Can we trust the Old Testament? Tom NT Wright

you have to read Psalm 105 and 106 together 105 says God brought us out of Egypt he gave us the law and we're his people and harah let's go we're are we great Psalm 106 says and we got it wrong and then he forgave us and then we blew it again the church has always struggled with living with the Old Testament different strategies for doing that have been tried from time to time the early church is a Jewish movement whose whole reson Detra is that what's happened in Jesus is the Fulfillment of scripture God calls

somebody who he knows God knows and the narrator of Genesis knows is a very mixed up character well so many the word Progressive has had a long and checkered history the ask ENT WR anything podcast let's start Tom with uh gray in Charlotte North Carolina and also Alex in Los Angeles who both want to ask about Andy Stanley um you may not be very familiar with him but uh here's gray who says Andy Stanley a popular mega church pastor and author in the United States has recently published a book and given multiple talks to church

leaders about the need for Christians to unhitch their faith from the Old Testament he claims that we do not need the Old Testament in order for us to have a Christian faith because our faith rests on a historical event the resurrection and not on the authority of an ancient book what do you think about this proposal is this pseudo marianismo is in a moment and Alex also asked a very similar question what do you think of that new book by understandingly irresistible calling the modern Church to decouple or unhitch ourselves from the Old Testament SL

old Covenant so well first I don't know the book and I've actually never heard of this person until you sent me these questions so um I can't keep up with all the different things that that pop up in America um and of course there's a sort of an equal and opposite because there are some Churches in America where every last word of the Old Testament is deemed to be loadbearing theologically so it's kind of equal and opposite and maybe for all I know that this man who's written the book is in reaction against those who

say that unless Eve ate the apple on a certain time of a certain day then our whole Faith collapses and he's just saying look for goodness sake leave that behind and go with Jesus in the resurrection and of course Jesus in the resurrection that's what Paul talked about on the areopagus that's in Athens um Paul didn't go back to the Old Testament at that point however Paul himself when he sums up his gospel in 1 Corinthians 15: 3 and following he said the Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and he was

buried and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and when he's explaining to the Corinthians what the resurrection is all about he draws on Psalm 110 Psalm 8 Psalm 2 uh he draws on Daniel he's he's pulling together all sorts of scriptural resources from Isaiah Etc and particularly actually also from Genesis 1 2 and 3 1 Corinthians 15 has a whole lot of that there so saying you can uncouple that's pretty difficult that's rather like you know in The Merchant of Venice shylock's being given a pound of flesh but he's

then told he can't take any blood um and ah game off is it pseudo marcionism as well sort of Marian was a second century heretic based in or around Rome who taught that the Old Testament God was different from the New Testament God and that uh it's a it's a form of dualism and one can see at a surface level why because there are bits of the Old Testament which don't look like some of what we find in the new we come back to that but here's the point Matthew and Mark and Luke and John

in the very different ways that they write their gospels they tell the story of Jesus as the climax of the Old Testament um you know they do it in subtle ways but it's there all through Matthew perhaps most obviously all this happened that it might be fulfilled if you try and strip that out of Matthew you won't be left with much which is why marcian only had Luke and he didn't like all of Luke either and and he only had then had Paul and he didn't like all of Paul either because the early church is

a Jewish movement whose whole res on Detra is that what's happened in Jesus is the Fulfillment of scripture now it's not the Fulfillment in the sense that scripture gives you this great mountain and Jesus's just little can on the top it is something new which also challenges the way that scripture was being read as we see with the two disciples on the road to Emmas but Jesus doesn't say on the road to emus oh foolish ones and slow of heart you were living in that silly old Old Testament let me tell you something news happening

he said you weren't reading it right right um and that's the big difference and so I I haven't read this man um he may be being misrepresented by the questioners I may be misjudging him I don't want to judge him but I want to say the church has always struggled with living with the Old Testament different strategies for doing that have been tried from time to time but that struggle continues and I don't think it's going away we will come to some of those big issues around um the picture of God painted in certain parts

of the Old Testament in moment but Ste in Australia has a different question he says I've heard many theories regarding the historicity of The Exodus ranging from the account being 100% historical to 100% mythical and everything in between uh more recently he says Richard Friedman has proposed an interesting take that it was the Levites only that escaped migrated out of Egypt do you have a take on it do you think 2 million plus Israelites escaped Egypt and entirely replace the local Canaanite locals do you think the number might have been less was it just the

Levites love to hear your thoughts okay Tom it is called ask and you write anything absolutely no these are great questions I should say professionally speaking I'm an ancient historian from 200 BC to ad whenever The Exodus happened it's a long time before that so I do not claim to be up to speed I haven't read the recent research on this I do remember from years ago running into questions about the date and the root and the numbers Etc did they go this this way that way how long was it and so on and there's

no doubt in my mind that the account in the book of Exodus has been written up with considerable theological and literary Artistry but like the gospels that doesn't mean it didn't happen just that the book of Exodus is not giving us and no serious reader should assume it does a kind of what you'd have seen with a um television camera perched on the edge of the pyramids actually to watch them all go it's not that sort of a book but that doesn't mean that nothing happen we in our culture really struggle with this we we

think it must either be all absolutely exactly as it happened or it's all a lie um and people Wobble on that and and really you don't need to you need to learn to read the pentat the first five books as a whole see the story that's being told and then the real focus is on Rescue and law and presence and the the rescue from Egypt it's very emphatic that the people of Israel know themselves to be the rescued slaves the freed slaves that's just deep in the Jewish DNA how that got there if there wasn't

an exodus I have no idea but then also the giving of the law something happened which they all construed as a meeting with the one true God but it the giving of the law wasn't so now you'll know how to behave it was CU I want to come and live in your midst and for that you need to be sorted out cuz you're messed up at the moment and those things again are deep in the ancient Israel DNA long before the time of King David and Solomon and I I'm not sure how they got there

if there wasn't in fact something like this going on now that's a very general thing I do not know about the numbers I gather there are different theories about what the meaning of some of these um ancient Hebrew words for numbers may be um I confess I couldn't count up to a thousand in ancient Hebrew if you put me on the spot um I more or less recognize the words when I'm reading them but um so I wouldn't claim to know about that but I think please let's look at what the story is actually saying

and not at not getting stuck on the tiny details yes again I I would recommend as well do um for a bit more uh um for at least just one perspective on this from both a Christian and a skeptic uh I did a very interesting program um with um Ted Wright of Epic archaeology on unbelievable looking at different theories Around The Exodus and that sort of thing but I'll I'll leave that in the link I when I was originally studying I found Old Testament archaeology absolutely fascinating and for for a few weeks I thought wow

maybe I should spend my life doing this and so I kind of look at that stuff um rather like one one looks at somebody with whom one was fleetingly in love you know yeah that that was really nice what does seem to happen though rather like the New Testament from what I see archaeological discoveries tend to confirm rather than disconfirm yes that's that case can be overstated you know somebody gave me when I was young a book called The Bible House history the subtitle was something like archaeology confirms the book of books so we found

the flood and we found this and we've got that and the answer is yeah actually there's quite a lot of that but there are always more questions of course Archaeology is only ever a tiny bit of the evidence you know I said to the students yesterday in my seminar we're still waiting for them to dig up two Philippians or three Corinthians I'd like to know what Paul said about such stff the uh the the the the ending of Mark or something like that well yes absolutely we can get there for like well we'll do that

in a later podcast actually someone's got a question on that um uh okay let's let's turn to this very serious issue uh which is the Warfare passages especially violence in the Old Testament um we'll come to the Greg Boyd sort of perspective on this in a moment but for now Coburn in Tacoma Washington asks what are your thoughts on the conquest of Canan and the instructions from God to his people to kill women and children in the process I've always struggled to reconcile this what looks like side with the mission of God's people being to

love and serve the world I'd love to hear how you've wrestled with that and what wider lens context or perspective you might have on the matter and John asked the similar question in briefly how do you explain the horrific Old Testament accounts of God's judgment in the light of the New Testament change of emphasis yeah yeah yeah I I I wouldn't quite say the New Testament change of emphasis because that rather implies that what you have right through the Bible is a set of moral examples and it's quite clear in many parts of the Old

Testament that the story is not being told in any way as a moral example as this is how you ought to do it guys and and that of course that comes to a low point at the end of the Book of Judges with those horrific stories which one hopes that nobody under the age of 21 would ever read but I'm sure they do um and so it's partly a matter of learning to read the Bible in terms of the whole sweep and then it isn't a matter of oh well the Old Testament say okay to

do genocide and then Jesus says it isn't it doesn't work like that and I think all of this comes down to the fact that when God makes the good creation he calls humans to be his Partners in making creation what he wants it to be and that's kind of built into Genesis 1 and two this is uh a world designed to work when humans are reflecting God's Ste into the world when the humans Rebel God doesn't say oh well goodness now that they've rebelled we can't have humans involved with my plan I'll have to do

something quite different God sticks with the original plan which means that when he calls Abraham Abraham as he still is then um God calls somebody who he knows God knows and the narrator of Genesis knows is a very mixed up character I mean the story of Abraham oscillates from Great Moments of faith and obedience to disastrous moments of getting it wrong and cowardice and getting everything upside down inside out so Faith one minute an apparent unbelief the next and then back to Faith the next and so the idea that Abraham is this great hero of

Faith you know when I was younger people would give me books on the Great Men of faith and Women of Faith in the Old Testament as though the stories were all simple going from one heroic thing to another um and you only have to think of David and Solomon and so on to see uh no they're not like that actually so that right from the start part God's israel- shaped plan the Abraham and onwards plan if you like has built into it the fact that odd things are going to happen which is something which God

is eventually going to have to take responsibility for and that's why I think the Old Testament as it stands remains deeply deeply ambiguous and actually I think it's one of the things Jonathan sax was exploring in his book not in God's name um where you get the Isaac and the Ishmael story and he points out that um the Hebrew words that are used are designed to push the reader sympathy all onto Ishmael even though we know that Isaac is the one who's going to come out smiling at the end of the day um and likewise

with Jacob and Esau uh it's as though the writers of Genesis and the other books are saying this was how it had to be but there's a deep ambiguity built in and I think the Canaanite stuff is is is the most obvious example of that but then when you read it from a Christian lens part of the meaning of the cross of Jesus it seems to me is that the four gospels tell the story as this is how the whole story of Israel and the world gets funneled down onto one point and you it'll only

work you can only understand it if you say this isn't just the story of a first century human being called Jesus this is the story of God himself taking responsibility because he's made a world in which this was the only way that things could be dealt with and now he's he's bearing it all himself that I find not a comfortable thing but then the cross has never meant to be a comfortable thing um but it's a way of saying when I see the story whole and all the multiple tragedies you know the Canaanite women Etc

and I see Mary at the foot of the cross and a sword will pierce her soul also Etc um that there's something whole about that which then with the resurrection says and now that's been done and we are starting a new world and the book of Acts is not about the church going out with swords and staves to beat everybody up it's about a different kind of mission entirely a lot of people as I mentioned have been getting in touch regarding a particular um hermeneutic that has been doing the rounds recently from Gregory Boyd um

Greg Boyd who fairly well-known Theologian I think you've been at conferences together and that sort of thing missio Alliance conference um and his his book his big two volume book the crucifixion of the warrior God which again um we've discussed on my other podcast unbelievable with him um and again we can't really in the 10 minutes we've got left do justice to to to the the fullness obviously of his argument but let me let me at least give you the questions that have come in on this and and it'll give a a sweep of some

of the way people are at least understanding what he is saying there Pamela in the US says Greg voyd suggests as best I can read him in his recent book that the difficult things said by God in the Old Testament are examples of God taking on a mask to relate better to the culture of the time or allowing the people to assign things like genocide to him even though God wouldn't really do that his rationale seems to be that the death and resurrection of Christ show God isn't like those difficult aspects of the Old Testament

Marty in sasot chwan I think that's how you pronounce it cisat CIS gatan that's the one um in Canada Canada um Greg Boyd has recently released his two volume book crucifixion of the warrior God in these volumes he attempts to reconcile violent passages such as God's command to Joshua to wipe out the Canaanites um he does this through what he calls literary crucifixes in that just as Jesus allowed himself to be seen as a criminal in the eyes of many while on the cross God in his grace only appeared to show himself as violent and

retributive before the Nations through Israel where in reality Israel acted on its own behalf violently and merely attributed these commands actions to God it seems to me in light of our postmodern Western sensibilities that in the desire to protect God from any word or action that may offend we like Boyd our reenvisioning scripture to meet these concerns my question to you is do you see validity in his thesis and is the attempt more harmful than good and let's go for one more uh from here Ron in Sue Falls who says how do you explain the

different pictures of God we find in scriptures in Greg Boyd's um crucifixion of the warrior God uh can somewhat understand this as a matter of perception seeing what they expected to see in the Old Testament authors but I don't find it totally satisfying says Ron I don't know if you you sort of personally have an idea of where Greg is coming from on I do I mean Greg and I were at a conference as you said um a couple years ago which was fascinating and he gave rather a long lecture and I had the same

reaction as I did when you were reading those quotes just now that to begin with I was thinking yeah I think maybe this will fly maybe this will actually work I have to say the more I listened to Greg and he's a delightful guy and we hung out together and talked at length um the more I thought I don't think that's quite right but it's hard to put your finger on it partly because we're dealing with such huge um issues of many many texts and themes and so on um I I do think that comment

that you just read is important that we have to beware of apparently rushing to God's defense no no no God wouldn't do that you know dietr boner points out that the Primal sin in Genesis is people putting the knowledge of good and evil before the knowledge of God and that doesn't mean that God lives in a moral vacuum and that there is a total disconnect between God's view of Good and Evil and our view of Good and Evil but it rather implies as Paul says in Romans nine who are you a human being to answer

back to God and that you know we always do have to be aware of that having said that um I think Greg is right to put his finger on something not least because in his culture more than in my culture there are people who seem to imply that oh well God does Redemptive violence so then that's how you solve the problems of the world you go and drop bombs on Iraq or whatever it is and I think he's very much reacting in the present American political climate which again many people in Britain um simply aren't

terribly aware of how all that works out in America I've spent a long time in America and I sometimes shudder at it and so he's trying to say no we got to distance ourselves from that I would want to come at it a little differently because there is a major difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament um and that is part of God's story with the world and you have to understand the whole story which like a Shakespeare play has these different acts and you don't repeat speeches from Acts 2 and three say

if you're in Acts four or five where's a different point in the drama now that doesn't mean that it was bad what happened there it means something has happened which has changed the situation and obviously if you believe anything like the Christian Gospel the thing that's happened is Jesus um so yes there is a change there is a shift and the um Slaughter of the Canaanites or whatever can never be a model although many Christians have said yeah okay that that's that's what we have to do sort of thing which is which is terrifying when

you think about it um I recall at the end of Genesis 15 when God is making the Covenant with Abraham the basic Covenant um he says that your descendants will be slaves in a land not theirs and I will rescue them and they will come out and I'll take them home to their own land in the fourth generation then he says because the iniquity of the Amorite is not yet full which is a very interesting idea and it goes with other Old Testament passages particularly but also new in which it seems that God's moral Providence

allows human beings to go from bad to worse from bad to worse and I'm not an expert on Ancient Canaanite practices but such little as I have read of that indicates that um there were some things which were taken as routine whether it was child sacrifice or whatever which we today would find completely stomach churning not that we don't have some stomach Jing things in our own world as well but in that context um you can understand an ancient Israelite author saying the only word that God can say to this is total Destruction putting it

all under a ban now you know we shudder at that uh but I I so I'm saying I think Greg is Raising important questions I understand why they're coming particularly sharply within the American context I wouldn't myself want to go all that route I I tell the story slightly differently I mean one one perspective on this I come across and I think it's sort of in the general area the of the way Greg approaches this is um I mean Greg speaks of the idea of God accommodating yes um to people's um understandings and where they

are in their culture which of course is what Calvin says about the Bible in general Calvin says God lisps in our language you know that that the words of scripture are human Words which can't begin to express the majesty and glory of God but God graciously inspires these words in order to talk our langage Russell and Costa Mesa as part of a longer question asks um could it be that scripture is still important and inspired but we read it more as a journey of a people's Progressive understanding of God in that sense I mean well

so many the word Progressive has had a long and checkered history and particularly in the 19th century people reached for that idea of a progressive revelation which then got hooked into various philosoph iCal schemes that well at the beginning they didn't get very much of it and and then with Moses it got a bit more and then with David it got a bit more actually I don't see that at all I see Abraham at his best got as much of it as any of them did David at his worst was worse than the the rest

of them um so I don't see a progressive revelation though I do see some cumulative things on both sides of the Ledger you have to read Psalm 105 and 106 together 105 says God brought us out of Egypt he gave us the law and we're his people and hurrah let's go we're are we great Psalm 106 says and we got it wrong and then he forgave us and then we blew it again and so he punished us and then we said sorry and then we you know you need both of those stories and if there

is progress I I think the way often people think of it is if if you know Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the the best you know the perfect representation of God you know this is God truly revealed of God's the true stamp of God's image do the idea that that it's through that image God gives us of himself that we then read understand all of those other images that that may more and this is why why Richard Hayes's short book on the Old Testament of the gospels is called reading backwards and the idea that

here is Jesus this is where it was all going and now like the two on the road toas we look back and of course these things were all and that includes all the times when they're getting it wrong because all the times when they're getting it wrong end up with the disciples running away Judas betraying Jesus Peter denying him those are the quintessential story of that that side of the Old Testament just like Mary and John at the foot of the cross are the quintessential um the good side of the Old Testament if you like

but you need both because both contribute to the meaning of the Cross where God takes the positive and fulfills it and takes the negative and finally deals with it I'm sure Greg would love to have a a chat of his own with you about it at some point and maybe that could happen who knows um in any case um thank you so much for for tackling all of those um in a short space of time Tom um just a quick one to finish off with this is I think it's pronounced zombo in Hungary do you

know any good Old Testament commentary suggestions that you yourself like and would recommend for somebody starting in Ministry and he says I'm particularly looking for commentaries that are like yours but written on the Old Testament well the ones that are explicitly like mine written on the Old Testament are by my friend and colleague John gold gay who's done the full Old Testament people sometimes asked me are you going to do the Old Testament I said absolutely not mine was a huge Journey how John did that I simply don't know but he's done the whole old

and it should be mentioned we've got you sitting here with us that the Bible for everyone published by SPC which is John's Old Testament and my new exactly and and he's done a whole series of commentaries himself of well that's the thing old test for everyone Genesis for everyone ex and and they they are they are great um I would also say even though often disagree with him Walter bamman remains a great guide and always stimulating and provocative and always with the needs of the Pastoral and preaching church at his heart absolutely [Music]