Christians have generally regarded the Old Testament as God’s Word and have often found pleasure in Proverbs and spiritual inspiration in Psalms. Christian preachers worthy of the calling have confirmed their proficiencies by drawing profound applications from Old Testament historical narratives.
Many Christians today are dismissing the Old Testament because they find parts of it morally offensive or quite bluntly, irrelevant.
Certainly some books may read dull and uninteresting. Other parts may come across as rambling and confusing. The result is that readers sometimes opt for the New Testament and neglect the Old Testament altogether.
This suspicious view of the Old Testament is not new, but it results from an earlier Pre-Reformation disposition by scholars and expositors to disregard the natural historical sense of the Old Testament, in favour of interpreting it allegorically. That is, if so much of the Old Testament was regarded as sub-Christian, then the only way to use it was to discern a concealed spiritual meaning within a story. That meant that the Old Testament would certainly not be taken seriously.
I’ll tell you why I believe this is a misguided approach. This essentially dehistoricizes the Bible of that which God has done once and for all in the gospel of Christ. Why emphasize a New Testament if you are going to ignore the Old Testament which provides the context for the drama and exceeding greatness of the ‘new.’
However, when Protestant Reformers recovered the authority of the Bible, they reaffirmed the doctrine of Scripture, helping believers to see the importance of the historical and natural meaning of all of Scripture. Instead of the imposed outside authority of the church to interpret scripture, Reformers established the self-interpreting and unblemished nature of the Bible. The Bible contains its own principles of interpretation, as its own rule of faith, or Sola Scriptura, the great Reformation exclamation. Every believer has a right to interpret the Bible, but wait, that surely does not mean that interpretation principles found in the Bible can be ignored so that a person can simply believe what he chooses to believe. It does mean that the Old Testament is significant on its own within the unity of the entire Bible.
Of course the Reformation posited other profound principles such as grace alone, by Christ alone, through faith alone. Salvation is God’s gracious work without man, or unconditioned by human effort. God accepts the sinner solely on the basis of what Christ alone has done. The only way for a sinner to receive this salvation is by faith alone and then Christ’s righteousness is credited to the believing individual. And all of these principles establish a method of biblical interpretation by which the natural historical sense of the Old Testament holds significance for the Christian because of its organic relationship to Christ.
The way that God has dealt with Israel is part of a process that is realized in the historical events of Christ and God’s work of grace in the gospel. Old Testament salvation history is interpreted by the Word himself, Jesus Christ, or stated differently, the gospel is God acting through the history of Jesus which goes all the way back into the Old Testament.
I appreciate this thoughtful essay. It is pretty hard to understand the New Testament without paying attention to the historical context of the Old.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that many Christians have a problem with some parts of the Old Testament that do not seem to reflect the moral standards of the New. C.S. Lewis, respected by most Evangelicals, was one who, though he recognized the importance of the Old Testament, had a different attitude to some of it than most Evangelicals who are fundamentalist (using the term "fundamentalist" respectfully and not in its recent pejorative use).