Those of you that were here yesterday, this is
a second part of that same set
of lessons. We have three people involved and
they've played games with my mind's
rotating among the various roles and so I'm
going to introduce one of them and
since they're all three speaking I know at some
point the one I introduce will
actually show up. As I understand it Mark
Hamilton will be the main presenter
today. Mark is father of two, son Nathan age 10
and daughter Hannah age 6. Mark
holds a BA from Freed Hardiman, an MDiv and an
MA from ACU and a Ph.D. in Old
Testament Studies from Harvard University. Mark
is a member at the
congregation where I also serve and is now in
the process of teaching on each
Wednesday evening. Father you bless us richly
each day. One of those blessings
is when we can meet together as fellow
believers to discuss and study you and
your word. We thank you for those who have
dedicated their life to deep
understanding and even more for those who
follow that dedication with one to
sharing what they know and love and appreciate.
Would you bless our three
speakers today? Would you bless your church
through their work? We pray in
Christ's name. Amen.
Thank you Jeff. Many of you have probably
noticed that the material that we're
using is material that comes out of here and so
for those of you who want to
follow along let me give you an overview and a
preview. The overview is
yesterday James talked about material from
chapters 1, 2, and 4 describing the
current situation, the loss of story in many of
our congregations, and the stakes
that come with the loss of story. And you'll
probably also notice that he
didn't talk too much about chapter 2 but you'll
want to go back and read chapter
2 which talks about what it means to talk about
Scripture being the inspired
Word of God. We thought that all of you
probably agreed on that we really didn't
need to discuss that too much. Mark will be
talking about the Old Testament. He'll
be drawing material from chapters 3, 5, and 6
and in these chapters Mark issues a
call to reclaim the Old Testament for the
church and he shows the various ways
in which the Old Testament deepens and shapes
Christian understanding. Mark has
the mind of a scholar and the heart of a
churchman and so he is intimately
qualified to talk about the significance of the
Old Testament for us. So it's my
pleasure to introduce to you the man who makes
Deuteronomy interesting to
teenagers, Mark Hamilton. Thank you Ken. I knew
that when Ken stood up many of you
said to yourself, you know that Hamilton's
really a lot handsomer than I thought he
was, but alas he's not. I want to talk to you
for just a few minutes about a
text that makes up three-fourths of the Bible.
There's an old discussion that
Israelites and Jews have been having now for
some 3,000 years and that is the
question, why did God give the Torah to Israel?
Why did God give this great gift
to these people? The earliest part of the
discussion we have is in the book
of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy says, don't think
it's because you were the most
noble and righteous and powerful people in the
world because you were the least
of the nations. And it tells them that the
Torah, the law, comes to them because
God wants things to go well with them in the
land and wants them to live there
for a long time. And also he wants foreign
nations to come and see their
experiences and in wonder exclaim, what kind of
people has a God as close to
them as this people has? What kind of people
has instructions and laws like
the ones these people live by? The gift of the
law. It's a discussion that goes
on throughout Scripture. You see it in the New
Testament where Paul will say
the law is holy and just and good and where he
will say that the things that
were written in the past were written for our
learning so that we through
patience and comfort of the Scriptures might
have hope. And you'll read a little
further in 2 Timothy, all Scripture is inspired
by God. Not the part that
starts at Matthew, but all Scripture is
God-breathed and all of it is useful for
doctrine. So Amos is useful for doctrine.
Obadiah is, well Obadiah is tough, but
Obadiah is useful for doctrine and instruction
and reproof and rebuke and
so on. It's about spiritual formation, it's
about ethical formation, and it's
about doctrinal formation from Genesis to
Revelation. It's an old story. Why did
God give the Torah to Israel? Sometimes Jews
like to make up stories about this.
Legends. Nobody took them very seriously. But
one of the stories goes like this.
God offered the Torah to other people. It's
just a story, people are having fun.
He went around to the nations of the world and
he says, would you like the
Torah? Would you like the law? And he went to
one group, the Edomites, and he
said, would you like the Torah? And they said,
well, what's in it? Show me. Edom,
Missouri, it's all the same basically. Show me.
And they found out that it says
don't murder. And they said, well no thank you,
because we really do enjoy
murdering. Please, please leave us alone. And
so he goes to the Moabites and the
Ammonites and they say, what's in it? And he
says to them, well, among other things
it says don't commit adultery. And they say,
well, you know, we're really kind of
fond of that. I know that is absolutely outside
our experience today, but that's
Moab and Edom, Ammon. Thank you very much,
please go somewhere else. And he goes
somewhere else. He goes to the Ishmaelites and
they also ask, what's in
it? And he says, well, it says don't steal. And
they, too, say, well, you know, we're
very fond of stealing. Please go somewhere else.
Finally, he's gone all
around the world and he comes to Israel and
they alone say, whatever God has said,
that we will do. It's just a story, but it
captures something very powerful. The
sense that Israel has, that Scripture has, that
all the people of faith have, that
the law is not designed to make life more
burdensome, but to make it more
easy. Because it's easier to live in a
relationship to the God who is the
creator of everything and the sustainer of
everything, the God who is concerned
about the behavior of human beings, than it is
to live subject to idols or to
oneself. So why does God give the Torah to
Israel? It's an old question, too,
because it's one that Christians have asked for
a long time. If you go into the
2nd century, you find in the middle of the
century a discussion of this
question, why do we Christians need this text?
In the middle of the century, a man
named Marcion, about 150, give or take three
minutes, about the year 150, moved
from Western Asia, Asia Minor, to Rome. He was
a merchant. He was quite
wealthy. He was what we would call today a
church planter, besides. And he said,
you know, we don't really need these texts,
because what's in these texts are
sub-Christian. And so he proposed that the
Bible should consist only of the
Gospel of Luke and the letters of Paul, with a
little bit of editorial work,
because if you're getting rid of the Old
Testament and then you don't want Paul
to make any references to them, you have to do
quite a bit of cutting, about
every other verse, basically. But somehow he
got through all of that. But the early
church said, you know, no, no, that's not what
we were taught. That's
not what the Apostles taught us. That's not the
Gospel. The Gospel is wider and
deeper, and the story begins in the beginning,
and it continues until that
day when all the creation will say, the kingdom
of this world has become the
kingdom of our God and of his Christ. So why
did God give the law to Israel? And
why does the church still honor this as
Scripture? It's a discussion that I
think a lot of us have to have in a lot of our
churches. I don't have numbers
about this. I wish somebody did. It'd be
interesting to know what percentage of
sermons in our churches on Sunday morning come
from the Old Testament. No
idea. Fifty percent? Five percent? That's
probably closer. I don't know what the
numbers are. My guess is it's not anywhere near
the 75% that might be
appropriate, given that 75% of the Bible is
from the Old Testament. Frankly, I'd be
happy for 50-50. That's, I'm not shooting, not
naive enough to think it's going to
be 31. But there is this need. It's a need that
shows up in the way we teach the
Old Testament, too. James talked yesterday
about our story and how that story is
often relegated to the children. The children
know the stories, but then when
we reach adulthood, we say, that's just, that's
for children. That's for
children. And I don't know what's there that I
need to hear. I'd like to talk
very briefly about what's there that I think we
need to hear, and why we might
need to hear it. This is doing an introduction
to the Old Testament in
five minutes while standing on one foot, which
has got to be some kind of record.
But that's not, that's not what I'm really
shooting for, Terry. It's just
something I want to talk about. What's there?
James talked a little bit
yesterday about the story. Most of the Old
Testament is this great story that
begins in creation. Everything I'm about to say
you know, have heard before, but I
just want to put it together, and I hope a new
way. The story that begins in
creation and continues as God moves in human
history through families, calling
people flawed people, people who look a lot
like the people who come to see us
on Monday morning after the Sermon, the people
we talked to on Sunday morning in
our sermons, flawed people. And he works
through these people, and he calls them,
and deals with them, and teaches them bit by
bit, weaning them of the paganism that
surrounds them. And then the story takes this
dramatic turn, because on Mount
Sinai he says to this poor shepherd man who's
run from Egypt, he says, I've heard
the cry of my people in bondage, and I want you
to go to Pharaoh and say, let my
people go. And God, with a strong arm and an
outstretched hand, reaches down into
the brokenness of Egypt and pulls those people
out. And from then on they sing
that song, we were slaves in Egypt. God
intervened on our behalf. We are who we
are because of what God has done for us.
Several weeks ago I watched the movie
The Prince of Egypt with my daughter who's six.
I've seen it about 25 times
now. But you know, I have to confess to you,
I'm a little embarrassed to say this,
but I cry in that movie. I cry every time,
because we won. And the score wasn't
really all that close. The score was about
275-0, and we won. And the song
ends, Ashira Ladonai, in Hebrew, I will sing to
the Lord, because he is
triumphed. And that story is the anchor of the
Christian tradition. It's a story
about how God reaches into history and brings
these people and makes them a
nation, and he says there are ways to live. I
said before you in the words of
Deuteronomy, I said before you the way of life
and the way of death. Choose
life. Don't live the way you lived in Egypt,
where the rich oppressed the poor,
where the monuments that tourists still see to
this day were built by whom? By
slaves, by us. Live a different way. And we
hear this story, we see the prophets
called, we see the judges, we see the kings.
Kings are like rulers in general.
You have to have them, but they're not all that
great to have, just better
than chaos, better than nothing. You have these
kings. You call even the rulers to
this high ideal, exemplified by David. Well, or
was it? Because David was flawed
himself. And the story goes on, and it goes on
through times of sin and
suffering and punishment and redemption, and it
keeps going on. Eventually they
lose their land, but then God calls them back.
That's the part of the story I
think we sometimes forget to talk about in
church. He calls them back, and he
makes a new covenant with them and gives them a
new temple and a new situation
and re-institutes them, Ezra and Nehemiah. The
story is the anchor of the Old
Testament, but built around that story are
other kinds of texts. We hear the
words of the prophets. We hear them saying to a
nation whose story is, we
were slaves in Egypt, but we've been redeemed,
and yet they live as if they
were back in Egypt. The prophets say to these
people a lot of things. Woe to you
who sell the poor for silver and the righteous
for a pair of shoes. And they
say, what does the Lord require of you but to
do justice, to love, mercy, and to
walk honorably in the sight of your God? And
they say to these people, let justice
roll down like waters and righteousness like a
mighty stream. And they give them
a vision of the God who cares about the poor.
Again, Deuteronomy, that's
what I've been reading, so that's what I'll
talk about. Deuteronomy is in, you
know, thinking about the prophets. And the
vision is, God doesn't take bribes. God
doesn't show favoritism, and you'd better not
either. We hear those words, and it's
become acute in our time, because if you think
about it for one second, you
realize that as a group we are the richest
Christians who have ever lived.
Think about that a second. We are the richest
Christians who have ever lived.
We live in a society that has the ability to
obliterate all life as we
know it, and seems increasingly willing. I'm
gonna step on toes a little bit. I
know this is Texas. I'll step on them anyway,
because when you're the junior
guy, you can say things, and everybody thinks,
well, you know, he's a fool, but
that's okay. Where we say, maybe we're
increasingly willing to do some of that,
and not to hear the voice as Christians. God is
calling us to a world that's not
marked by power and wealth, and what you can do
to other people, and how many
walls you can put up to defend yourself, but
it's marked by something else. And the
words of the prophets are words we need to
hear, but that's not all there is in
Scripture. There is also, there are also the
words of these wise men and women.
You hear them in Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes,
and Job. You hear people who
long to know how to live in this world, here
and now, a world that God has
created, that God sustains, that is
extraordinarily beautiful, even in
Abilene, beautiful in its own way. We always
say the people are beautiful, but
the place is too. Living in this world, how are
you going to do that? But that's
not all. You also hear words throughout these
texts, praise. Most beautiful text
ever written on worship is the book of Psalms,
I think. But it's interesting, as
you look through the book of Psalms, it ends
with words of praise, five psalms
that form a kind of coda to the whole book, and
say, if we're going to talk
about what it means to be in Israel, let's talk
about praise. Praise the Lord.
Hallelujah. Praise Jehovah. Let the heavens
praise his name. Words of praise. But
there are also other kinds of words of worship.
Lament. Oh Lord, how long? Oh Lord,
will you cast us off forever? Oh Lord, have you
forgotten us? Why do the Heathen
rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
Words of protest. Words of fear and
longing and despair that lead to praise. We
talk a lot today about worship
renewal, and we need to talk about that. But
the risk is, if we don't hear the
words of the Old Testament, that I think we may
only hear the words of the
culture that says, only talk about joy, only
talk about the wonderful times, only
talk about success, only comfort me, never
challenge me, and never be honest about
the reality in which all of us live. But the
Old Testament says, sometimes
life is hard, sometimes God seems absent, and
here are words that speak to that
reality. Here's a resource by which we live.
And that's not all. You also have a
text like Job that is willing to challenge the
easy pieties that says, God
has arranged all of human events for my
benefit, and everything is going to work
out beautifully for those who love the Lord,
and there will never be any
struggle or strife, and if there is, that's a
proof that I've done something
wrong. And Job is the innocent sufferer who
says, I was innocent. Where is God? And
God appears. And if you read that book, he
doesn't exactly answer Job's questions.
He seems to give him even more questions. But
still, his presence, his willingness
to show up in court in the lawsuit, that's the
metaphor of the book of Job,
it's a lawsuit. His willingness to show up in
court at all is testimony to his
graciousness to human beings. Why read the Old
Testament? Well, it is three-fourths
the Bible. The early church did say, the New
Testament does say, that it is
Scripture, that it's inspired by God, that it's
useful for all kinds of things. We
do read here language that gives us resources
for living lives of faith in
robustness, in richness. We do here hear our
story in a world that is, I think, not
without a story so much as having too many
stories, each of them competing, none
of them being able to say, we are, this is the
story. But we hear our story here. Most
of all, why do we read this text? Because in it
we see the picture of God. We see
the picture of God who intervenes in human
affairs and takes sides, and says,
injustice can't be tolerated in my creation,
and I will solve this problem,
and I will favor the poor, and I will protect
them. You remember the song of
Hannah, the poor he feeds, the rich he sends
empty-handed away? I think we need
to hear these texts again, because as the
richest Christians who have ever lived,
and as people with a great tendency towards
self-comfort, we live in times of
spiritual danger, when the risk is not to
others but to ourselves. Why do we need
to hear these texts? Because in them you hear
the voice of God. Finally, I want to
tell you a story that we talk about in the book.
1944, a young man named David,
who lived in Hungary in a Jewish ghetto, was
arrested by the SS. He was a child
prodigy, famous already in his community for
his knowledge of Jewish
law, and he was taken first with his family to
Auschwitz, and then to another
little camp called Wulfberg in Silesia, and he
was put to work. He tells the
story one day, as he struggled to survive, he
walked into the mine where
they were building an underground factory safe
from the bombs. He carried
in the drill bits, in and out. Young man could
do it. Older men got too
tired. He could do it. He saw there the guard
standing, eating as he did every
night at that time, his sandwich, grease
dripping down his face. The hungry boy
wishing he could have it, though it wasn't
Kosher, it wasn't permitted, but that day
the guard had something extra. He had in his
hand, wrapped around the sandwich, a
greasy piece of paper on which there were
Hebrew words, Hebrew words, and he
recognized the page. It was a page he had, a
book he had studied before, a book
about religion, about the faith, and he begged
the guard for it. The guard first
pulled out his pistol, because he was scared.
Little boys didn't usually ask
him things. He gave him the page, finally.
What, what harm is it? It goes in the
trash anyway. And every week, on the few hours
they had off, the boy and the other
men with whom he was housed in this
concentration camp would take the page
out of one man's trousers where he hid them,
and they would read, and they would
study, because the words that seemed so
foreign, so irrelevant, were words of life.
They connected you to something deeper than
yourself and your immediate
experience. But we don't live in Wolfberg, but
we do live in a world in which
people bong for life, in which we want to say,
my immediate needs and the things
that are most relevant to the task of the
moment are not the only things that
count. I need something deeper. And these
texts, I want to argue today, and my
colleagues will help me talk about this in a
minute, these texts take us to
something deeper. So God says to us, I set
before you the way of death and the way
of life. Choose life. I'm going to ask Ken and
James to
come up here, and we're going to talk a while,
say some things of, I don't know,
snide remarks. I'm not sure what will come.
We'll see. But good things, I hope.
I think it's my turn to start off with opening
part of the conversation, and we're not just
asking each other softball questions. This is
also a dialogue, so it'll be a
little bit of both. But one of my memories is
that I learned the Old
Testament at home, and as a child, I don't
recall ever, well, I do recall a
couple of instances in a church context where
we worked through a part of the
Old Testament the way we worked through a part
of the New Testament. I want to
come back to that in just a moment, but would
you elaborate a little bit, Mark, on
the title of one of your chapters was
reclaiming, it refers to the whole
scripture, and that's a pun because he spells
whole, W-H-O-L-E, but he also has
a parenthesis around the W, that there's a
whole in our approach to scripture, and
I take that to mean also a whole in our
Christian consciousness, that there's
something missing from the life of the church
when you think of yourself only
with the New Testament. What are we missing
most that would come out of our
study of the Old Testament if that got 50% of
the space that we have in our
classes? How would it change anything? Well, I
think it'd change a lot. I was
trying to be cute with the title, because when
you're, you know, it's always good to
be clever, that covers a multitude of other
sins. I think some of the things I
tried to touch on, I think the whole comes
because of neglect, because we
haven't talked a lot about some of these
things, because the texts seem obscure,
maybe we can talk about that in a minute, but
some of the things I tried to touch
on, I think it enriches our understanding of
who God is, first of all, that God
didn't start working in 4 B.C. in a little town
in Bethlehem. He'd been working for a
long time before that, and what happened there
is part of this older story. So it
gives us a deeper sense of who God is, it gives
us a deeper sense of who human
beings are. We understand that we're part of
communities and not just individuals
who happen to come together because
individually we have relationships to
God. It gives us a deeper sense, again, of
social justice, and something that we are
beginning to recover, and I see very hopeful
signs in our churches. I think
we're, that's good, but something we must
recover, because it's tempting for
us to forget the words of the prophets, to
ignore them. There are other
kinds of gains. I think the list is fairly
long, you don't want me to talk
forever, but frankly I don't see how you make
much sense out of most of the New
Testament, if you don't understand the Old
Testament. It's not just, you know, the
quotations, or you know, but really the New
Testament is so intertwined
with the Old Testament. You're taking those
discussions back there and
we're bringing them into a new situation all
the time. Just, for example, take a
Bible that you, the copy you're going to throw
away or something, and go through
Romans and mark out all the verses that are Old
Testament quotations or
allusions, and the four you have left are sort
of interesting, but you know, you're
missing a lot. I wonder how many people have a
translation that italicizes Old
Testament quotations. It's rather, it's a
pretty amazing thing to see that. In
many of our Greek texts, the allusions they
picked up on are italicized, and it
would be interesting to have an English
translation that identified those, not
just quotations, but just phrases that come out
of the Old Testament, and how
much he expects them to know. Sure. Mark, you
mentioned some obscure things, and so
it's perhaps time for someone named Sikrowski
to ask you a question. You say
that three times so people get it. Yeah. At
Mentor Lane, where I go to church, we
read through large blocks of text as part of
the worship service, and we are
reading through Exodus right now, and as we
read, oh, probably four or five weeks
ago through some of the laws concerning sexual
activity, the crowd was a little
uncomfortable, and as we moved farther along in
Exodus, and we started reading
chapter-long descriptions about the composition
of lampstands and curtains,
there were some discussions about whether, in
fact, we should be reading
through the whole Bible. Maybe we should just
skip that. Now, it might be easy to
say, well, yeah, look at social justice, and
look at the vision of God that we
get, but how about those passages? Can you tell
us how those passages are
scripture for the church? Sure. I mean,
naturally, I picked the easy ones to talk
about, I think. And I think obscure ones to
talk about. And I appreciate that. You know, it's
interesting. Christians have dealt with that in
a lot of different ways through
the centuries. In the early years of the
church, you weren't allowed to
read the Song of Solomon until you were 30, and
that's kind of
interesting in its own way. I think different
texts are going to be used in
different ways. Some texts you're going to read
in church, some texts you're
going to teach in other contexts. You're going
to have to use some judgment. But
it's interesting. One of my favorite ones is
this thing about the
tabernacle, because when I was in the fifth
grade, I liked that. Fifth-grade boy,
carpentry, dreams of being a carpenter. Now
that I'm a man and have no more
skills at carpentry than I did when I was 10, I
don't like it as much until I
ask what it's about. What it's about is the
presence of God in people. It's about
God's using creation to appoint people to him.
It's interesting. If you read the
description of the tabernacle, and you start in
Exodus 24, and you get this long
description of just minute detail, and then in
the middle of it is the story of
the golden calf. Israel fails miserably at its
calling, and they have to drink
some gold. There are serious consequences. But
then at the end of the story,
after Moses has said, remember that...
...and then you go into this long description
of the tabernacle again. If you didn't get
it the first time, you're going to get it the
second time. You say, why? I just read
all this. Well, I think one reason is the text
wants to say there was this
interruption. Human sin reared its ugly head,
but God's plan is going to keep
going on, and God has determined to be present
among these people, and in grace
he's acting among these people. Can I say one
last thing about that? Because you
just you set me off, and then I just go. I
sometimes tell my students the
Old Testament never talks about grace, except
in about every other verse,
because what we heard as kids, the New
Testament's about
grace, the Old Testament's about law. I mean,
there's some truth to that, but not
much. Not much. It really is about the grace of
God. As you say that, I'm
reminded of Jonah, where Jonah's angry with God
because God is so gracious.
Sure. Not because he's a wrathful God, but
because he's a gracious God. Sure. How can
you forgive those people? So I think there are
hard cases, and some
texts are easier than others, clearly. And
there may be hard cases in the New
Testament as well. That could be too. Yeah,
that could be too. I do have a few
memories of going through passages of Scripture
in the Old Testament, but let
me set the context by saying our customary
habit in church is when we
study Scripture and study it very seriously,
we're accustomed to having a
fairly short series on, say, Philippians. And
Philippians has four chapters, and we
don't wear them out because we have four
chapters of Philippians, and we might
even have Hebrews and have 13 chapters. But
he's talking about Exodus with 40
chapters or something. And then Isaiah with 66.
And the model that we have of
studying Scripture is to work in smaller units.
And the whole problem of the Old
Testament being so large, think of Isaiah with
its 66 chapters. And how would we do
this in the context of a series? You just don't
use the models, it seems to me, that
you use for New Testament in studying the Old
Testament. Wouldn't you have to
change your pedagogy, your instructional means
a bit when you do the Old
Testament with such long books? I think
probably. We're used to hearing the New
Testament, but we grew up with sermons that
explain all the obscure details, and
so we know a lot more about it in church.
You know already, but I'll tell you anyway. At
University Church we're doing
the book of Deuteronomy in 12 weeks, 34
chapters, so you have to leave out a lot
of stuff. But you try to pick the things that
are most crucial and talk
about that. I think it's a matter of getting
people used to doing that. I
don't think you should spend 66 weeks in Isaiah.
You do that, go look for another
job. I don't know, but I think practically
that's a mistake. But six weeks in Isaiah
and getting people used to it, and so that at
the end they say, oh there's a
lot more there than I thought. I hope we do
that again. Or where can I go to learn
more? Or maybe some of us could kind of meet at
my house once in a while and
we'll read deeper. That's I think what we want
to do. That's what you're saying, I
think? Yeah, I think so. And let me follow up a
bit with the conversation. I remember
the first time I ever discovered Amos, and I
was in my late 20s. I mean really
discovered it. I've had it at survey level. But
I was thrilled by Amos and
its call for justice. And I remember
introducing this to church
members in the dismissive way in which they
said, but it's in the Old Testament.
Now that was a way of dismissing it. It's in
the Old Testament. It doesn't count.
Now that sounds pretty bad. It sounds kind of
crude, but there is an
element there that I want to ask about. The
social justice dimension, the Old
Testament is meant for Israel, which is a
political entity. And it covers all of
life. It is civil law. We live in a different
situation, and the laws, some of
the laws, are meant for, it is the civil law of
the land. And we live in a
different context, and that may be why we're
more comfortable with the New
Testament, in which the New Testament is not
written where these epistles become
the civil law of the land. It's for the
community. So don't we have a problem of
taking the passages in Amos and even
Deuteronomy that talks about the poor,
because this did involve the poor of all of the
land, the civil law. So there is a
little difference here. How do we deal with the
difference when that is
meant for the law of the land, civil law? Well,
in a lot of ways, of course, the
distinction is a modern distinction, in some
respects at least. It's, thank you
for the hard question, I think the one that
would take me several hours to work
out, I think. It's an interesting question, and
clearly reading this text
is very hard work, and it's not going to be,
there are no simple answers to it. It
also, it's interesting that we do this in the
New Testament, too. You know, fear God
and honor the king. You know, pray for rulers
and those in authority. Anybody
prayed for a king lately? You know, God bless
Queen Elizabeth? I don't know. We
make some of those adjustments. We say that
what are the principles involved
here? What kind of people are being formed by a
text like this? What does it
mean to do what this is? How would that look in
our current situation? So we make
those sorts of adjustments. The other thing is,
too, that it's true text like
Amos is designed for a particular culture, but
Amos himself, it's a great
example, because if you read the first two
chapters of Amos, he jumps on the
Edomite king for what he did to the Moabite
king, or is it the other way
around? But anyway, it's one or the other. So
God's vision is really more than
just local and more than just about us. It's
worldwide in scope at some
level. That's where I would start. And it's the
same God. God is
the creator of everything, and God's concerned
about all human beings. It gets
sticky when you start to say, you know, do we
agitate for changes of laws, or do we
try to do it in our church, or, you know, this
kind of practical solutions get a
lot harder. But I guess I would love it if we
were discussing that we
were really racking our brains so much about
how to solve that practically, that
that was our issue. That would be fabulous, you
know. What about the
distinction that some folks have made, that we
follow the Old Testament's
moral law, but we don't follow the cultic law.
Sometimes you've heard
Christians deal with the Old Testament in that
way. What are the strengths
and weaknesses of that approach? That's a
question I'd like to turn back on the
two of you in a lot of ways, if I could,
because you guys are the New Testament
people, scholars, New Testament Christians on
the left and the right. But, you know,
it's interesting. You read Romans. I'll step in
it, and you fix what I do. You
correct what I do. But you read Romans, and
Paul kind of makes a distinction
somewhat like that, or at least he's headed in
that direction. You have to be
careful. I think we and our folk were reacting
to some things going on in
other circles. We don't want infant baptism, so
we're reluctant to
use the Old Testament. We want to kind of sort
this out. We don't want
instrumental music in church, so we try to sort
this out. And I agree with
those two things, but I think we ought to
rethink how we sorted it out. I'm gonna
leave that there, and you help me here. Yeah. I
think there is some
misunderstanding. First of all, we got the
reputation as people who didn't believe
the Old Testament, and it was kind of because
they heard some of our
rhetoric. And I sometimes see students who walk
around, or somebody in church, and I
see them with only a copy of the New Testament.
I'm embarrassed that it's what
I have right here. It's only a copy of the New
Testament. And I say, oh, a Marcianite here.
People who don't accept the Old Testament. I
think Paul has been
misrepresented a little bit. Obviously, Paul
does not assume Gentile converts
will keep kosher homes. Sure. He does not
assume circumcision. So those are
principles, because these are Gentiles. They're
not Jews. We're not going to
sacrifice animals at University Church. Right.
That's right. Not anytime soon. Yeah.
Well, the elders, you know. Yeah. But one thing
that really strikes me as I read a
passage, let's say 1 Corinthians, and it's a
Gentile church, a very Gentile
church, with very Gentile problems. And he
reads 1 Corinthians 10, and he says,
our fathers passed through the sea. They were
baptized in the sea. Our fathers. And
the expectation level that he has for these
Gentile converts, that they know
the Old Testament. He assumes it. And I've been
in classes many times with
Galatians. These are Gentile converts. And the
arguments that are so difficult and
hard for us to follow. The expectation he has
of his Gentile converts, that
they could follow his argument about Abraham,
Sarah, or Sarah and Hagar. He
assumes they know the Old Testament. And I
think it's also important that several
places Paul says, do something because the law
says it. What does he give his
new Gentile converts? He gives them basically
the moral laws of the Old
Testament. I don't think the Old Testament is
quoted in 1 Thessalonians, but when he
gives rules for living, they are consistent
with the Old Testament.
Sure. And 1 Thessalonians is the exception.
Yeah. To what he does. Yeah.
But Romans, for example, will say the whole law
is fulfilled in one word, love
your neighbor as yourself. And this is a book
that has spent a lot of time
talking about the fact that the law doesn't
save, that Christ saves. But when
it comes right down to it in chapter 13, the
law is fulfilled. He assumes that the
law still is functional for his churches. And
love your neighbor as yourself is a
quotation from Leviticus. Right. So it's a
complex relationship between
Christianity and the Old Testament. And I hope
that we can reclaim that
complexity because I think it enriches us and
our lives and will have a great
effect on who we are as people. Okay. I'll wrap
things up here. We will stay
around for a few moments. Yes. Okay. The question.
I'm here. I'm the guy with the mic. I guess I
have to answer that question. The
question is, with many people this is solved in
a sense by having prescribed
readings through the lectionary. And we did so
much that was intended to
demarcate us from others that the lectionary
has not been that functional.
But for many people something like it is being
used. And its advantage is if
you are left to your own devices you will
gravitate to your favorite texts
all of the time. I remember going back and
looking over my old sermons for a
year and it was kind of scary when I look back
over my own sermons because
they were my pet themes. And every preacher
needs some kind of outside
control, as well as an educator, that is not
just the themes that I like. And
therefore the lectionary is going to take you
through all of Scripture in a
three-year cycle or that kind of thing. We
could learn very much from having
some kind of control so that we are not
dictating the nutrition, the spiritual
nutrition of our congregation, but that we have
some way of ensuring the
passages we don't like get read. I think
there's simple ways. Lectionary is
one way. I've done that for a number of years
and it is effective. There are some
problems, as you know, but it's effective.
Having a psalm read in church every
Sunday would go a long way toward solving some
of these problems. Or
working through a text. At Highland Church,
Mike Cope works through a text
week after week at some length and those are
often Old Testament texts.
Mitterlane is even reading through Exodus.
Mitterlane reads through the New Testament book
and the Old Testament book,
alternating back and forth. And sometimes it's
very challenging, as I indicated to
Mark, but I think it's good for the church to
be challenged. Sure. And it's
good for the church to have the psalm, the
gospel, the Old Testament reading. And
some of the strengths and weaknesses of the
lectionary I've described in the
ninth chapter there. Some of the things that I
think the church can gain from
that and some of the things that the lectionary
doesn't do well.
You know, you're educated scholars. You work
within a framework of an intellectual institution.
That's not true of the satellite churches of
Christ the Risen. There's very little
guidelines, very little assistance.
And a well-documented, literary, theological,
and historical outline that would be refined
would be bought, I think, by some leaders and used.
Because they too, although there are a couple
of our churches, they know our psalms.
So we would do very well to find the outside
help to ensure that we have a sacred trust that
the whole counsel of God get heard.
I want to draw this to a conclusion. I know
there's another session. I thank you very much
for coming.
One thing that you may have noticed is that
academics can theorize forever, but they don't
like to get very practical.
But tomorrow's session is the practical part.
Ken Sikorski wrote that part.
And it is the kind of thing you can take to
your church and you can implement.
Questions about how to interpret the Scripture.
What is the best translation? For what purposes?
What do you do with the silence of Scripture?
How do you implement a Bible study program, a
good public reading program of Scripture?
Tomorrow's session is designed to be very
practical, and I hope that you will be back to
complete this because we've only begun the conversation.
And I think tomorrow is a good opportunity for
you to see how this can be implemented in a
local church situation.
And even then, we're not through. I hope we as
a church are just beginning a conversation.