The Problem of the OT: John Bright's Solution

A quick review will bring us up to speed. John Bright, in his book The Authority of the Old Testament, begins by stating the issue he wants to explore and resolve:

Even he who affirms that the Old Testament is in each of its texts inspired of God and affords in all its parts a revelation of his character, purpose, and will, . . . must still face the question: How are these ancient laws, institutions, and concepts, these ancient narratives, sayings, and expressions of an ancient piety, actually to be taken as authoritative over the faith and life of the Christian, and how proclaimed as such in the church? (p. 18).

Next, Bright describes and critiques what he calls three classical solutions to this question. In turn, the three misguided solutions attempted to

1. reject the Old Testament, either completely or, at least, practically (e.g., Marcion)
2. Christianize the the Old Testament, mainly by reading it as though it were a Christian allegory (e.g., Origen)
3. correct the Old Testament, using the standard of the New Testament (e.g., nineteenth century liberals)

Bright correctly notes that one thing all three have in common is that each one takes the New Testament as its point of orientation. As he says it, In each case, the true text is the New Testament. The Old Testament text must conform to it, be made to conform--or get out! In no case is the Old Testament it's own witness, in its plain sense and in its entirely, taken seriously as having validity in the church (111).

So what is the solution that Bright has been waiting to announce? In his third chapter--the heart of the book--he states and explains it. A few of his statements mixed in with my own commentary:

But it is here submitted that the key to the solution of the problem is to be found in the theological structure of both Testaments in their mutual relationship--that is to say, through the study of biblical theology (112).

Bright goes to great lengths to defend the idea of a unified biblical theology. Despite the real differences between the two testaments, and the real diversity within each, he says, a genuine unity exists. The differences between the two are mainly because they are written on either side of the cross:

Characteristic of the Old Testament faith is its forward look, its straining ahead toward God's future, the triumph of his kingly rule in the earth (136).

The Old Testament was incomplete theologically. What it hoped for was not yet. But what it hoped for now is in Christ. Consequently, the New Testament announces and refers to the fulfillment of God's promises to Israel. Thus Bright's thesis is:

The normative element in the Old Testament, and it's abiding authority as the Word of God, rests not in its laws and customs, its institutions and ancient patterns of thinking, nor yet in the characters and events of which its history tells, but in that structure of theology which undergirds each of its texts and which is caught up in the New Testament and announced as fulfilled in Jesus Christ (155-56).

So, what do you think? Is Bright's a good response to the question of what he calls preaching an A.D. message from a B.C. book?

3 "Solutions" to the Problem of the Old Testament

"The church can never part with the Old Testament. But it is not enough to say that. After all, what responsible person would question that the Old Testament has abiding values or that some knowledge of it is necessary for the proper understanding of the gospel? Even those who would deny the Old Testament canonical status would admit as much. So we must go a step further and say that not only will we have to retain the Old Testament, we will have in some way to use it as a part of normative Scripture." --John Bright, The Authority of the Old Testament, p. 77.

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But how? That is to say, how should the church use the Old Testament Scriptures in this New Testament Age? That's the question Bright attempts to answer in his book. But before he does, he puts the spotlight on what he calls three classical responses to the question he has raised. Using my own headings--and throwing in my two cents from time to time--here are the three classical solutions to the problem of the Old Testament:

1. Toss It

This approach says that the best way for Christians to deal with the Old Testament is to reject it. The position is named after its first strong advocate: "The attempt to get rid of the O.T. was encountered by the church as far back as the second century in the first great heresy with which it had to deal, that of Marcion" (Bright, 60).

Bobby Valentine has recently written about the man named Marcion and his movement. He talks about how, ironically, Marcion's rejection of the Old Testament and his adoption of alternative scripture led the orthodox Christians of the second century to start settling on the question of which books should be regarded as authoritative for the church.

As Bright and Valentine both point out, Marcionism never completely died. No, not many people have argued so radically against the OT as Marcion did. But the tradition lives on. Bright includes in his list of Marcionite scholars the following well-known people:

Adolf von Harnack, a prominent historian of Christianity who believed that the church should reject the canonical rank of the OT and place it at the beginning of the Apocrypha.

Friedrich Delitzsch, the son of Franz Delitzsch, who wrote a two-volume attack on the OT called "The Great Deception." Bright says Friedrich was a Marcionist "in the fullest sense, even to the point of denying that Yahweh, God of the Israel, is to be identified with the Christian's God" (p. 66).

Rudolf Bultmann, famous and infamous NT scholar. According to Bright, his negative attitude towards the Old Testament was much more subtle and understated, but nonetheless real.

Having grown up among the Churches of Christ, with our strong Marcionite tendencies, I was kind of relieved to find out that mine was not the only tradition that took a low view of the OT.
Christianity has always been right to reject the Marcionite solution. But because it keeps hanging around, the church should remain vigilant.

2. Christianize It

That is to say, save the Old Testament by reading a Christian message from it. This was simple in the early church. That's because reading a book allegorically was popular in the Greco-Roman world.
Bright explains how the church bought into this approach and used it in biblical interpretation: "It was generally believed that Scripture had various levels of meaning. Origen popularized a threefold sense corresponding to the supposed trichotomy of man's nature: body, soul, spirit" (p. 80).

By reading the Bible in this way, passages like the so-called "cursing psalms" and stories that relate the complete destruction of the enemies of Israel can be "prettied up." Those parts of the Bible, it is thought, teach a message that is much more consistent with the loving, forgiving spirit of Jesus. By the same token, by reading the OT allegorically, people could think of the Song of Songs as a love story where Christ is the husband and the church is his bride.

Of course, the problem with this solution is that it insists that we overlook, and sometimes even deny, the literal sense of the text. This approach ultimately divorces the biblical text from any sort of discernible, agreed-upon meaning. Five people can come up with five very different allegorical readings of the same text. So who's to say which one is correct? Thus, the allegorizing approach fails to measure up to what Bright calls "sound exegetcal principles."

Here I have to add a tentative counterpoint. I am undecided about the legitimacy of going beyond the literal sense of the biblical text. When it comes to interpretive method, why do we assume that people like Origen were wrong and that people like us are right? If we conclude the reason is because we're children of the Enlightenment and he wasn't, then we've admitted that we might be more tied to the Age of Reason than the Rock of Ages. And aren't we even going so far as to say that the New Testament writers used a bad method in order to tell us the good news?

In response to this question, most Protestants have said things like, "Well, people like Matthew, with his strange way of reading the Old Testament, were writing by inspiration. We're not. Therefore, Matthew gets to do anything he wants, while we have to stick with only historical-critical readings." Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a dodge? Does the New Testament teach us all things except how to interpret the Bible?

3. Correct It

This alternative to the problem of the Old Testament formed a value judgment from the New--especially the teaching of Christ, easily found in those red letters--and imposed that standard on the Old. This, Bright tells us, was the position of nineteenth century liberalism with it's evolutionary and progressive view. An assumed development over time was the reason that statements and assumptions found in the Old Testament could be corrected by what is found in the New.

Here Bright points to the words of F. W. Farrar: "Is it not an absolutely plain and simple rule that anything in the Bible which teaches or seems to teach anything which is not in accordance with the love, the gentleness, the truthfulness, the purity of Christ's gospel, is not God's word to us, however clearly it stands on the Bible page?"

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So, I'm curious to hear your responses. What experiences have you had with variations of these three "solutions" to the question of the Old Testament? Which ones are still hanging around in the Christian circles you know?

Bright has his own answer and alternative. I'll talk about it next time.

How Should Christians Use the Old Testament?

When he delivered the Gray Lectures at Duke Divinity School in November 1959, the unassuming John Bright never imagined that his speeches would become a book that would remain popular for several decades to come. But they did, and with good reason.

Perhaps better than anyone else, Bright proposed and explained a Christian approach to the Old Testament that honors both the OT's position as one of the two parts of the Christian Bible and the biblical mandate to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). That's not an easy task. As Bright explains in the Preface to the book The Authority of the Old Testament, the question he takes up is one that had plagued him for many years:

"I suppose that it is inevitable that it should have: it is a problem that no teacher of Old Testament studies can forever evade. Certainly I was unable to do so. I had long found myself troubled by the fact that so few preachers--myself included, I fear--really seemed to know how to proceed with the Old Testament, or were guided in their preaching from it, if they preached from it at all, by any conscious hermeneutical principles. . . It early became clear to me that the place of Old Testament studies in the theological curriculum was not something that could be taken for granted. I was driven to the realization that if I could not present my students with some positive position with regard to the place of the Old Testament in the Bible, and provide them with some guidance in their use of it in the pulpit, they might justifiably regard all that I was trying to teach them, however interesting it might be historically, as of questionable theological and practical importance."

What exactly is the question regarding the place and authority of the Old Testament? Bright sums it up as follows:

People who affirm "that the Old Testament is in each of its texts inspired of God and affords in all its parts a revelation of his character, purpose and will . . . . must still face the question: How are these ancient laws, institutions, and concepts, these ancient narratives, sayings and expressions . . . to be taken as authoritative over the faith and life of the Christian, and how proclaimed in the church?" (p. 18).

At some point in the course I teach on the Old Testament, I ask my students some version of Bright's question. After all, it doesn't do much good for a person to know the content of the OT if she doesn't have a good idea of how it should be used by the church (I teach students from the Bible Belt who are, almost to a one, religiously engaged).

So what would you include in a response to Bright's question?

Monday Medley

Our Weekend:
We have a little amusement park here in Amarillo: "Wonderland!" We'd never been there before, but Aubrey's school band was going last Saturday. Michele and I wound up going as non-paying chaperones. In spite of our free admission and the chaperone title, we had basically no responsibilities. Woohoo!

By late afternoon, the three of us were on our way to Altus, Oklahoma. We spent the night with my folks and went to worship with them Sunday morning. My years in Connecticut didn't afford many opportunities for me to be with my mother on Mothers' Day. I was so glad I got to be with her yesterday.

The Demise of Dogma?
"The only church of Christ is the Catholic Church governed by the successor of Peter" --Pope Benedict, speaking last week to the bishops of Brazil, as quoted on last Saturday's broadcast of "NPR Religion."

The Bible and Tattoos
The same chapter of the Bible that says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18) also says, "You shall not tattoo yourselves" (v. 28).

No believer that I know of has argued against the positive statement found in verse 18, especially since Jesus repeated it and said it was super important. On the other hand, any number of believers have violated the letter of the prohibition found in verse 28. Have they violated the will of God?

Old Testament specialists tells us that tattooing (or painting) the body in the ancient world was an explicitly pagan thing. It may have been done to ward off evil spirits, or to identify a person as belonging to a certain pagan group. Either way, the very appearance of a tattoo would have meant a rununciation of what the Bible affirms: that there is only one true God and those who are faithful to him will not be harmed but will, instead, be secure. These days, tattoos don't necessarily mean the same thing. So, while I'm not a fan of tattoos, neither do I believe that they are against the will of God.

The Authority of the Old Testament
The question of how Christians might apply the teaching of, say, Leviticus 19 was part of what we talked about in the last class session of the Old Testament course. I gave the students a copy of the question as it's worded in a classic book by John Bright:

" [People who affirm] that the Old Testament is in each of its texts inspired of God and affords in all its parts a revelation of his character, purpose and will . . . must still face the question: How are these ancient laws, institutions, and concepts, these ancient narratives, sayings and expressions . . . to be taken as authoritative over the faith and life of the believer, and how proclaimed as such?"

How can, how should, the Old Testament function as a word from God within the church? What principles of interpretation, for example, serve to open up that part of the Bible as a word on target for Christians?

The Church Sings!
"The Christian church sings. It is not a choral society. Its singing is not a concert. But from inner, material necessity it sings. Singing is the highest form of human expression....What we can and must say quite confidently is that the church which does not sing is not the church. And where...it does not really sing but sighs and mumbles spasmodically, shamefacedly and with an ill grace, it can be at best only a troubled community which is not sure of its cause and of whose ministry and witness there can be no great expectation....The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable forms of the ministry of the church." -- Karl Barth, in Church Dogmatics, Vol. IV, part 3, chapter 16, par. 72, #4.