Are the Old Testament writings Christian, pre-Christian, sub-Christian, or un-Christian? If we may judge from the letters on the subject which recently appeared in the correspondence columns of the London Times, a state of considerable confusion exists within the Church on this issue. The correspondence was sparked off by a letter from the president of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, who raised the question of the place of the Old Testament within the context of public worship, in which lessons from both the Testaments are customarily read. Complaining of having to listen to “extracts containing genealogies, fragments of Jewish history, military operations, and anecdotes or exhortations which are not always edifying,” and that as isolated readings they mean little to the average congregation, he asked whether it would not be possible to have a selection of passages for divine reading “chosen from among the great devotional books of English prose” for occasional use at the minister’s discretion—mentioning by way of example the writings of Donne, Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Traherne, and Dr. Johnson.
A dignitary from Bedford suggested that the following passage from Jeremy Taylor, one of the authors recommended by the president of St. Catharine’s, might be a good one to start with: “That the Scripture is a full and sufficient rule to Christians in faith and manners, a full and perfect declaration of the will of God, is therefore certain, because we have no other. For if we consider the grounds upon which all Christians believe the Scriptures to be the Word of God, the same grounds prove that nothing else is.…”
Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, Minister Emeritus of London’s City Temple, spoke up for the extremist opposition to the Old Testament. “Again and again,” he wrote, “one would like to rise in church after the Old Testament lesson and say, ‘My dear friends, do not pay any heed to the irrelevant nonsense which has just been read to you. It has no bearing whatever on the Christian religion.’ ” Referring to Joshua’s conquest of Palestine and destruction of his enemies “as the Lord commanded him,” he unburdened himself of this startling viewpoint: “One wonders whether the Israelites had any better reason for going into Palestine which God allegedly gave them, than Italy had for going into Ethiopia, or Russia into Hungary, yet false religion pervades the rape of Palestine because it is “in the Bible.’ ”
A London rabbi rubbed his eyes in astonishment and pain on reading this effusion, “because such a view is bound to stir up religious feelings and heap fresh coal on the fires of hatred stoked by Nasser and his facade of the U.A.R.” He affirmed that by his bigotry Dr. Weatherhead had “joined the ranks of those who hate the Jew by hating his Bible, the matrix of all that is noble in civilization.” Another rabbi pointed out that “one cannot fairly extract from the Bible, which alone tells of the events, the unpleasant half of death, while ignoring the moral half of Almighty-judgment.” A layman pointedly observed that Dr. Weatherhead hoped to attract people to church “by treating the Scriptures as Dr. Bowdler treated Shakespeare, and for much the same reason, namely, that he finds parts of them embarrassing”; and a dignitary from the North of England inquired whether he had never read in the New Testament what Christ said ought to be done to the man who caused one of His little ones to offend, adding that “it would be very interesting to know how Mr. Weatherhead accommodates his faith in the redemptive power of the slaughter of the Man of Calvary with the beliefs he declares in his letter.” Another Anglican clergyman, however, applied the terms “repellant myth” and “savage saga” to the account of the Exodus from Egypt, which is appointed to be read in church on Easter Day.
The Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge emphasized the unity of the two Testaments and warned that “the fate of the Old Testament, the bible of Jesus, is bound ultimately to affect the fate of the New Testament also”; while the Archdeacon of Oxford offered the mordant comment that “from the earliest days the Church has regarded the Bible as a whole, but there have long been those who, like the heretic Marcion, have wished to choose out certain portions and to reject others.” A layman from London remarked: “These veiled attacks coming from the quarters they do go to show what a decline is taking place in current thought. The Old Testament is history and requires to be accepted as such.… To pick out certain passages for attack is no help to Christians and is perfect food for the pagans all around us.… A sound and regular Bible teaching in the home and school would obviate much of this empty criticism.” Another from Eastbourne noted that cathedrals and churches hold services of thanksgiving to commemorate the Battle of Britain, and that back in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I “both Church and state saw the Hand of God in the storm which carried to completion the defeat of the Spanish Armada”: indeed, the medal struck for the occasion bore the words from the Song of Miriam celebrating the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea: “Thou didst blow with thy wind and they were scattered.”
The epistolary exchange was brought to a conclusion by a sane leading article which contained the following comment: “It would be interesting to determine when some Christians first began to find much of the Old Testament shocking. The date is comparatively recent, and it is to be noted that this moral sensibility has sprung up in an age which is responsible for acts of inhuman cruelty on a scale as great as anything to be found in all previous recorded history, let alone the restricted annals of ancient Jewry.… Much of the sensitive humanitarianism alive today springs more from the eighteenth-century enlightenment, with its extravagant over-estimate of man’s moral capacities, than from Christianity with its realistic attitude to the world. No man who believed that God is ‘Lord of history,’ as Christians do, should flinch from hearing the chronicles of the past.”
It is at least important to recognize that the unsympathetic attitude of many today towards the Old Testament indicates a radical departure from the undeviating verdict of historic Christianity that, to quote from the seventh of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “the Old Testament is not contrary to the New,” and from the position uncompromisingly maintained by our Lord—who expounded to his disciples in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27)—and the Apostles—who taught that the writings of the Old Testament are divinely inspired (2 Tim. 3:16; 1 Pet. 1:11; 2 Pet. 1:21).
