Q.
Do Christians need to read the Old Testament?
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Jarrod McKenna
Who is...
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Jarrod McKenna
I hate Scrabble (I’m dyslexic).A.
One way to resist the co-opting of Christ into a consumer self-help
trinket by those pedaling false salvations that seek to sedate us so
we sleep soundly through the destruction of God’s good creation
(almost as if the resurrection never happened) is to be immersed in the Hebrew
Bible until its stories become our own. This is not an easy thing to do.
There are many modern-day Marcionite heresies, both fundamentalist
and liberal, that seek to kidnap Christ from his prophetic Jewishness, divorc-
ing his life from the Hebraic hope of the redemption of not just souls, but all of
creation. The New Testament is too easily co-opted when it is cut off from its
context as the nonviolent fulfi llment of the hopes of Israel, in Jesus.
This ripping of the roots of the New Testament from the fertile soil of the
Old Testament leaves us with emaciated imaginations, susceptible to preda-
tory forces seeking to feed us death-dealing spiritualities of otherworldly
escapism.
Like the early church, we must become communities that immerse people
foreign to the Old Testament into the Hebraic hope that has been fulfi lled in a
Messiah who saves with a towel of service, not a sword of war—who defeats
his enemies by suffering for them rather than making them suffer.
As the Mishnah (Mishnah Pesachim 10:5) instructs, “In every genera-
tion, [people] must so regard themselves as if they themselves came out of
Egypt, for it is written, ‘And thou shalt tell thy children on that day saying, it
is because of that which the LORD did for me when I came forth out of Egypt’
(Ex. 13:8).” We must ourselves follow the resurrected Christ out of captivity
into the kingdom that is breaking into history, bringing heaven to earth.Jim L. Robinson
A.
The question may be related to another issue, namely, the distinc-
tion between law and grace. Virtually all New Testament teaching
acknowledges such a distinction, and speaks of the law as the “old
covenant” and grace as the “new covenant.”
But the contrast between the “old and new covenants” is not the same as
a comparison between the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (which we typi-
cally call the Old Testament and New Testament).