Theological Journal – February 25 Torrance Tuesday – What Use is the Old Testament?

The Old Testament is in a rather bad odor in many Christian circles these days. That’s not news.

“To reject the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the church rightly repudiated; to retain it in the sixteenth century was a fate which the Reformation could not yet avoid; but to continue to keep it in Protestantism as a canonical document after the nineteenth century is the consequence of religious and ecclesiastical paralysis....[T]o sweep the table clean and honor the truth in confession and teaching is the action required of Protestantism today. And it is almost too late.”

So wrote Adolf von Harnack in his book Marcion. Recently evangelical pastor Andy Stanley promoted “unhitching” Christian faith from the Old Testament in certain respects (though not in Harnack’s thoroughgoing sense). And many other scholars, evangelical and non-evangelical), have claimed that the Old Testament is a mixture of divine and human words and ideas and we today must sort out which is which based on what we believe Jesus and the New Testament says.

And then there’s the mostly dismal story of Israel’s failure of its mandate to be God’s faithful Abrahamic people. What does all that say to us?

What we make of all that, however, we must not succumb to rejecting or ignoring the Old Testament or treating it as inferior revelation. For as Thomas Torrance makes clear in the following passage from The Mediation of Christ the Old Testament is vital to understanding Christ and the New Testament. I believe he is spot on here.

“It was indeed in the course of the Old Testament revelation that  nearly  all  the  basic  concepts  we  Christians  use were hammered out by the Word of God on the anvil of Israel. They constitute the essential furniture of our knowledge of God even in and through Jesus. If  the Word of God had become incarnate among us apart from all that, it could not have been grasped - Jesus himself would have remained  a  bewildering  enigma. It      was  just  because Jesus, born from  above  as  he  was,  was  nevertheless  produced  through the womb of Israel, mediated to us through the matrix of those conceptual and linguistic patterns, that he could be recognised as Son of God and Saviour and his crucifixion could be interpreted as atoning sacrifice for sin. It was because God mediated his revelation to mankind in that patient, informing way through the history of Israel and within  the  interpretative  framework  of  its relation with God in salvation and worship, that people were able in that context to know God  in  Jesus  and enter into communion with. him, and to proclaim him to the world.”