that one can read the first ten books of the Aeneid as if the last two did not exist, and this, in turn, is to say that the last two add nothing essential.”2 My argument is that the execution and the resurrection were indeed the logical end term of a stance that God had been taking through First Testament times, so that the First Testament story does give an entirely adequate account of who God is and of the basis for relating to God. Because of who God has always been, God was already able to be in relationship with his people, despite their rebellion. God has always been able and willing to carry their waywardness. And on the basis of that story, Israel has always been able to respond to God and to be in relationship with God. In this sense the gospel did not open up any new possibilities to people; those possibilities were always there. Yet the dying and the resurrection were the ultimate expression of who the God of Israel is, and the story of the dying and the resurrection is the story of that ultimate expression of who the God of Israel is. They do therefore provide the ultimate public basis for responding to God and trusting in God. Abraham and Sarah, Miriam and Moses, Jeremiah and Huldah, Esther and Daniel managed okay without the New Testament, but we are privileged to have the story it tells because it gives us the climactic expression of the truth about God that they lived by.

Narrative

So is the First Testament story complete on its own? The New Testament story does add to the First Testament story, but so do other Jewish writings from the Greek and Roman periods such as 1 Maccabees. The movie The Bourne Legacy added to the earlier Bourne movies, but this fact does not signify that the earlier movies needed a fourth in the sequence.

The beginning of Matthew’s Gospel implies that the story told in the First Testament and the story told in this Gospel can be read as a unified story, but it does so in a way that also indicates that the First Testament story does not have to be read that way. Matthew speaks of fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile and fourteen from the exile to Jesus, which suggests that the story forms one elegant whole. But the First Testament itself shows that Matthew has been selective with its story in order to make the point. In the First Testament there were more than fourteen generations from Abraham to David and from David to the exile. Matthew is working backwards. He knows that Jesus is the climax of the biblical story, and he shapes it accordingly. But the shaping does not emerge from the First Testament narrative itself.

Paul likewise knows that he and his churches are living in the context of the climax in the biblical story, and it has been argued that this perspective “allows him to read the story whole from the standpoint of its ending, thus perceiving correspondences and narrative unities that would have been hidden from characters in the earlier chapters of the story.” The “astonishing event” of the execution and resurrection of Jesus was then “completely unpredictable on the basis of the story’s plot development,” but it “is nonetheless now seen as the supremely fitting narrative culmination, providing unforeseen closure to dangling narrative themes and demanding a reconfiguration of . . . the reader’s grasp of ‘what the story is all about.’”3

Jesus’ execution and resurrection may have been largely unpredicted on the basis of the First Testament story, yet Jesus didn’t see them as unpredictable. He was not surprised at his execution and resurrection, and his lack of surprise did not simply issue from his possessing divine insight. His execution fitted the pattern of the First Testament story; Israel had regularly rejected and killed its prophets (e.g., Mt 16; 23). His resurrection, too, fitted the pattern of the First Testament story. Ezekiel 37 notes how Israel in exile saw itself as dead and hopeless, yet God brought it back from the dead and reestablished it in fulfillment of Ezekiel’s promise that Israel would be raised from the dead. So the “astonishing event” of Jesus’ execution and resurrection is a logical continuation and culmination of Israel’s story, though we might not have seen that Israel’s story is a story of death and resurrection unless we were reading it in light of Jesus’ story.

There is then a converse point to be made. The First Testament indicates that God brings Israel back to life after the exile, but it also indicates that this new life is not as glorious as the life promised by Ezekiel’s vision. The story in Ezra and Nehemiah portrays the community’s reestablishment, but the story then peters out rather than achieving closure. In a sense the late Second Temple community is still living in exile,4 yet the Jewish people is living throughout the historic borders of Israel, so I would rather speak of it seeing itself as still in need of restoration. The Holy Spirit thus inspires John the Baptizer’s father to speak not in terms of exile and return but in terms of freedom, of light shining on people living in the shadow of death (see Lk 1:67-79).

Luke’s version of the gospel story thus starts by suggesting that Jesus’ coming will bring the downfall of Rome and the restoration of Israel to freedom and full life. “He has brought down rulers from their thrones,” Mary says; he has “rescued us from the hand of our enemies,” Zechariah says (Lk 1:52, 74). In the short term, this prospect gets frustrated by the leadership of the people of God, whose hostility leads to Jesus’ execution. The process whereby God restores his people and implements his sovereignty in the world involves God letting that rejection happen and turning it into a means of achieving his purpose. The process God goes through in Jesus parallels the one God goes through in the First Testament story.

So Jesus comes to bring Israel back to fullness of life, and his own dying and rising is designed to bring its story to its magnificent conclusion. Yet it does not do so. Israel strangely declines that closure. Paul then sees a further mysterious divine providence in this refusal: it adds impetus to the carrying of the gospel message to the Gentile world, pending a closure for Israel that will come later. Yet, we can hardly say that the spreading of the gospel issues in a church that simply manifests resurrection life. The church engages in crucifixion (Christian groups kill one another); the church experiences crucifixion (Christians get martyred); the church experiences resurrection (churches sometimes die but come back to life).

The First Testament, then, reaches a partial closure, but not a complete one; the New Testament likewise achieves a partial closure, but not a complete one. This parallel gives the First Testament story more potential to be instructive for the church than is realized in the way people commonly think of this story. When Paul wants to get the Corinthians to reflect on their life, he points them to Israel’s story as it unfolded from Egypt to the Promised Land, and comments that “these things happened to them as examples, but they were written for our admonition, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11). There might seem to be some tension in Paul’s comment. If the end of the ages has come, would one expect there to be illumination for the church in these stories about Israel’s experience before it reached the Promised Land? Yet the issues that arise in the Corinthian church’s life show that living in the last days does not transform the life of the church. Israel’s position between the exodus and the Promised Land provides a parallel for the church’s position between Jesus’ resurrection and his final appearing.

The First Testament story is not merely the history of our distant spiritual ancestors, a history of a period so different from ours that it hardly relates to our life now that the end of the ages has come. It is the history of a people like us in a position not so different from ours. Our pretense that things are otherwise puts us into potentially fatal jeopardy.

Mission

Do we need the New Testament because the First Testament focuses exclusively on Israel and we would not otherwise know of God’s concern for the whole world? In fact, God’s concern for the nations goes back to the beginning. The First Testament relates how God created the whole world and was involved with the development of all the nations. The aim of God’s appearing to Abraham was not simply to bless him but to drive the nations to pray for blessing like Abraham’s. God’s judgment of the Egyptians and the Canaanites does not mean God is unconcerned about other nations, as God’s judgment of Israel and God’s judgment of the church does not mean God is unconcerned about Israel and about the church. Prophets look forward to a time when nations will flock to Jerusalem to get Yahweh to make decisions for them. Psalms repeatedly summon all the nations to acknowledge Yahweh with their praise.

In keeping with this concern, the spread of the Jewish people around the Middle East and the Mediterranean before Jesus’ day had the happy result that there were synagogues throughout those worlds, and these synagogues were attracting Gentiles to acknowledge Yahweh. In keeping with this concern, too, before Jesus’ day the Jewish Scriptures had been translated into Greek, which issued in the translation called the Septuagint. Gentiles as well as Jews who did not know Hebrew could thus read them. The book of Acts relates a series of events that gave new impetus to spreading knowledge of the God of Israel: Pentecost, the abolition of the Jewish people’s distinctive rule of faith as related in the Cornelius story and the broader process the book relates. Yet these events did not initiate the spreading of knowledge of Israel’s God among the Gentiles. One might try a thought experiment. Suppose Jesus had not come when he did. What would have happened? Whether or not the Jewish community was deliberately seeking to spread knowledge of its God and its Scriptures, maybe Judaism would have continued to spread through the Gentile world and become more and more of a world religion.

God’s strategy in seeking to fulfill his purpose for creation worked somewhat as follows. First he commissioned humanity to subdue and care for the world. It didn’t work. So he tried destroying most of the world and starting again with one family. It didn’t work. So he tried a third time with one family but separated them from the rest of the world in order to bless them so spectacularly that the entire world would pray to be blessed as they were blessed. This strategy also didn’t work, and the descendants of Abraham and Sarah ended up back in the Babylonia from which they had come. God tried a fourth time by reestablishing the community centered on Jerusalem, though many people who had been scattered around the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds stayed in the place of their dispersion or spread further. While this arrangement proved more effective insofar as these Jewish communities were in a position to attract many Gentiles to come to believe in the God of the Torah, the Jewish people centered on Jerusalem remained under the domination of the superpower of the day. So God tried a fifth time by sending his Son into the world. When this strategy again initially failed in particularly catastrophic fashion, God again transformed disaster into potential triumph. He turned the failure and his refusal to be beaten by it into a message that could go out to the entire world, making use of that already-existent dispersion of the Jewish community and the way it had already brought some Gentiles to believe in the God of the Torah.

The strategy of attraction that God had initiated with Abraham and Sarah continued. The focus of the Epistles lies on seeing that Christian congregations grow in their understanding of the gospel and their embodying of that gospel in their life. The world’s coming to recognize the God of the gospel would then follow. Paul makes this vision of attraction specific to the Corinthians when he speaks of people coming to the congregation’s worship, falling down to worship God themselves and acknowledging that “God is really among you” (1 Cor 14:26). The dynamic is the one envisaged by Zechariah, who pictures ten people from every tongue among the nations taking hold of the hem of every Jew’s coat and saying, “We want to go with you, because we’ve heard that God is with you” (Zech 8:23).

When prophets promise that the nati...