Why should graduating seniors care about the Old Testament? Any senior graduating from Taylor without an answer to this question ought to ask themselves what has gone wrong to leave them with this yawning lacuna of mind and soul. That might strike you as a nervy thing for me to say. But time is short, you are headed out the door and I am limited to 700 words. For the sake of clarity, allow me to dispense with niceties.
The answer to why you should care about the OT boils down to how you will choose to define “success.” That decision involves you in a quest for wisdom to know what is available and what is not. This compels a reframing of our question for clarity: Why should graduating seniors think the Old Testament has any wisdom they need, especially since we have the New Testament? One of the first and most insidious heresies to afflict the early Church arose as a response to that wisdom question. Marcionism, as the heresy is now known, rejects both the revelatory authority and the sapiential relevance of the OT for Christians. The early Church condemned it.
Now if the threat of heresy is not enough to chasten you, consider how the apostle Paul, speaking about the OT, reminded Jewish and Gentile Christians that “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom 5:4). Similarly, Paul explained to the Corinthians that the things which happened to Israel in the book of Numbers “happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11). In each of these passages Paul’s advocacy of the OT bears on the eschatological future for Christians, thus indicating its enduring value for us.
Paul makes the point in his letters to Timothy that competent handling of OT scripture and recognition of its goodness are critical for the character formation of Christians, especially of Christian leaders (1 Tim 1:8–11; 4:13). Paul even goes so far as to characterize the entire OT functionally as wisdom literature that is efficacious for those moral ends due to its divine inspiration (2 Tim 3:15–17). Paul understands it is God who makes the whole process work well for edification of the Christian community. But the apostle sees God achieving this especially through the instrumentality of the OT scriptures, properly handled, and through faithful human vessels who have purified themselves for God’s use (2 Tim 2:20–4:5).
We should not think that the purpose of the NT is to tell us which OT passages we should retain for our lives and which ones we can safely toss out. The NT is not a sieve to separate OT wheat from OT chaff. The influence of the OT is deeply wholistic and runs way beyond prooftexts supporting specific NT doctrines. It extends to entire worldviews and theologies as the OT subjects you to a wisdom program. Much of its agenda is to develop you into a competent sufferer and circumspect follower, one who knows where their real vulnerabilities lie and is thus able to recognize and render proper allegiances through the right management of honor and shame. To appreciate this, one must submit to a “slow build” conducted through engagement with large swaths of OT narrative, poetic, and prophetic texts.
You graduates have some decisions to make about defining success and securing the power, wealth and relationships associated with it. The OT is where you will find instruction about how all this plays out at the level of the individual, the family, and nation states, over very long periods of time, amidst the complicated forces of personal, political, and philosophical upheavals, socio-economic ups and downs, mass formation events, group think, natural disasters, war, and community dysfunction. The OT teaches you how to embrace all this and still affirm that life is good, as your theology of joy soars no higher than your theology of suffering runs deep.
Christianity stands upon a rich reserve of wisdom in the OT. So why not “drill, baby, drill?”
