gregoryjenks

Tag: St John’s Cathedral

  • of back stories and afterlives

    St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane
    Choral Evensong
    20 August 2023 

    Of back stories and afterlives

    In a majestic edifice such as this Cathedral we are reminded that Christianity has a back story.

    As we participate in the beautiful liturgy of Choral Evensong, we are experiencing a form of worship that has sustained faith for hundreds of years and indeed much longer.

    The building and the prayer book draw together elements of Western civilization from at least the time of Jesus. The Scriptures go back even further and draw from wells of ancient wisdom and spiritual practice centred around the temple in Jerusalem.

    Yes, the church has a back story.

    Of course, that back story is not as venerable as the stories of our First Nations, but like the much more ancient stories of our Indigenous Peoples it is a story that reflects the wisdom of slow time.  

    As a “slow time” narrative, our back story is not captive to a 3 or 4-year electoral cycle.

    The great story of faith invites us to dream long-term while acting here and now.

    As people of faith—as people with such a back story—we do not build for a single generation.We invest in outcomes that may not be seen in our own lifetimes.

    This is sometimes called “cathedral thinking.” That term captures the truth that cathedrals can take decades or even centuries to complete; and are expected to last for hundreds of years.

    Not many architects are invited to create a building to last 500 years.

    In today’s throwaway culture we literally spend our fortune on structures that will not last; and were never designed to do so in any case.

    To step inside this awesome church is to cross from everyday time into a liminal space where the distant past remains strangely present in stone and text, music and ritual. The lingering aroma of incense as we enter the Cathedral draws us into the great back story of faith. 

    When we leave from this place we are imbued with the holiness celebrated here, and perhaps we take a little of that with us as we return to the everyday world. A lingering aroma of otherness. Of slowness. 

    The scriptures that we have read and sung in this service are from the back story of Christianity. Indeed, they all come from a time when the term “Christian” had not yet been fashioned.

    These are Jewish texts. All of them. Even the New Testament writings are Jewish texts although they were written to explore the significance of Jesus for individuals and communities during the first 100 years after Easter.

    Earlier in this service we heard a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans. It is easy to overlook the fact that Saint Paul was a Pharisee. He was a proud Jew and had such a strong sense of his identity that he claimed to be a Hebrew-speaking Israelite. 

    Of course, he was also a follower of Jesus. But Paul would never accept any suggestion that this made him anything less than a totally kosher Jew.

    As our sacred back story, the Scriptures come from a time when we did not yet have a name for the new religious movement that was taking shape within Judaism but would eventually become a separate religion. 

    Yet there is more than a back story here in this cathedral, in our liturgies and especially in our scriptures. 

    The scriptures themselves do not just speak about the past. They imagine a future, sometimes described as the kingdom or empire of God in distinction from the way things are usually done in the everyday empire of how-things-happen-around-here.

    That back story disturbs what Crossan describes as the (violent) normalcy of civilization, and subverts the narrative of how-things-happen-around-here with a meta-narrative of compassion, truth-telling and reconciliation.

    These sacred texts are an incubator for what is yet to be, and they fashion faith that will transform successive phases of cultural normalcy with the subversive dream of a better way.

    We encounter that back story here in this place, where new light is indeed streaming; to quote some lyrics from a recent hymn. 

    However, the great story of biblical religions is not just an immense back story. We can also understand those sacred texts as a cascading series of afterlives. 

    The originating spark is hard to identity. Perhaps there were several independent moments of insight. But there came a time when the prophets of ancient Israel began to speak truth to power, and demand a society that expressed in its everyday arrangements the character of God spoken about in its liturgies.

    Scripture was born as the first afterlives of the prophets were composed: The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, and The Book of the Twelve Prophets.

    The fashioning of those written afterlives took many generations and in some cases more than a hundred year. Kind of like a cathedral, I guess.

    The prophetic afterlives then generated more afterlives as the rest of Hebrew Bible took shape, and then as people such as the community at Qumran wrote commentaries, targums and midrashim on these texts which they had themselves inherited from the past. 

    Indeed, we can think of Jesus as himself an afterlife of Second Temple Judaism. 

    Jesus was not opposed to the afterlives of the Moses and the prophets. He was a child of their wisdom and he embodied the compassion of which they spoke. 

    It was as an afterlife of Judean religion that we can speak of Jesus fulfilling what was written in the prophets. There is much more happening in that phrase than proof texts plucked from ancient scrolls as talking points for later Christian spin doctors.

    Jesus was inherently and authentically Jewish. 

    He was one of many afterlives that developed from the scriptures of ancient Israel. 

    For us he is the quintessential afterlife of Torah. The human face of God. 

    The earliest Jesus movement in all its diversity was itself an afterlife of Jesus; or a set of several afterlives, more likely.

    The different forms of Christianity that developed inside the Roman Empire but also beyond its borders, constituted multiple afterlives of Jesus.

    Well beyond the explicit contours of Christianity we can discern numerous afterlives of Jesus. Many of them are traced in various chapters of the three books we shall be launching here this evening.

    Not every afterlife of Jesus is authentic (even if they pay the bills) and some are clearly toxic. But the spiritual DNA of Jesus can be discerned in many people and in many forms of compassionate practice across time and in very different cultures.

    Why would we expect anything less?

    What else might “incarnation” mean? But there is more, and it gets personal.

    Each of us who takes seriously the wisdom of Jesus is creating yet another afterlife of Jesus.

    The afterlives which we are fashioning will express our best understandings of Jesus. The raw material for these new afterlives will be our own lives. In our better moments—and by the grace of God—the authentic spiritual wisdom of Jesus will be seen in our attitudes, actions and words. 

    We do not simply replicate Jesus. Nor do we duplicate what others have down before us, or alongside us. Rather, we allow others the space to fashion the kind of Jesus afterlife that is most authentic for them, and—we hope—they allow us that same freedom as well.

    And here is some surprising good news: these imposing cathedral buildings are great places for fashioning our own afterlives of Jesus. 

    They are not just monuments to the past. 

    They are also places where we create the future of what Jesus began as we fashion our individual and collective afterlives of Jesus.

  • Preaching the Old Testament

    A sermon by Dr Anthony Rees for the ‘Debate the Preacher’ series at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane on Sunday, 9 February 2014. Published here at Anthony’s request.

    Last week we commenced on a four week series—Why Bother with the Old Testament?  My colleague, Rev Dr Greg Jenks gave a fascinating reflection on this, inviting us to imagine a bible without the law, a bible without the prophets, a bible without the poems.  What sort of bible would that leave us with?  A narrow one, a lighter one—and not only in size.  Greg’s position was that we should bother with the Old Testament.  For the sake of the series, I considered proposing an alternative view.  But I need you to understand something.  I am writing my second book on the book of Numbers.  To be clear, if there is a book we have not bothered with, it is Numbers.  So if word got out that I had claimed that we need not bother with the OT, that would have been very bad for me.

    Greg began by playing a little with this title—Why Bother with the Old Testament?  Is this a question, or a statement?  If it is a question, how should we inflect it?  I want to suggest that the question itself assumes that we should bother with the Old Testament.  Even if we ultimately come to a point of rejection, we can only get there through a process of bothering.  But ‘bother’ itself is ambiguous.  To bother can mean to pay attention to, to attempt to understand.  In this sense it has a positive meaning.  But I say to my son, stop bothering your sister, by which I mean agitate, disturb, and it is generally not said positively.  Can we agitate the Old Testament—can we mess with it, can we play with it, can we bother it.  If we do, is it positive or negative?  Plenty of things I read, and write, suggest that we can—but that is for another time.

    What I want to do tonight is to pick up on something that came out of the discussion which followed Greg’s sermon.  If we affirm that we should bother with the OT, how should that manifest itself in our worshipping community?  The simple answer was that we should devote preaching to it—a recognition that much, if not all of our preaching tends to focus in on the NT readings.  For a long time, that meant Paul, and the reinforcement of doctrine.  But in more recent decades, as we have understood that our lives are a narrative, not a series of propositional statements, the gospel narrative has become a more potent source for preaching.  I have to make clear that this focus on NT preaching is not universal.  Indeed, I suspect it is a western phenomenon.  In the rural areas of Fiji, you might be lucky to hear one NT sermon a month.  The same is true of Africa.  I preached a sermon from John in Kenya a few years ago, and I think the local minister was very surprised.

    So I am going to preach from an OT text—but I want to do so as a way of demonstrating what I think is another compelling reason for us to hold onto the OT.  That is, that the OT gives us an emotional vocabulary to express our human experience, that is far richer than what we find in the NT.  Much of this is lost, due to the tragically sterilising work of the lectionary compilers.  But if we were in a sense, to reclaim our scriptures, we might be surprised at what we find.  Actually, my experience is that people are always surprised at what they find.

    PSALM 22

    For centuries, one figure dominated our interpretation of the psalms; David, the charismatic, god fearing, heroic King of biblical Israel, whose story we read in the books of Solomon, Kings and Chronicles.  This king, warrior, singer and song writer was thought to be the writer of many of the psalms we have collected in this book.  The superscriptions made it clear.  A psalm of David.  It was thought that at least some of these psalms could be traced to particular events in the story of David’s life as we read it in the historical books.  For example, psalm 51 has been thought to be written as a response to David’s actions with Bathsheba; in some sense, a display of contrition in light of his moral failing.  The psalms inspired readers, being, as Ellen Davis puts it, the spontaneous outpourings of a pious King’s heart.

    The twentieth century fractured that romantic view.  No longer are these psalms valued for their insight into David’s life, which is now considered to be essentially unknowable, but instead for the way in which their more generalized language and forms have made them accessible to generations of worshippers.  These songs belong not to David, but to all those who worship the God of Israel.  As Davis says again, they are intensely personal, and yet, not private.  Their response of faith to human experience ensures that they serve as the single most important resource for both Jewish and Christian prayer.

    So it is with psalm 22, a lament, perhaps the supreme example of lament in the psalms.  The psalm divides into two major sections. Vss 1-21 are what we might generally refer to as the lament, vss 22-31 being a prayer of thanksgiving for deliverance.  The distinction between the two sections is so sharp that some scholars have suggested that these two fragments may have come from separate authors, or at least represent two independent compositions.  If we were interested in looking for an author, this may well be a clue to us.  However, if we approach the psalm with a view to reading it as a liturgical work, what we see instead is not discontinuity, but rather, a liturgical process; the lamenting prayer makes way for the praise and thanksgiving which follows the assurance of God’s gracious response.

    My, God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  The opening question leads to another—why are you so far from helping, from the words of my roaring?  And a further complaint—I cry, day and night, but find no rest, by which he means not peace, but rather, no reason to stop crying, God’s abandonment is still real to our psalmist.  This is an interesting problem.  The psalter is full of assertions that God does not abandon his people (see Psalms 9, 27, 37, 38, 71), and yet what we have in this psalm is a writer in despair, complaining bitterly at God’s abandonment.  Despite his bitterness, the writer is still some way from turning away from God.  His cry reveals his desperation, twice calling ‘my God’, what Calvin notes as a distinct profession of faith, the cry of a believer.

    The shift in vs 3 highlights the gravity of the psalmist’s theological problem.  The essence of Israelite covenant faith is that trust in God leads to deliverance.    This is the story of ‘our’ ancestors, those who cried out, trusted and found deliverance.  This story is the praise upon which Yhwh is enthroned!  The use of ‘our’ is instructive also.  There is an understanding that personal distress can be held together with a common history.  The prayer for personal deliverance is spoken in the midst of others.  This idea reiterates Davis’ comment; it is personal, but not private.

    At vs 6 the tone changes again.  The psalmist reveals something of his circumstances.  He is a worm—an object of derision, of insignificance.  People around him taunt him—all who see me, he says.  The taunts reveal to us the nature of the psalmist’s mental turmoil; God’s apparent inaction justifies the taunts of the mockers.  Their taunts have a tinge of truth to them; ‘let Yhwh deliver —let him deliver the one in whom he delights’—their taunt echoes the historical recollection of the ancestors who were ‘delivered’ in vs 4.  The irony is cutting.  God’s abandonment seems evident to the onlookers, their jibes are internalised by the psalmist.

    Again the focus shifts at verse 9.  A pattern has emerged: vs 3 commences with the words, ‘But you’, verse six, ‘But I’, and at verse nine, ‘But you’, though this time a little more emphatically.  The psalmist again looks at God’s action in the past, though this time not with Israel, but with himself.  God is imaged as a midwife, taking him from the womb and placing him on the mother’s breast.  God, the gentle, caring, compassionate midwife is tenderly concerned for the well being of this new life.  God has been intimately involved in the development of our psalmist, so much so that he proclaims, ‘since my mother bore me, you have been my god’, forming an inclusio with the opening cry of the psalm—my god, my god—god who has always been my god, why have you forsaken me?  The opening section concludes with a plea which affords us a glimpse of what lies ahead—do not be far, trouble is all around, there is no one to help.

    Vss 12-18 reveal an ever deepening despair and unravelling of the psalmist.  The language is metaphorical, the imagery powerful.  His enemies are described as wild animals; bulls, lions and dogs.  The animals are symbols of non human strength.  They are animals that represent a threat to human existence.  In the ancient world they could also represent demonic forces, an image which dramatically heightens the picture of fear that is being painted.  They surround him, stalk him and appear ready to pounce on their prey.  They seem to be ever closing—vivid contrast to God’s supposed distance.  The psalmist’s physical state is disastrous—his energy is consumed, his body battered, his heart melts, his mouth is dried out—he is fatigued and thirsty beyond the ability to speak, death is assured.  So certain are the enemies of his demise that they cast lots for his clothing—this man is beyond hope.  In fact, in the midst of this litany of disaster, God does appear, but only to lay the victim in the dust, symbolising the apparent certainty of death.

    Vs 19—But you, and here the psalmist names God Yhwh for the first time, and prays not for closeness, but for deliverance, for help.  Vss 20-21 are remarkable; ‘deliver my soul from the sword, my life (my only one) from the power of the dog; save me from the mouth of the lion’, and then, remarkably, ‘from the horn of the wild ox you have rescued me!’—the perfect tense immediately changes the tenor of the text.  No longer is this a psalm of petition, of imploring god to be close, of crying out for divine help.  This is now a prayer of assurance, you have rescued me!

    The praise that follows unfolds in sharp distinction to the lament from which it proceeds.  The lament is marked by a sense of entrapment, of an ever tightening circle of danger.  The praise and thanksgiving section however, moves ever outward in its expression, moving from brothers and sisters, to the congregation, to the offspring of Jacob, to the ends of the earth—all the families of nations, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.  All of humanity is caught up in the psalmists vision of praise to the almighty god of his deliverance.  It hints at Isaiah’s vision—that the whole of the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God, though its scope is even wider.

    While the universal vision that this portion of the psalm presents is breathtaking, these verses contain other significant statements that we mustn’t ignore.  Vs 22 places the psalmist in the presence of friends, in opposition to the enemies that have surrounded him to this point.  That he is in the midst of the congregation also tells us that what is being described is a liturgical, religious event.  This is extended in vss 25-26, where having offered his vows in recognition of God’s action, the psalmist joins in a thanksgiving meal.  This is a symbol both of a reconciled community and fellowship with God.  The psalmist, who had previously approached death exclaims to those with whom he shares ‘may your hearts live forever’.

    The language of verse 26 is particularly significant.  The poor (the afflicted, the lowly) shall eat and be satisfied, those who ‘seek’ will praise the Lord.  James Luther Mays sees here a clear redefining of who Israel is.  It is not the trouble he has faced which has made the psalmist lowly or afflicted.  This suffering has happened to him  ‘as’ one of the lowly, and God’s response shows that he is the God of the lowly, of the afflicted, not in circumstance, but in being.  This too reaches back to vs 24 and is a realisation that God’s apparent absence was an illusion.  So the psalmist answers his own complaint—he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried.  The meal then is not just a meal of physical nourishment, but also represents a spiritual fill for those who continue to be ‘lowly’.

    In response to God’s actions on behalf of the psalmist, the nations are called to praise god.  This is an unusual move, as the nations are often pictured as god’s enemies (Ps 2).  Even more peculiar is that they are said to ‘remember’, and ‘turn’, verbs which are commonly implored of Israel.  And then they will worship, or ‘bow low’.  Interestingly, Israel is frequently warned against becoming like the nations.  Here, the nations are to become ‘like Israel’, the clear implication being that Yhwh rules the nations.

    The ever widening circle even encompasses those who have died or have not yet lived.  This lends the psalm an eschatological character, particularly with the future tense verbs of vss 27 onwards.  Death comes to all, but the delivering acts of God will be told from generation to generation; he has done it.

    The sufferer of the psalm experiences the terror of human mortality, acutely aware of god’s absence and the presence of enemies.  The prayer of the psalmist offers us a paradigm for expressing our own suffering—to use it is to set one’s self within the paradigm.  For Christians, this psalm has taken on special significance, since Jesus’ appropriation of the psalm joins him with the countless others—the company of the afflicted, and he becomes one with them in the midst of suffering.  Jesus’ use of the psalm invites us to pray with him in the midst of our own turmoil.

    But this psalm, in the end, is not about suffering.  It is, finishing with the words of Ellen Davis, about the possibility, efficacy and necessity of giving praise to god’.  He has done it.

  • Why bother with the Old Testament

    A sermon for the ‘Debate the Preacher’ series at St John’s Anglican Cathedral, Brisbane on Sunday, 2 February 2014.

    It has fallen to me to begin this new series of ‘Debate the Preacher’ as we explore the significance of the ‘Old Testament’ for us today. Over the four Sundays of February we shall have an opportunity to hear different scholars from St Francis Theological College offer perspectives on the contributions that this part of the Bible makes to our lives today.

    Speaking of perspectives, what are we to make of the title for this series? How do we imagine the title to be punctuated? To put it another way, is our topic a question or an argument?

    Have you come here this evening expecting to be told why you should actually bother with the OT? Or have you come to hear someone tell you it is OK not to bother with that part of the Bible? Those are very different perspectives and we can signal the difference by the way we punctuate the sentence. 

    So whether you have come to seek release from the challenge of reading the OT, or seeking to be persuaded that this is actually something you should do, we have each come with some assumptions. We also come from particular contexts and life experiences. All of this will shape our perspectives, and meaning is largely constructed through the perspective of the interpreter. You may find what I say confronting or challenging, traditional or revisionist, helpful or a waste of time. What I will have said will be the same, but your perspective will largely determine what you make of my words.

    And then to the debate after the service ends …

    Defining our terms

    One of the first challenges we may face when thinking about the OT is which set of books is  intended, and what is the best way to name them these days. We can start with the latter issue since that opens the way for the deeper issue of which texts comprise the OT.

    It is common these days to find Christian people seeking to avoid the term, ‘Old Testament’. In its place we typically find terms such as ‘Hebrew Bible’, or ‘Jewish Scriptures’. There are good reasons for doing that, as well as even stronger reasons—in my mind—not to do so.

    The positive reasons for dropping the label ‘Old Testament’ begin with the unfortunate perception that ‘Old’ implies ‘no longer of value’. In a consumer culture obsessed by the quest for the latest new thing, clearly a ‘New’ Testament is better than an ‘Old’ Testament. Quite apart from the age profile of the average Anglican congregation, one might expect such an argument to have little appeal in Anglican circles. We value tradition and do not chase after the latest new thing.

    More insidiously, ‘Old Testament’ can suggest a supersessionist attitude towards Jews and their religion, and reinforce latent Christian anti-Semitism. The traditional name for these books within the Bible that we share with Jews does tend to imply that the religion centred around those books is an earlier and less-developed version of the latest ‘religious operating system’ that we enjoy as Christians.

    On this side of the Holocaust, Christians are rightly sensitive to anything that smacks of supersessionism or excludes Jews as the despised other. For many people, calling these books the ‘Hebrew Bible’ or the ‘Jewish Scriptures’ is an overdue recognition of our debt to Judaism and of the historical reality that two-thirds of the Christian Bible belongs first of all to the Jews.

    However, despite my sympathy with all these arguments, I do not accept the fashion of re-badging two-thirds of our Bible in this way. In my view the Christian scriptures known as the ‘Old Testament’ are related to the Jewish scriptures, perhaps better described as the Tanakh, but are not to be confused with them.

    The reason for this is very simple, and it is connected with the fact that there is no such thing as ‘the Christian Bible’, but rather a great many different variants of the Christian Bible. The collection of biblical writings that passes as ‘the Bible’ for most Westeners these days is not the ancient Bible of Christianity, but a novel form of the Bible created at the time of the European Reformation for the use of Protestant faith communities in NW Europe.

    Up until the Reformation—and therefore for more than one thousand years—the normative form of the Christian Bible was an enlarged version of the Old Testament together with the commonly-accepted books of the New Testament. The Christian OT derived from the ancient Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures, and included a dozen or so additional writings not included in the normative Hebrew version of the Jewish Bible. These were parallel and competing versions of the Jewish Bible, until the Protestants decided to adopt the Jewish set of books for their Old Testament as part of their protest against Rome. In the East, of course, there were none of these internal debates over the contents and form of the Bible, and the ancient Greek Bible with its larger OT continues to be the canonical text of the Orthodox religious communities.

    When the Protestant Reformers took upon themselves to reshape the OT within the Christian Bible they only half completed the job. They deleted the books found only in the Greek version, but kept the remaining books in the same sequence as found in the Septuagint Greek and the Latin Vulgate versions. The end result was a Protestant OT that contained only the books found in the Tanakh, but arranged them in the traditional Christian order that differs significantly from the Jewish arrangement.

    That was not simply a sloppy job. It actually created a third form of the OT, even if it is one that most Western people mistake for the original Bible. We now have a Jewish set of Scriptures with 22 books arranged in three sections, a Catholic/Orthodox Old Testament with around 52 books arranged in five sections, and a Protestant Old Testament with 39 books also arranged in the same five sections. These are not the only variations, but they are the major ones and suffice for our purposes this evening.

    Except when I am intending to refer to the Jewish Scriptures (in which case I use the term, Tanakh), I therefore insist on using ‘Old Testament’ for the first two-thirds of my Christian Bible. There is an ancient and obvious link between the Christian Old Testament and the Jewish Tanakh, but they are not the same document. What I am speaking about this evening is not the role of the Tanakh in the life of the Christian community, but the role of Old Testament.

    In doing that I am conscious that my OT may not be the same as yours. That is most likely because I am using the ancient Christian Old Testament while you may be using a Protestant edition of the OT that deliberately choose to exclude a dozen or writings that had been part of the biblical inheritance of Christians since the first century. Those so-called ‘apocryphal’ books continue to form part of the Bible for Anglicans, Orthodox and Roman Catholics.

    As an aside, let me just add that this diversity in the forms of the Bible does not faze me. In fact, I appreciate that diversity and I claim it as part of my biblical authority to hold opinions that someone else may not approve. If the Great Church cannot even agree on what books constitute the Bible, then I think I can cut myself a bit of slack on a number of other disputed beliefs and practices as well.

    Why is the place of the OT in Christianity up for debate?

    Given the historical aspects of the Old Testament as ancient part of the biblical legacy of Christianity, why are we beginning this conversation over a month of Sundays? The reason is, of course, that all of us feel some degree of discomfort when engaging with these ancient Jewish texts that now form two-thirds of our Bible.

    Let me absolutely plain here: these are Jewish texts. They constitute the largest part of the Christian Bible, but they are not Christian texts. They are canonical texts for Christians, but in accepting them in that way we are adopting into our context documents that come from another very different context.

    Out of our desire to acknowledge and respect the Jewishness of these texts we may feel that there is something awkward about even using them these days as Christians. Just as we would no longer consider it appropriate (I hope) for a group of Christians to celebrate a Passover Seder during Holy Week, should we stop using their Scriptures and just make do with our own? For reasons that will be covered later, this is not my view; but it is one with which I have some sympathy.

    We sometimes hear it said that we are a ‘NT church’ and therefore should not pay as much attention to the Old Testament. Indeed a colleague said exactly that at Clergy Summer School last month. It is almost as if a biblical passage from the OT only has relevance for us if we can find a NT text to affirm it or modify it in some way. This is a view with which I have almost no sympathy, and it drives me to affirm that we are a ‘biblical church’, rather than a NT church. Not a ‘Bible Church’, mind you; but a biblical church! There is a difference even if we cannot parse it out this evening.

    Part of the reason for this series that we are beginning tonight is that we do sense some profound differences between OT and NT. This is right to do, and far better than reading the OT so thoroughly through our Christian perspectives that these ancient Jewish texts only speak with a Christian accent. But a growing awareness of those differences, and the need to redress almost 2,000 years of Christian anti-Semitism, can cause us to lose our nerve when it comes to reading these texts.

    The ‘problem’ of the Old Testament

    There are a great many complexities and challenges about reading the OT as Christians, just as there are when Jewish people seek to read the same texts as Jews. I have rehearsed some of these in other places, so I will not recite them again here.

    Suffice to say that the length and complexity of the OT, and its cultural distance from our time and place—as well as its uncritical acceptance of violence, patriarchy, gender discrimination—all combine to make these texts problematic for Christians in the twenty-first century. This is compounded by issues around literal readings of these ancient pre-modern texts, and perceived conflicts with history and science.

    The power of the Old Testament

    Rather than focus on the things that make it tricky for us to use the OT, I want to sketch some of the positive reasons why we should make the best use we can of these ancient Jewish texts that constitute such a large proportion of our Christian Bibles.

    First of all, the OT provides historical depth to our tradition. Even when the events themselves are not historical, these are ancient stories and ancient songs that derive from the historical experience of our ancestors in the faith. Their contexts were different from ours, and their beliefs about God are not the same as ours, but they represent the mountain spring from which the river of faith flows. The faith that matters to us did not begin with Jesus and was certainly not created in the last few hundred years. It has ancient roots deep behind historical memory. Some of us are privileged to visit the biblical lands and dig up the past with our own hands, but for most of us the OT is our birth certificate as people of faith.

    Secondly, the OT simply covers a larger sample of life and holiness than NT offers. Most likely we can account for the creation of all of the NT writings within about 100 years of Easter. Some would argue that much less time is needed, but I prefer this is more modest claim. During that one hundred years and across the limited range of texts gathered into the NT, there is a much smaller sample of life and faith than we find in the OT. Many issues are just not addressed directly in the NT, but we find texts within the OT that do so—and they invite us into an engagement with Scripture (and with the Spirit of Christ).

    A third reason for bothering with these ancient Jewish texts in the Christian Bible is that these are the formative texts of the Western religious tradition. In saying that I am conscious that these are actually ‘Eastern’  texts, even though they have shaped the Western tradition so deeply. If we want to understand our own cultural tradition we simply have to engage with the writings of the Old Testament.

    Far more than a cultural legacy is involved at this point. These are challenging spiritual texts: the Law, the Prophets, the Poems. The Law invites us to imagine ourselves in a covenant with God, and it is a communal covenant rather than simply a private quest for salvation. The Prophets challenge us to be authentic about living out the implications of that covenant, and to focus on the things that really matter: mercy, justice, humility. And the Poems of Israel provide us with a songsheet for the human soul as we pass through times of success and times of tragedy.

    The danger of a Christianity without the Old Testament

    The idea of ceasing to bother with the Old Testament is not a new one. It was a very real option for Christians in the middle of the second century. By that time a majority of Christians were not of Jewish descent, and some Christians considered too close an association with Judaism to be a negative element following successive Jewish revolts against Roman rule. Indeed, some Jews were also eager to dissociate themselves from Christianity and sharpen the divide between the two religions.

    Marcion (ca. 85–160 CE) was a Christian leader from what today we could call northern Turkey. He was something of a lightning rod for those Christians seeking to discard the Jewish aspects of Christianity, and get rid of the Old Testament. While often represented as a heretic and trouble-maker, Marcion may actually have been a traditionalist who argued for a view that was contested in his own time. However that may have been, the debate that Marcion brought to focus with his publication of the very first edition of the New Testament, led ultimately to the NT as we know it today—and to the affirmation that the OT is an essential part of the Christian Bible.

    We owe Marcion a deep debt, and especially for his unintended consequence of making us claim our Jewish heritage as an essential element of Christianity.

    To discard the OT from our Bibles—or even just from our lectionaries—would be to suffer a loss of access to these profoundly spiritual texts. Can we really contemplate a Bible without the Law? A Bible without the Prophets of Israel? A Bible without Job or the Psalms?

    Such a truncated Bible would mean we could never understand either Jesus or Paul. They were both Jews, of course. Their Bible was the Tanakh, or—in Paul’s case—the Septuagint.

    Worse still, if we are not willing to ‘bother’ with the OT we shall end up with an excessively spiritualised and individualised Christianity. ‘Me and Jesus’ too often substitutes for the biblical faith that calls us to participate in intentional covenantal communities of faithfulness. The OT is absolutely essential for a Christianity that offers more than fire insurance or get-out-of-jail cards for isolated individuals.

    Finally, and most importantly, a Christianity without the OT will lead us back to Auschwitz. Christian anti-Semitism is fed by self-serving Christian rejection of the Jews and their Bible. A Christianity without the OT is not Christianity at all, but a Jesus cult that promotes a toxic religious message that is bad for everyone, and fatal for the Jews.

    So, yes, I think we should bother with the Old Testament!

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