My reflections on excerpts from Do We Need the New Testament?: Letting the Old Testament Speak for Itself (2015) by John Goldingay:
A novel summary of the Gospel in light of the Old Testament:
In a sense God did nothing new in Jesus. God was simply taking to its logical and ultimate extreme the activity in which he had been involved throughout the First Testament story.
[…]
One might almost say that God had to provoke humanity into its ultimate act of rebellion in order to have the opportunity to act in a way that refused to let this ultimate act of rebellion have the last word.
[…]
My argument is that the execution and the resurrection were indeed the logical end term of a stance that God had been taking through First Testament times, so that the First Testament story does give an entirely adequate account of who God is and of the basis for relating to God. Because of who God has always been, God was already able to be in relationship with his people, despite their rebellion. God has always been able and willing to carry their waywardness. And on the basis of that story, Israel has always been able to respond to God and to be in relationship with God. In this sense the gospel did not open up any new possibilities to people; those possibilities were always there.
In which Goldingay delivers big “ouch“ for the church that seems like it’s also a knock on God as a strategist:
God’s strategy was that his people would be the magnet that attracts people to him. Israel was not very good at being such a magnet, and the church continues to have this problem.
In which I hear, “Zing!”:
Once people know about eternal life, they often stop taking this life really seriously. The history of Christian attitudes provides evidence for this speculation. We need the New Testament to give us hope for resurrection life, but we need the First Testament to remind us of the importance of this life, and to give us hope for this life.
In a comment about our action in relation to God’s kingdom that echoes (by a period of days) something I was trying to get across to a friend in an email correspondence:
In none of the Gospels does Jesus tell his disciples to extend the kingdom, work for the kingdom, build up the kingdom, or further the kingdom.
To which I can only say wow:
Further, the First Testament is under no illusion about whether implementing the Torah has the potential to achieve God’s purpose for Israel’s life. There is no direct link between seeking to restrain injustice in society and the giving implementing of God’s reign. Implementing God’s reign is fortunately God’s business. We have noted that the New Testament does not talk about human beings furthering or spreading or building up or working for God’s reign. Human efforts to achieve social justice are not destined to be successful. “Our responsibility is not to save the world. We are not required to transform This Age.” The problem about human society is too deep. As human beings living in God’s world, our vocation is to do what we can to restrain disorder in society, in light of what the Scriptures tell us about God’s creation purpose, but not to be overly optimistic about what we can do to bring in the kingdom.
In connection with our life in the world, then, do we need the New Testament? From it we get a further articulation of God’s creation ideals. Jesus does not need to give us any new truths or to issue new divine expectations in this connection, though he does provide a fresh prophetic articulation of God’s truth and God’s expectations. More important is the fact that from his story we know how God’s self-giving came to a climax in him as he let himself be martyred. We learn how that self-giving issued in the promise of resurrection and eternal life that extends to the whole world. It is what Jesus did that crucially matters. We could not do without that.
Important for me to remember:
The person and activity of God’s Spirit are objective realities separate from any sense of them that we may have.
Here’s the bit about the recurring theme I found so remarkable:
The prophets characteristically announce an event that sounds as if it will be the ultimate fulfillment of God’s ultimate purpose, and it is characteristic of the New Testament to talk as if that fulfillment has happened. That perspective applies to [Joel 2:30-32]. These declarations look like a description fo cataclysmic events at the End, of the kind that are also described in a passage such as Luke 21. Acts 2 sees these declarations, too, as fulfilled at Pentecost, which reflects that fact that Pentecost is itself indeed a partial realization of the End.
Yet is is only a partial realization, as is also characteristic of the fulfillment of prophecy. When a prophet announces the End (with positive or native implications), we have noted that an end does come, but it turns out not to be the End. The indication that Pentecost was not the End is the way history continues to unfold, with further withdrawing of the Spirit as well as further outpourings. Given that two thousand more years have passed (three or four times as long as passed from Joel to Pentecost), it seems Pickwickian even to call Pentecost the beginning of the End, though theologically there is a basis for speaking in these terms. It is rather the most magnificent instance of a pattern that runs through the First Testament and continues to run through the church’s story, and it is part of the guarantee (as Paul emphasizes) that the End will come. It is also a basis of praying and hoping that we may see more instantiations of the pattern, if we do not see the end itself.
An uncomfortable truth about the Holy Spirit is that we cannot control its coming and operation, as we cannot bring in or further or work for God’s reign. We can hurt or grieve the Holy Spirit and forfeit any right to the involvement of God’s spirit with us. But in ordinary human experience we cannot make another person fall in love with us or want to spend time with us, and neither can we take action that will ensure that God pours out his spirit on us. Our relationship with God is not contractual, so that we could fulfill the right conditions and it would have the desired results, as if our relationship with God resembled putting coins in a vending machine. It is a personal relationship, and such relationships involve freedom on both sides.
Isn’t the following what Deuteronomy actually says?:
It was the must that was the problem. There were circumstances in which Paul was happy to observe rules in the Torah, in connection with taking and keeping a vow or with circumcision. But the must implied that observing the rules in the Torah was the make-or-break factor in a relationship with God.
A curious take on the role of the Law that I’d like to look further into:
Elsewhere, Paul describes the Law as designed to increase transgression (Rom 5:20), perhaps in the sense that it designated as transgression offenses such as coveting that we might not otherwise have seen as sinful (e.g., Rom 4:15; 5:13; 7:7).
I love his refusal to disguise the Bible:
The Bible is not a lover letter to us from God; it does not focus on a personal relationship between God and the invidious. Nor does it focus on a challenge to work for peace and justice or on adherence to a body of doctrinal beliefs. Nor does it focus on faith itself: “The Gospel is not primary concerned with faith” but with “that upon which the faith reposes,” with the object of faith, “the kerygma that arouses faith.” It suggests a grand narrative about a project that God initiated and will bring to completion. Human communities and individuals gain their significance through being drawn into that project.
On the way the Scriptures use the Scriptures:
To put it more paradoxically, the hermeneutical guidance that the New Testament offers us is that we should not be looking to it for hermeneutical guidance, unless the guidance is an invitation to be imaginative in seeking to see how First Testament texts speak to our concerns.
Is this true? I think not, at least not exclusively. There’s a lot about the people talking.
The worship the Psalms commend and model is one that focuses on God.
This is a great spiritual strategy:
Intercession implies interposing between two parties so as to bring them together. It entails identifying with one party and representing it to another. For a prophet, intercessory prayer involved identifying with people and representing them before God, so that one speaks as “we” or “I,” not as “they” or “he” or “she.” I realized that the apparent absence of intercessory prayers from the Psalter might mean that actually the “I” and “we” psalms could be used as intercessions as well as supplications. Perhaps Israel used them that way; certainly we might do so. In praying protest psalms, one need not be praying for oneself. Specifically, in praying the prayers in the Psalms that speak out of oppression, affliction, persecution and tyranny, we pray not directly for ourselves but for people who experience oppression, affliction, persecution and tyranny, with whom we identify. We pray for God to put down tyrants and oppressors.
Not so fast:
Christians commonly justify their opposition to the use of such psalms by suggesting that these psalms are out of keeping with the New Testament, but it is not so. While the New Testament doesn’t quote Psalm 137, it does utilize imprecatory parts of Psalm 69 (e.g., Jn 2:17; Acts 1:20), which as a whole is more extensively imprecatory. Further, we noted in the introduction to this volume that Revelation 6:10 reports an imprecatory prayer on the part of the martyrs, who ask, “How long, Lord, holy and true, will you not judge and take redress for our blood from earth’s inhabitants?” God’s response is not to point out that such a prayer is inappropriate in light of Jesus’ exhortation to forgive enemies; it is to promise them that the time will soon come. Since it has not done so, perhaps this promise provides further reason for praying in imprecatory fashion, or further reason for us Westerners to avoid doing so if we allow for the possibility that we will be its victims.
A nice way of viewing the Bible:
“From a theological perspective, the Bible is the revelation of what God selected to be remembered and forgotten of God’s relationship to Israel and to the world” and of “God’s own character and configuration.”
What?!:
There is no basis in Scripture for the conviction that the narrative of history is moving toward the kingdom of God.
Again, something to think about:
Jesus did not reveal something new about God. What he did was embody God.
C’mon, preach it!:
I am not sure what would be the unfortunate result of interpretive programs that assume an autonomous Old Testament. Our actual problem is that of subsuming the First Testament under our understanding of what is Christian, so that this strategy enables us to sidestep parts of the First Testament that we want to avoid. By sleight of hand, aspects of what the First Testament says about God are filtered out in the name of christocentric interpretation. But the real problem is that we don’t like these aspects of the Scriptures. Christocentric interpretation makes it harder for the Scriptures to confront us when we need to be confronted. It is not the case that what was hidden in the Old is revealed in the New. Rather, there are many things revealed in the First Testament that the church has hidden by its interpretive strategy, obscuring the nature of scriptural faith.
This is to completely discount the idea that we can hold it up as an example to be spiritualized. Nope.:
the positive way the New Testament speaks in Acts 7:45 about Joshua’s taking the land and in Hebrews 11 about Israel conquering kingdoms, becoming faithful in battle and routing foreign armies suggests that it did not feel any of the unease about such First Testament narratives that is characteristic of modern Christians, as it does not feel any unease about the kind of praying that occurs in Psalm 137.24
In its entirety, worth the price of admission:
So do we need the New Testament? Or rather, what’s new about the New Testament? Christians commonly operate with the working hypothesis that Jesus brought a revelation from God that went significantly beyond the revelation in the First Testament. My thesis in this volume has been that the chief significance of Jesus does not lie in any new revelation that he brought. It lies in who he was, what he did and what happened to him, and what he will do. He did not reveal new truths about what it means to be God except the fact that God is more complicated than people would previously have thought (“three persons and one God”). He did not reveal new truths about what it means to be human but (like a prophet) brought into sharper focus some of the truths that people ought to have known.
Thus their reaction to him was not, “Wow, we never knew that.” It was more something along the lines of, “I wish you hadn’t reminded us of that,” and of, “What right have you got to be associating yourself with God so closely?” He did bring a concrete embodiment of who God had already told Israel that he was and had shown Israel that he was. In this sense Paul indeed implicitly thinks in terms of “a revelation which began with creation but which now has been brought into sharper focus in Christ.” Jesus provoked Jews and Gentiles to an ultimate rejection of God that God turned into the ultimate means whereby his relationship with his people could be affirmed, healed and restored. He also thus opened the way for the news about what he had done to be shared with the Gentile world as something that could bring it the same blessing, in keeping with God’s original intention. And he established his own authority to be the person who would ultimately judge the world as a whole.
In the course of telling his story and working out its implications, the New Testament does make some affirmations that supplement what people could know from the First Testament. One is the fact that Sheol is not the end for humanity. At the end, all humanity is going to be raised from death in order to enjoy resurrection life or to go to hell. Thus people in the First Testament “did not receive what was promised. God had planned something better for us, so that they would not be brought to completion without us” (Heb 11:39-40). Paul pushes the argument further in connection with affirming that all God’s people will be raised or will meet the Lord together (1 Thess 4:13-18). We do not go to heaven when we die; the entire people of God will reach completion together. Alongside this truth is the way the New Testament assumes the existence of Satan. While the First Testament presupposes the existence of an embodiment of resistance to God, the New Testament puts more emphasis on this motif.
It is appropriate that the truths about resurrection, hell and Satan should be associated with the story of Jesus’ dying and rising. It was Jesus’ dying and rising that made resurrection possible. It was these events that brought to a climax the conflict between God and the power that resists God. And it was these events that made hell necessary for people who turn their back on what God did in Jesus and insist on maintaining their resistant stance. Oddly, these truths were all part of Jewish thinking in Jesus’ day, so that even they are not new revelations that Jesus brings. It is almost as if the people of God knew they needed to affirm these beliefs even though they couldn’t quite know why or on what basis they might do so. It is Jesus who gives us reason to believe things that it would be nice to believe (at least some of them are nice to believe). He rescues us from just whistling in the dark and invites us to trust in him.