Neglecting the Old Testament Al Mohler Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus rebuked those who should know, who should see, who should hear, who should believe—and yet, will not. Jesus indicted the people who claimed to be not just the sons of Moses, but also the sons of Abraham—yet would not hear, believe, and be saved. The Jews said to him,... ”Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? And the prophets died! Who do you make yourself out to be?” Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’ But you have not known him [cf. John 5:37: “His voice you have never heard”]. I know him. If I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and I keep his word. Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” So the Jews said to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:52–58) But these words also rebuke the church of the Lord Jesus Christ in our own generation for our misuse and neglect of the Old Testament. In our own way, we can commit the same insult to both Christ and the Scriptures. For many, the Old Testament is simply a problem. Throughout the history of the Christian church, there have been those who have struggled to understand what to do with the Old Testament. Some of the sources of the problem are ideological and theological. First, in a context of political correctness—particularly within the academy—some call the Old Testament the “Hebrew Scriptures” or the “Hebrew Bible.” Unless that designation does no more than highlight the dominant language, a Christian cannot accept the term because it insinuates that the Old Testament is someone else’s book, that it is foreign territory to the church. Second, there is the historical Marcionite impulse to reject the Old Testament as revealing a different deity. It is frightening to see how many evangelical children and young people just assume that this is indeed the pattern. They pick it up one way or the other and are little Marcionites. You wonder where they get this idea, and then you talk to their parents. There are Marcionites in our pews and in far too many of our pulpits. Many of them do not know it. They are practical Marcionites, even if not card-carrying ones. Third, some argue that the Old Testament should be read only on its own terms without any reference to the New Testament. Some suggest this even within the Christian church, even within some evangelical institutions and faculties. It comes down to insisting that Christians need to do synagogue readings when we come to the Old Testament. Fourth, classical dispensationalism is right to see ethical development but wrong to deny continuity. Taken at face value, the classical dispensationalists argued for what amounted to two completely different ethical systems in the two Testaments. They were certainly right to point to the higher law found in the New Testament, but wrong to argue against the basic continuity of the covenants, with the Old Testament and the law completely fulfilled in the person and work of Christ. This exegetical and theological error has opened the door to much mischief and misunderstanding. Fifth, there is a moral argument against the Old Testament, an updated Marcionite temptation. It is not particularly new, but it became more focused in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In his Lyman Beecher lectures on preaching, given at Yale in the early part of the twentieth century, Harry Emerson Fosdick spoke of the task of preaching the Old Testament in general, and a very specific text in particular, as “intellectually ruinous and morally debilitating.”6 Fosdick said that modern people rightly recoil from these Old Testament texts, and that it would be an insult to modern morality to try to preach them or even to try to rescue them in some way. Fosdick said we should not try to harmonize them or come to terms with them. Rather, we should just write off sections of the biblical text as the musings of an ancient nomadic people and be done with it. More recently, Kenton Sparks, in his denial of biblical inerrancy, wrote of the Old Testament and “biblical texts that strike us as downright sinister or evil.”7 In like manner, Brian McLaren wrote about the Genesis account of God’s actions in the story of Noah and described the story as “profoundly disturbing.”8 (Neglecting the Old Testament, Al Mohler, see Taken from The Scriptures Testify about Me: Jesus and the Gospel in the Old Testament, edited by D. A. Carson. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, crossway.org.) Notes 6. Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 27. 7. Kenton L. Sparks, “After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age, Part 2,” The BioLogos Forum: Science and Faith in Dialogue, June 10, 2010, accessed biologos .org /blog/after-inerrancy-evangelicals-and-the-bible-in-a-postmodern-age-part-2. Cf. Kenton L. Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008). 8. Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 108. 9. Fosdick, The Modern Use of the Bible, 1.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:51:48 +0000
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