A Catechism of Our Faith

What the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures of the Elder Testament, Does

Remember we are building our temple of faith, and the stained glass windows let His light in. That is why they represent the Scriptures.  We have paused to consider the Old Testament in particular, which task we complete with this entry. There are doubtless many answers, but I here list some important ones.

The Old Testament grounds the revelation of God in history and in real human life.  We are not offered a work of mysticism, nor poetry, nor myth, though one could characterize particular passages this way. It is the world, and all of it, that God addresses, and a people He deploys, deeply flawed though they be.

The Old Testament begins at the beginning and envisions the end of all things.  These books set the expansive, inclusive frame of our relation to God.

The Old Testament introduces us to the Lord of heaven and earth, who is the Word from the beginning, speaks to us, so that we pay attention to His words.  His speaking so that we can hear is itself a gift of God, and the starting point of our life with Him.  He bends down to do this, and no less glorious for doing so.

The Old Testament provides the story in which we can identify God, and in so doing identify ourselves.   It is in narratives that we humans do this.

The Old Testament provides the elements of our faith, elements we share with the Jewish people, so that we are related in a close and complex way.  Word of God, Messiah, people of God, Kingdom of God, prophecy, resurrection, exile, repentance, the nations, etc., without these the New Testament can make no sense.

Discuss some of the ways we misunderstand the Old Testament (legalism, angry God, unevolved, etc.,) and how you would answer these.

The Wisdom Books

Counter-point, Talking Back, Bringing Yourselves, Your souls and Bodies:  the Wisdom books (Job 38, Proverbs 8, Ecclesiastes 1, Song of Solomon 1)

Some resist reading the Bible because they suppose it has a kind of distant sanctimony unrelated to ‘real life,’ that is, things like doubt, desire, practicality, and our ‘off-message’ emotions toward God.  But in fact, the Old Testament acknowledges and includes these, so that the answers it provides truly addresses our lives as we actually experience them.

This entry is but an invitation to read the books in their entirety, but at least let me point out how they challenge other parts of the Scripture, so as to provoke answers which we can more deeply appropriate. Ecclesiastes throws in doubt the sense that godliness will have its reward. Job likewise complains about how the mystery of evil fits into God’s plan. Song of Songs is an unabashed love song. Proverbs includes worldly advice, much of it from pagan sources.  But the assumption behind the inclusion of all of this literature is that we do not need to protect God, as if He could not provide an answer. In Job 38 He places us and our questions in their place, though He goes on to reward Job’s complaining!

Wisdom literature finds a place in the whole collection, or canon, of the Old Testament. Likewise desire in marriage, doubt in waiting and listening, suffering in the message of the suffering servant, and practical advice in a life with the larger purpose God gives us. These have their place, but there remains a larger context in which to understand ourselves before God.

Google ‘Song of Songs’ and Bernard of Clairvaux and read a few pages.