Marginal Christianity

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 ou...

The Place of the Old Testament           As we embark on God’s response to humanity’s revolt against him we face the fact of the Old Testament. This sprawling, daunting, mystifying, complex story occupies the vast majority of the Christian Bible. That alone makes us ask “What’s going on in the Old Testament anyway?”           The church adopted the scriptures of the Hebrew Bible as their own and joined them to those documents that eventually became the New Testament to form it Bible. So what is the relation they discerned between these two sets of texts that made it possible and plausible to read them together? The church understood its existence as a part of the long story of what God had been doing in and for the world from creation onwards . However complicated and difficult it may be to understand that relation at points, the fact of the Christian Bible as Old and New Testaments ...