The Old Testament: What’s Up With That?
On our Thursday night Zoom gatherings, we’ve been working our way through the Bible from beginning to end. As a joking nod to the excellent comedic work of Kenan Thompson, I’ve been calling this series of discussions “The Bible: What’s Up with That?”
There are a lot of different answers out there to the actual question of what’s up with the Bible. You have the conservative answers that many of us grew up with: it’s the inerrant, perspicuous, authoritative, inspired Word of God. Then you have the other end of the spectrum that considers the Bible to be just like any other book, written by humans as they engaged in religious and theological reflections. In between these two black-and-white poles are fifty shades of what it might mean for a book to be “inspired” by God.
But in our weekly discussions, rather than calling upon systematic theology to give us a definitive answer to this question, we are exploring some of the key texts together. Perhaps instead of answering what is the Bible, we can focus on what’s in the Bible.
After seven discussions, we’ve reached the break between Old and New Testaments (it’s a very high-level journey through the Bible). So in case you’ve never joined us or you missed a week or two, I thought it might be helpful to recap what we’ve covered in our survey of the Old Testament. Here’s what you missed:
The Very Abridged Old Testament
Genesis 1: Creation in God’s Image
Creation as “very good”
Humans made in the image of God
“The spiritual practice of encountering others is coming face-to-face with another human being, preferably someone different enough to qualify as a capital “O” Other—and at least entertaining the possibility that this is one of the faces of God.” —Barbara Brown Taylor
“God throws down every effort to absolutize God. God is dynamic—diversity, unity, communion. Here is a God who doesn’t have a face—thus a God who can assume all faces.” —Silvia Regina de Lima Silva
“In essence, to commit acts of physical, emotional, psychological, sexual, political, and economic violence against fellow humans is to attempt to crush the image of God on earth.” —Lisa Sharon Harper
Genesis 4: The First Murder
Blood spilled in injustice cries out to God
Surprisingly, God is good to Cain (and to us).
“There is a popular reading of this passage that moralistically tells: be like Abel, not like Cain. This interpretation is not even close to being sufficient.” —Peter Choi
Cities are gifts from God.
“Yes, cities are places of brokenness and depravity. But they are also, from the very beginning, places of second chances and new possibilities.” —Peter Choi
Genesis 12, 16, 21: Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar
A divine calling for Abraham to go
Hagar points us to a theology of survival
“Hagar and Ishmael together, as family, model many black American families in which a lone woman/mother struggles to hold the family together in spite of the poverty to which ruling class economics consign it. Hagar, like many black women, goes into the wide world to make a living for herself and her child, with only God by her side.” —Delores S. Williams
Exodus 3-4: God’s Self-Revelation to Moses
Moses and powerful self-doubt
The Exodus as paradigm of God’s liberation
“Maintaining this conviction—that black people are made in the image of God and are beloved children of God—as white supremacy has continued unabated has been made possible by context-oriented readings of the Book of Exodus, the prophets, and the story of Jesus.” —James H. Cone
The Israelites are not only delivered, but they leave with much of Egypt’s wealth—pointing to reparations.
“God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation, there is hope beyond tragedy.” —James H. Cone
1 Samuel 8: The Shift to Monarchy and Empire
The context of empire shapes theology
As Walter Brueggemann explains, prophetic imagination challenges the status quo and energizes people to work against injustice. When empire (and its “royal consciousness”) snuffs out this imagination, it replaces the economics of equality with the economics of affluence, a politics of justice with a politics of oppression, and religion of God’s freedom with religion of static access to God.
The Spirit works to cross and break down the empire’s walls
“Disciples of Jesus connect peoples at the sites of segregation, inviting a mutual enfolding of story within story: the stories of people enfolded in the story of God’s love found in the resurrected Jesus and the stories of peoples enfolded in one another.” —Willie James Jennings
Lamentations 5: Lamenting Violence and Oppression
Lament, then and now, entails intense emotional honesty
Nancy J. Duff highlights three important effects of lament: it challenges our inability to acknowledge intense emotions of grief, it frees us to make bold expressions of grief to God and other people, and it allows us to rely on God and the community to carry hope for us when we ourselves have no hope.
Lament is sorely missing from many of our faith journeys
“For American evangelicals, a triumphalistic theology of celebration and privilege rooted in a praise-only narrative is perpetuated by the absence of lament and the underlying narrative of suffering that informs lament. The loss of lament in the American church reflects a serious theological deficiency.” Soong-Chan Rah
Esther: Courage in the Face of Evil
Is justice inevitable, or does it require work (or both)?
“Esther is not a work of history but a historical novella, that is, a fictional story set within a historical framework. The story’s purpose is to entertain, but more importantly to demonstrate the inevitability of justice and, paradoxically, the need for oppressed minorities to act shrewdly and boldly for that justice to prevail.” —Mary Joan Leith
The journey of finding voice and agency
“While the other main characters in Esther are essentially stereotypes without distinctive personalities, Esther does change over the course of the narrative. She begins as a passive figure, notable only for her beauty and obedient nature.
However, after Mordecai’s challenge to Esther, she seems to embrace her Jewish identity; with this self-recognition Esther becomes the decisive actor in the story, risking her life, issuing orders first to Mordecai and then to the king himself.” —Mary Joan Leith
So there you have it. The definitive, once-for-all summary of the Old Testament.
Just kidding, of course. But these have been the explorations of our community over the last couple months. If you’d like to chat about any of the topics you’ve missed (or all 7 of them!), sign up for a Zoom call with me over on the Get Involved page. I’d be thrilled to explore the Bible with you—but, fair warning, I don’t have the answers.
