Five Notes on Teaching Old Testament

The German Chronicles, Part 4

“Make things as weird as possible” is a good rule of thumb.

A General Update

Things are going really well in Leipzig. We’ve been here for a full month as of today, and one of the surprises is how easily we’ve adjusted to a very different way of living: apartment, large city, public transportation, embedded with students, navigating a second-language. In nearly every way, the situation has changed for us, but I can genuinely say that I’ve loved it, to the degree that I’m not looking forward yet to coming back to the United States in less than two months.

Our weekly rhythm is as follows:

Mondays: class prep, program meeting with the assistant director, all-house meeting that night, followed by dinner.

Tuesdays: teach two classes, host the students for dinner in the apartment, lead house church after dinner.

Wednesdays: class prep, and a family outing. Last week, we went to Erfurt, but this week, we’re staying in town to explore the Leipzig Zoo, and some of the wildlife parks in the interior of the city.

Thursdays: teach two classes, and either begin packing for the weekend travel, or ease into the weekend. This past weekend, we stayed close to Leipzig, with a day trip to a nearby castle, but the two weekends prior to that, we were traveling.

Friday-Sunday: typically travel out of town, or if in town, attending the English-speaking Anglican church. Berlin and Amsterdam are in the rearview mirror, with the German forests, Turkey, Prague, Vienna, and Salzburg yet to come on the weekends before our time draws to a close in April.

In the cracks, I’m reading purely for my own edification, doing a modest amount of writing, and walking everywhere. My Kindle is a constant companion. Today was upwards of 40 degrees, which is downright balmy, considering that two weeks ago, it was snowing with highs in the 20s.

---

One of my responsibilities is teaching an Old Testament survey course, generically entitled “The Message of the Old Testament”. In nearly 20 years of teaching, I’ve taught more different courses than I can remember, but never a course on the Old Testament. Fortunately, I’m older than them, and have read stuff: teaching, at its most basic, is working with what you have, and then filling in the gaps.

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

In teaching a course for a handful of students (a course that I’ve never done before), I’ve landed on five basic theses for teaching it.

1. Read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture. One of the perennial moves that my students make is to jump to the New Testament and ask what arcane bits of Judges have to do with Jesus. The thing I keep reminding them is that the New Testament presupposes the Old Testament, and that reading the Old Testament well means presuming that this is what Jesus came to bring to its fullness. To read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture is not to become absorbed in questions of what Israelite religion consisted of vis-a-vis the Old Testament canon, but what it means that the Old Testament speaks to us of the same God seen in Jesus Christ.

2. Sustain the Weirdness of the Scriptures. Do not, under any circumstances, try to explain away the Nephillim, or God nearly killing Moses, or Jephthah burning his daughter alive. Do not explain away the Leviathans, Ezekiel’s wheels, or the times in Numbers when Moses has to remind God to be faithful. Resist the urge to smooth out the edges or to synthesize it with what they think they know about the New Testament. Let things breathe.

3. Let the Old Testament Read Itself. So much of how the Old Testament hangs together is arguably through a persistent process of expansion. You can’t read Leviticus 18:18 and tell me that the Law isn’t working in conversation with the story of Jacob’s wives. Proverbs and Job carry on an argument about the relationship between virtue and prosperity; 1 Samuel and 1 Kings argue about how to understand the monarchy. Don’t try to even out these arguments, but enter into them.

4. Keep It in the Covenant. The Law—and all that surrounds it—is built on the presupposition that one must be inside it to understand it. For if the Law is prefaced by God reminding the people that he brought them out of Egypt, there is an interrelationship between God’s action with the people and the Law. Thomas Aquinas may be right—the Scriptures reflect the natural law, that which all creatures participate in—but the way into understanding that is deeply participatory. There is an inside to the Old Testament which Christians believe we have access to through the person of Jesus. But even then, understanding the Old Testament is a matter of being committed to the people of God before it is a hermeneutical exercise.

5. Follow the Threads to the Future. Reading the Old Testament is reading a book which tells a straightforward story, but which was written in hindsight. Most likely pulled together while Israel was in exile, the Old Testament tells of God’s work in the past, while compiled in a present which looked forward to the future. The future is already, thus, part of what the Old Testament’s history presupposes.

   And so, making the connections to the New Testament is fine, so long as we don’t deny the Old Testament’s ability to make those connections on its own terms. The authors can certainly mean more than they intend—the New Testament makes this clear all the time! But better to leave open the edges which the New Testament does not take up: a more robust future is better than a more minimal one, since it is God speaking in and through the whole of the canon.

Reading the Old Testament is a wild experience, if only because we’ve so domesticated it in favor of a God we already decided we knew.