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...

One can certainly be excused for assuming that violence is an intrinsic part of all life in our world. Nothing and nobody is free of its taint and corruption. Well, almost nobody. Jesus of Nazareth, a 1 st century a.d. Galilean peasant and prophet, acclaimed the Messiah of Jewish expectation and Lord and world ruler by Christian faith, seems to have lived free of its taint and even its allure. And therein lies the nub of the problem investigated in this study. How do we understand this Jesus, and the God he worshiped and served, and the books of the Bible that witness to him? Especially since the latter, and the God they present as the “Father” of this Jesus, his “Son,” seem as “bloody, brutal, and barbaric” as the world in which it arose and to which it claims to witness to a redemptive nonviolent alternative reality and possibility for human life on this planet. The Bible itself testifies to the near ubiquity of violence in the life of our planet. Most of its content is ...

How should we respond when we discover passages or ideas in the Bible that mystify, offend, or scandalize us? Discussions of violence, God, and the Old Testament over the last few years keep the issue on the front burner. Should we reject the whole thing? The parts that offend us? Or grit our teeth and refuse to jettison these parts hoping that somehow we can find a way to live with them? There may be other options but these three are the major ones so I’ll go with them for now. Just a few comments from my seat in the peanut gallery. Obviously, one’s view of the Bible will in large part determine which way you go. If you don’t think God’s involved with it in any way that appends his authority to what it says, you’re free to go any of the three ways I mentioned above, though usually the first two ways will appeal more to you. If you do think God is involved with and gives a special authority to these writings, you are probably not free to take the first option. You could go wi...

Old Testament scholar Stephen Chapman from Duke writes in the book Holy War and the Bible: “Warfare in the Old Testament, as indeed all killing in the Old Testament needs to be recognized within Christian theology as a strictly circumscribed divine concession to the brutal reality of human sin (Gen.9:3-6). However, someone still might ask, ‘Couldn’t God design a world in which war wasn’t necessary?’' The appropriate theological response is that God in fact did so (Gen.1-2), but human sinfulness spoiled it precisely by generating violence (Gen. 6:11-13). Someone might push further and say 'Even with the advent of human violence, couldn’t God have devised a strictly nonviolent method for dealing with it?" Here again the theological response is that God did just that in Jesus Christ, but in order for Christ to appear in the fullness of time (Gal.4:4) it was necessary for God to elect and preserve the people of Israel. And apparently - this is the hard part - God was not ab...

Reading the Old Testament as a Christian Book The Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible. At least taken by itself it is. But when the church added the New Testament to it, it became a Christian book. But what does that mean?  How does it effect the way we read it? Herman likes to make a point of how much of it there is - way more than the New Testament. It must have some vital role to play in shaping Christian understanding if the church chose to put it together with the NT. That means we cannot ignore or neglect it as Christians started doing in the second century and in too many circles continue to do to this day. One has only to remember that this is what the Nazis did in Germany as part of their program of rebuilding the German nation of pure Aryan blood. We forget or neglect the Old Testament to our hurt! So, how do we (Christians) read the Old Testament? 1. as part of the one story of God with his creation and creatures. It is chapter 1 of a 2 chapter story...

1.     God’s purpose and design for creation is divine-human communication/communion/community with humanity on this earth (pictured in Gen.3 by God walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden). In other words, God always intended to come among us and be with us as one of us. It was always his plan to send the incarnate Jesus Christ into the world to effect his purpose. 2.     God’s strategy was incarnational: to identify and enter into solidarity with his creatures in ever more intimate ways as his purpose unfolds through history. Development, change, and deepening were always to be features of this history. The principle: God meets the people where they (takes history seriously) and takes them on in the direction he wants them to go. 3.        After the Fall, this strategy is complexified. God now has to deal with the problem of sin and its distorting effects in his world to achieve his purpose. Violenc...

Prelude: What’s Going on in the Old Testament Anyway? 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?” And “What use is it to the church today?”           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 ...