0:03

Hello and welcome to

0:05

another episode of the Enter the

0:07

Bible podcast, where you can get answers

0:09

or at least reflections on everything you

0:11

wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid

0:14

to ask. I'm Katie Langston,

0:16

and I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker. And today we

0:18

have a very special guest. My

0:21

own seminary teacher, Ellen Davis,

0:23

who has become

0:25

my mentor and friend over the years. And

0:28

we're just so delighted that she

0:31

is joining us. I'm going to read her title

0:33

to make sure I get it right. She is the Amos

0:35

Ragan Kearns Distinguished

0:37

Professor of Bible and Practical Theology

0:40

at Duke University. And

0:42

I, in fact, am using your book

0:45

Ellen, Opening Israel's Scriptures,

0:47

in my class that I'm teaching this fall. So

0:50

it's an introduction

0:53

to the Old Testament. And I would highly recommend

0:55

it as I would any book that Ellen has

0:57

written. So thank you for joining us, Ellen.

1:00

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Kathryn

1:02

and Katie.

1:03

All right. So the

1:05

question we want to address today, I'm

1:08

going to introduce it with just a really brief

1:10

anecdote. So a number of years ago, I

1:12

was in rural Minnesota

1:15

, southwest Minnesota. I took in and taken

1:17

a group of students down to visit

1:19

farms and and and

1:21

rural pastors. And we went to church

1:23

in a small town and then

1:25

afterwards had coffee and cookies, which is

1:27

kind of the third sacrament for Lutherans. <laugh>

1:30

And I was sitting at a table with

1:32

a group of people from the congregation,

1:35

one of whom was an elderly gentleman

1:37

who asked me what I taught. And I said, Well,

1:39

I teach Old Testament at Luther Seminary.

1:41

And his immediate reaction was, Oh,

1:43

I don't like the Old Testament very much. There's just

1:46

too much there's just too much

1:48

violence. And I just I don't like

1:50

the God of the Old Testament, and I'm just glad that

1:52

we have Jesus. And I thought

1:54

for a minute about addressing it and I thought,

1:56

no, this probably isn't the context

1:59

to talk about it. I too, am

2:01

glad that we have Jesus. But there

2:04

are also many, many, many treasures

2:06

in the Old Testament. So the question that we're

2:08

addressing with asking Ellen to

2:10

address is why should Christians

2:13

read the Old Testament? So

2:16

I know that's a huge topic and we're not

2:18

going to do it justice, but I'll

2:20

hand it over to you.

2:22

Okay. First,

2:25

I would say that the

2:27

man you met over coffee and

2:29

cookies is I

2:31

don't know that I can say in good company, but he's

2:33

in plenty of company.

2:34

Yeah.

2:36

And the idea that we don't

2:38

need that we as Christians

2:41

do not need the Old Testament is the

2:43

first heresy identified

2:46

by the church in the second

2:48

century.

2:49

Yep.

2:50

so Christians have

2:52

always raised the question

2:54

of why would

2:56

we want to

2:58

know anything about the God

3:01

of the Old Testament? Assuming

3:06

that that God is

3:09

a different God than

3:12

the God we worship as part of the Trinity.

3:15

This, of course, is the basic heresy.

3:17

Right. Exactly.

3:19

That what we call the

3:21

Old Testament. Jesus

3:24

called Scripture. That

3:26

was his Bible. And

3:30

it is for Christians. It

3:32

is three quarters of the Bible.

3:36

So. And

3:39

the God of the Old Testament

3:42

is the God that

3:45

Jesus calls his

3:48

Father.

3:49

Mm hmm.

3:50

And we might mention the

3:52

heresy that you're talking about, Ellen,is Gnosticism.

3:55

But that does that

3:58

said that, you know, the God revealed

4:01

in the Old Testament is different than the God revealed

4:03

in Jesus, and that the God of the Old

4:05

Testament was not a good

4:07

God so much.

4:11

So, no, go ahead.

4:12

The most famous proponent of this

4:14

view was someone named Marcion

4:17

, and it's often referred to

4:19

as Marcionism. But yes,

4:21

it is. It.

4:26

It is. Whenever

4:30

you have a.

4:35

You might say whenever you have an

4:37

orthodoxy, you're going to have a way

4:41

of believing that is coherent

4:45

over the generations, you are

4:47

also going to have certain distortions

4:50

of that way of thinking and

4:52

believing. And that too,

4:55

endures over generations.

5:00

Sometimes when I look at the when I look

5:02

at the old heresies and compare

5:04

them to things I hear in the world,

5:06

I think, oh, yeah, okay. There is nothing

5:09

new under the sun, indeed.

5:12

To quote Ecclesiastes.

5:14

Yeah, exactly.

5:15

Exactly. Yeah. So

5:17

how do how do we. So, yes, it's

5:20

the boot. The God of the Old Testament

5:22

is the same God we know in Christ the

5:26

God that that Jesus called Father

5:28

Abba. It's

5:31

the Old Testament -- two thirds of the, no

5:33

it's three quarters of the

5:35

Bible. And

5:38

it's the Bible that Jesus knew.

5:40

It was the only Bible, you know, that Jesus

5:43

and the early disciples knew. What

5:45

do we what do we learn

5:48

about? What are some of the themes

5:51

that that are important to know in

5:53

the Old Testament or the figures or the. Yeah.

5:58

Well, I would say I'm

6:01

going to answer that question, not so much in terms

6:03

of themes, but in terms

6:05

of what we would lack

6:08

if we didn't have the Old Testament.

6:11

Yeah.

6:13

And most

6:17

the first thing that comes to my mind is

6:19

we would lack most of the models

6:22

for Christian prayer, which

6:25

is to say we would lack the Psalms.

6:28

Yeah.

6:29

And it's no coincidence

6:32

that the Psalms is

6:34

the book of the Hebrew Bible

6:37

Old Testament that is most

6:39

quoted in the New Testament. By

6:43

that, I understand

6:46

that we can't

6:48

understand who

6:51

Jesus is or how to

6:53

live. With

6:57

God in Christ without

7:00

knowing how to speak to God. And

7:03

the Psalms teach us how to speak

7:05

to God.

7:06

Yeah.

7:07

I love t hat that's where you went first. And

7:10

I love that it went right.

7:12

Not a theoretical concept necessarily.

7:15

Not, you know. Well, if we didn't have

7:17

this, then we wouldn't have this theological

7:19

teaching. But right into the heart

7:21

of, like, spiritual practice and relationship

7:23

with God, that that that

7:26

the Psalms provide us

7:28

the language and the pattern of

7:30

prayer.

7:31

And I mean, one indication

7:34

of that is that, you know,

7:36

this little teeny pocket Bibles

7:38

that you sometimes you get for

7:40

free in a Christian bookstore or whatever.

7:44

Almost. Well, they're not pocket

7:46

Bibles. They usually pocket New Testaments

7:50

because the Old Testament, if

7:53

it were added, it wouldn't fit easily in a

7:55

pocket.

7:55

In a pocket. <laughs>

7:57

But at the back

8:00

of that pocket, New Testament is

8:03

what?

8:04

The Psalms.

8:05

It's the Psalms. And

8:07

I think almost invariably

8:09

included in that. And I think

8:11

that that is tacitly making

8:14

the point that I just made.

8:16

Yeah, Yeah, I agree. I

8:19

think one of the great gifts of the Psalms

8:21

and I think you're exactly right that it teaches

8:23

us how to speak

8:26

with and listen to God. One

8:28

of the great gifts, of course, is the form of prayer

8:30

known as lament. There's

8:33

this very honest wrestling with

8:35

God. You know, How long the

8:37

Lord or, you

8:39

know, My God, my God, why have you forsaken

8:42

me? Probably the most famous lament. That

8:45

that there's there's some of that

8:47

in the New Testament. Like Jesus in the Garden

8:49

of Gethsemane. But really,

8:51

most of what we know about lament is from

8:53

the Old Testament. And it's just such a

8:56

great gift of Israel to

8:58

us and is used,

9:00

you know, probably more and better

9:03

by our Jewish brothers

9:05

and sisters than by Christians. But

9:09

and in spite of it, it's,

9:12

you know, the lack of its use, something

9:14

that if we didn't have,

9:16

it would be a great loss to

9:19

the church.

9:20

And as you've already suggested, the

9:23

evangelists in

9:26

showing us Jesus's death.

9:29

They are citing the Psalms repeatedly

9:33

and or Jesus is reciting

9:36

the Psalms -- Psalm 22,

9:38

but also Psalm 69.

9:41

Save me O Lord for the water is already

9:43

up to my neck and

9:48

details from that psalm run

9:51

all the way through the Evangelist's

9:53

account of the Passion.

9:57

When when we were talking or emailing

10:00

back and forth before this podcast and you talked

10:02

about the Old Testament as

10:04

being a kind of ground against over

10:07

spiritual izing our

10:11

relationship with God or what we know

10:13

of God or the world itself. Would you say

10:15

more about that?

10:16

Yeah, this is something

10:18

I learned from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

10:21

The German

10:24

motor of the

10:26

20th century died

10:28

in a Nazi prison camp. And

10:33

in his in the last

10:37

year and a half, I think of his

10:39

life, he is writing

10:41

a series of letters which

10:43

have been published as Letters and Papers from

10:45

Prison. And in

10:48

that, he speaks about

10:50

the fact that in

10:53

what proves to be the last

10:56

months of his life, he is reading

10:58

more and more the Old Testament.

11:01

Hmm.

11:02

And he he actually

11:05

makes the interesting statement

11:07

in the strong statement that

11:09

anyone who comes

11:13

to the New Testament without

11:15

going through the Old Testament is

11:18

no Christian.

11:19

Mm hmm.

11:21

And and his reasoning

11:24

for that is because,

11:27

well, as he puts it, using sort of an anachronistic

11:31

metaphor, the Old

11:33

Testament puts the

11:35

church, puts the faith community

11:38

in the middle of the village. He's

11:40

using a very sort of German

11:43

metaphor, more

11:45

than an Israelite metaphor. But

11:48

his point is that

11:52

it, the

11:54

Old Testament, embeds us

11:56

in all the ordinary business

11:59

of life politics,

12:02

economics, family life,

12:04

community life, arguing with your neighbors,

12:07

getting , you know, raising

12:11

kids to a mess or not. Failure,

12:15

loss, heartbreak, all of the

12:17

stuff that happens in the

12:19

village and everybody knows about

12:21

it and all

12:23

that business of being human

12:26

while also believing that

12:29

somehow this mess is unfolding

12:32

in the sight of God.

12:34

Hmm.

12:36

That is an

12:40

unmistakable present

12:43

in the Old Testament.

12:45

And you could. Of

12:48

course, it's also present in the New

12:50

Testament. But

12:53

the New Testament is more like

12:56

the last quarter of a book, you

12:58

know, sort of like the last quarter of

13:01

a great multigenerational novel.

13:04

Hmm.

13:04

And so if you don't have all

13:07

the backstory for that,

13:10

then reading the last quarter, you have it.

13:13

Could seem a little thin.

13:15

Mm hmm. Yeah, well,

13:18

I mean, there's just more variety, right? In

13:20

the Old Testament. I mean, that. And

13:23

please, listeners don't think that we're dissing

13:25

the New Testament. Obviously, we

13:27

are all Christians. We we hold

13:30

the new, say, the New Testament.

13:32

Yay, New Testament!

13:33

But you know, you have the Gospels,

13:35

you have the Book of Acts. You have primarily

13:37

letters, then epistles with, you

13:39

know, the Book of Revelation. At the end. You

13:41

don't have, you know, books like Proverbs,

13:44

for instance, that really is concerned with the

13:46

stuff of daily life and living

13:48

the good life in

13:50

the most ethical sense

13:52

of that word. You don't

13:55

have a lot of legal material.

13:57

You don't in the New Testament, you don't have

13:59

obviously, the Book of Psalms. You don't

14:01

have stories like Esther

14:04

Ruth. Obviously

14:06

you have the Gospels, which are narrative. But

14:08

I guess what I'm I'm agreeing

14:10

with you, Ellen, and just saying that there's there's

14:13

more kind of stuff of daily life

14:16

in the Old Testament that just

14:19

partly as a result of just the variety

14:21

of types of literature that you have in the Old

14:23

Testament.

14:24

And in a sense you

14:27

don't need it in the New Testament.

14:29

It's one of my colleagues, possibly

14:32

one of your teachers, Christopher Seitz,

14:35

said once, Where the

14:38

Old Testament does

14:40

not refer, where the New Testament

14:42

does not refer to the Old Testament, i

14:45

t defers to the

14:47

Old Testament.

14:48

Oh, interesting.

14:49

Yes, I think it's beautifully expressed.

14:51

Yeah. That it is assuming

14:55

that we have all

14:58

of those resources to

15:00

draw upon. And so

15:02

now it's kind of honing

15:05

in on the

15:07

particular part of the story

15:09

that focuses on the

15:11

person of Jesus.

15:13

And I love that. Yeah. Professor

15:16

Seitz was one of my teachers, too, when

15:18

I was at Yale with you as

15:20

well. Yeah, when it doesn't

15:23

say it again, when it doesn't.

15:24

When it where it does not

15:26

refer to the Old Testament,

15:29

it defers to the Old

15:31

Testament. It just so he's he's

15:34

arguing against. Thinking

15:39

that if something is absent,

15:41

that means it's being sort

15:43

of shorn off as

15:46

insignificant.

15:48

No, that's really well-put. There's

15:50

also just the point, and I think your

15:52

analogy of, you know, reading the last

15:54

quarter of a book without reading the rest

15:57

of it is a useful one because, you

15:59

know, how do you know what Jesus is doing at

16:01

the Last Supper? Right. If

16:04

you don't know the story of Passover, right?

16:06

I mean, you can certainly understand some

16:08

of it, but the depth of the meaning,

16:11

the depth of the theological meaning is

16:13

is really lost

16:16

if you don't know about Passover. How do you

16:18

read the texts about the New Jerusalem

16:20

if you don't know about, you know, the

16:22

the original Jerusalem, the old Jerusalem?

16:25

Right.

16:26

And and also, I mean, just another example

16:28

of countless. But when

16:32

in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus

16:36

refers to his death as

16:39

the Gospel of Luke being written in Greek as

16:42

his "ex hodus" says Exodus

16:45

his his the road

16:47

out. He's referring

16:50

to the way out of bondage

16:53

to freedom. But

16:55

if you don't know the first

16:57

story of the Exodus, then

17:00

you don't have that way of

17:02

making sense of something as

17:04

otherwise nonsensical

17:07

as how death on a cross can be

17:09

a way to freedom.

17:10

Yeah.

17:11

Or just the fact that Jesus is the

17:13

Jewish Messiah. If you don't have

17:15

the Old Testament, you

17:18

don't know what is entailed

17:20

in those promises of of the coming

17:22

Messiah and how through, you

17:25

know, how through Israel, the rest of the world

17:27

will be blessed. It's

17:30

you don't you can't bypass Israel.

17:32

You can't bypass the stories of

17:34

the of the Jewish people and

17:36

their literature in order to go straight

17:38

to Jesus, because it's precisely through

17:41

you know, it's precisely through Israel

17:43

that God in Christ is blessing

17:46

the world. And and

17:49

you just can't understand at

17:51

all what Jesus is doing if

17:53

you don't understand where he's coming

17:55

from and which promises he's fulfilling.

18:01

Go ahead. Go ahead, Ellen.

18:02

And it occurs to me to say

18:04

in this conversation that.

18:08

So when Jesus speaks of

18:10

at the Passover, a new covenant

18:13

in my blood. Of

18:17

course, we can't understand what that means

18:19

if we don't understand God's

18:23

ongoing commitment to humankind

18:26

and Israel that

18:28

we see from Genesis into Exodus,

18:34

Leviticus, Deuteronomy. And

18:36

so on. And

18:39

but I think when we hear

18:42

"the new covenant in my blood,"

18:44

we hear that as an

18:47

annulling of everything that

18:49

preceded it.

18:50

Right.

18:51

And that, I think, is the line

18:54

that leads us both to

18:56

Marcion ism as we've

18:58

been as we began talking

19:00

about. But it also

19:04

has through centuries and

19:06

millennia, led Christians

19:09

to anti- Judaism.

19:12

Yup.

19:14

Which even in my classes today,

19:17

I mean even very well-meaning students,

19:20

when we talk about difficult texts and the Old

19:22

Testament, like, like

19:25

the sacrifice of exactly what Jews call the

19:27

"akedah" the binding of Isaac, and they

19:30

they too often fall into that kind

19:33

of supersessionism . That's the big word.

19:35

Have to talk, you know, describes

19:37

what you're just talking about and that

19:39

Christianity somehow replaces Judaism

19:42

or the the New Covenant replaces

19:44

the old covenant. And it and

19:46

it's yeah, it's not a it's

19:48

not a good way of thinking about that relationship

19:51

either between Christians and Jews or between the Old

19:53

Testament and New Testament. I always go,

19:55

you know, when that happens in a class,

19:58

I go to Romans 9 through 11

20:00

where Paul wrestles with that. You

20:02

know, that question about,

20:05

you know, what about the Jews? What about

20:07

Israel? Now that, you

20:09

know, the for

20:11

the most part, you know, the majority of them are not

20:13

accepting Jesus as Messiah. And

20:16

he ends up saying in a very complicated argument,

20:18

but he ends up saying the gifts

20:20

and the calling of God are irrevocable.

20:23

And it's a it's a really important

20:25

theological point to make because he's

20:28

he's defending God's faithfulness,

20:30

right? If God is not faithful to Israel,

20:33

to the original Israel, then

20:35

how can the church expect that God will

20:37

be faithful to the church, right?

20:40

So there is it's a complicated relationship,

20:42

but it's the old covenant

20:44

is still a covenant.

20:47

God is still faithful to God's people,

20:49

to that to to Israel.

20:51

And of course, the

20:54

Novum, the new thing that happens

20:57

with Paul is not that the Jews are out.

20:59

It's the Gentiles of are in

21:01

exactly.

21:02

They're grafted in right.

21:04

As Paul puts it it's

21:06

that that metaphor that he uses that

21:08

that that we as Gentiles

21:11

are the the, the wild olive

21:13

branches grafted into the the

21:15

root of Israel, into the original olive

21:17

tree. So we need to have

21:20

humility. That

21:22

should not be proud. So

21:25

can we. Probably

21:27

getting close to needing to wrap this up, but I

21:30

want to ask Ellen if you could

21:32

address one more kind of aspect of this

21:34

related to what we've just been talking about, and that

21:36

is, I think

21:38

many Christians, whether on purpose

21:40

or, you know, accidentally

21:43

tend to read Old Testament and New Testament

21:45

the relationship as prophecy

21:47

and fulfillment that the

21:50

that the Old Testament is relevant

21:53

only insofar as it prophesies

21:55

Christ. And I know this

21:57

is a huge question, but I wonder if you could talk

21:59

about hearing, hearing

22:01

the voice of the Hebrew Bible of the Old Testament

22:05

kind of on

22:08

its own merits, and not

22:10

just as prophecy and fulfillment.

22:20

I think, you're

22:22

right, it's a huge question. I know that

22:25

as a sort of first foray

22:27

into it, I'll say

22:30

I don't think anybody reads

22:33

the Old Testament

22:36

/ Hebrew Bible entirely

22:38

on its own merit, which

22:40

is to say, Christians

22:45

read it as

22:47

being completed

22:50

in terms of scripture by

22:53

the New Testament and

22:57

Jews read it as

22:59

being completed or

23:02

continued, maybe is a better

23:05

way of putting it, through

23:07

centuries of Rabbinic commentary.

23:11

So I just think it's important to remember

23:14

that the

23:21

Old Testament, so-called,

23:24

is a it

23:29

is a collection of books

23:32

that has lived in

23:34

two traditions because it keeps

23:37

begetting new understandings.

23:41

And one of those, certainly

23:44

for Christians, one of the dominant

23:46

ones, is, as you said,

23:48

the prophecy and fulfillment with

23:50

Jesus being the Jewish

23:53

Messiah. And

23:59

in addition to that,

24:03

I would say that we

24:06

can't understand

24:09

who Jesus is, not

24:13

only as the Messiah, not only

24:16

as the anointed One

24:18

in the House of David, but

24:22

Jesus speaks of himself, for

24:24

instance, as

24:26

being in the line of the prophets. And

24:31

he's not a wonder worker. He's not an

24:34

aspirant to political power. He

24:37

is a prophet. And it

24:39

is as a prophet that he expects

24:42

to be rejected and ultimately to die

24:44

in Jerusalem.

24:46

As many prophets were.

24:48

Right. And so.

24:54

So in order to understand

24:56

that part of Jesus' self-understanding,

25:00

then we need to hear

25:02

what the prophets are saying, both

25:05

in promise and in

25:07

castigation and

25:09

in denouncing our

25:11

sins. So that would be

25:14

I mean, that's just one example

25:17

of as another

25:19

one of our

25:23

colleagues and teachers, Richard Hays,

25:25

often speaks about reading the Bible

25:27

back and forth. Richard Hays is the New Testament

25:30

scholar. But

25:32

he says continually, we're

25:34

having to go back and forth as Christians.

25:37

We're having to go back and forth between

25:40

the two testaments

25:42

in order to understand ,

25:45

quite frankly, on any given Sunday

25:49

or any time we are in church to

25:51

understand the fullness of the message

25:54

that is being offered to us

25:57

in and in the lessons

25:59

appointed for the day.

26:01

Well, thank you. That that probably

26:03

wasn't a fair question to ask at the end of our

26:05

time. But you did a very insightful.

26:08

I love that. I love that image that

26:10

Richard Hayes talks about going back

26:12

and forth. I think that's that gets

26:14

at what I was trying to

26:16

ask. It's not simply a one way

26:18

street of the Old Testament

26:20

or Hebrew Bible saying something,

26:22

and then it's completed in the New Testament,

26:25

though that is certainly one valid

26:28

way, a traditional way of reading

26:30

it. But it's a dialogue back and forth

26:32

between both collections,

26:35

between Old Testament and New Testament.

26:37

And I'll just say that if -- t here

26:42

is a sense in

26:44

which, i t

26:48

is finished in Jesus,

26:50

it is perfected, as Jesus says,

26:52

on the cross. And

26:56

yet. Then

26:59

there is the Book of Acts. And

27:01

so we are always going

27:04

on in the

27:07

Christian community and in the Jewish

27:09

community. We are always

27:11

carrying this message

27:17

into new contexts. And

27:20

certainly the Book of Acts encourages

27:23

us to do so. And and

27:26

the letters that follow.

27:28

Yeah, well,

27:30

wow, that was. Yeah, Super insightful.

27:33

Thank you so much. What a joy to have

27:35

you with us. And thank you

27:37

to our listeners and viewers for being with

27:39

us on this episode of the Enter

27:41

the Bible podcast. You can get

27:43

more great conversations and reflections,

27:46

resources, courses, all kinds of things

27:48

at Enter the Bible dot org. And

27:50

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28:04

time.