Photo by Christina Cannon

"Christianity," G.K. Chesterton once remarked, "has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." Although American religious culture is often described as "Judeo-Christian," and random verses from the Old Testament are sometimes used as proof-texts to bolster whatever political argument a speaker might support, the fundamentally Jewish character of Christianity has been suppressed so much over the past two millennia that Christianity itself is sometimes represented as an uncomfortable and textually unrecognizable blend of Western philosophy, European colonialism and provincial bias.

Sandra Richter, Wesley Biblical Seminary's Professor of Old Testament and author of "The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry Into the Old Testament" (InterVarsity Press, 2008, $24), is working to close the gap between the ancient words of the Hebrew Bible and the contemporary eyes and ears with which we perceive them. While she does this as a devout Christian, she is also a historian—bringing to Wesley an extensive curriculum vitae that includes numerous academic publications, a decade of teaching experience, and a doctorate from Harvard University's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Richter's husband, Steve Tsoulakas, also teaches at WBS. Wesley drew the couple with their two young children to Jackson in 2009.

"We had been looking for a while to be on the same faculty, and Wesley heard that was our situation," she says. "They are a young and growing institution and wanted to expand their reach, so when they found out they could get us if they would offer us both full-time positions on their faculty, they pulled out all the stops to do it."

What is the message we're not hearing from the Old Testament?
The message of a redemptive God, a merciful loving deity who is extending himself as far as he can to redeem humanity. We tend to hear that message from the New Testament, but we overlook it in the old. In fact, I'm often asked the question when I teach in lay circles: "Why is it that the God of the New Testament is the God of mercy, and the God of the Old Testament is the God of judgment?" I'm always partly entertained and partly aghast at that question, because I see a God who has been working since the foundation of the world to redeem humanity marching all the way through the Old Testament. And I typically have to remind the church that the Second Coming is all about judgment, so don't think you've missed out on judgment just because you've claimed the New Testament and not the Old.

Do you think God communicates in the Old Testament differently from the way he communicates in the New?
No, but I think the audience is very different—and that is the great challenge. In ... "The Epic of Eden," that actually is my exact quest: to help the New Testament Christian understand the audience of the Old Testament message, so that they can hear it as it was intended. The Old Testament truly is long long ago and far far away. Just reaching back to Abraham, we're reaching back ... to 2,000 BC. ... So this is ancient ancient history, and it's an entirely different economy an entirely different social structure.

These folks are nomadic pastoralists who are very wealthy, but live in an ephemeral society—meaning that they're changing rotations regularly, that their bread and butter is raising sheep and goats, and their lifestyle is following the seasonal pasturage of their flocks. This is radically different from 20th-century westerners. Radical isn't even a strong enough word.

... [T]hen, as we march through the tribal lineage of ancient Israel, we're introduced to a very patriarchal tribal culture in which kinship ties are everything, ... this very male, very clan-based society. Then we move into the monarchy, which is ... centralized.

All this to say it's just a very different audience, and Israel itself is geographically very different and economically very different. So all of this makes for a message that sounds quite foreign to the modern reader, whereas when you move into the New Testament, Hellenism has already blanketed the Middle East, and Jesus is at least at some point speaking Greek. This is a more urban environment, and people have businesses and trade; it sounds more familiar. So I think that is the essence of the change. I don't think the message shifts that much, but I think the audience does.

Are there ways we resemble the audience of the Old Testament more than the New?
I think we resemble both audiences in that the needs of the human heart haven't changed much. Just as in Abraham's day, and in Peter and Paul's day, the average citizen is worried about the next meal, the next mortgage payment, how their children are going to turn out and this eternal ache in their souls. I would say that is common to the Old Testament audience, New Testament audience, and contemporary audience.

... I love following the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and watching them stumble through real life, bumping into their God and his expectations, messing up on those expectations, trying again. It comforts me to see that David was a bad parent, and still, the kingdom survived.

So I think sometimes the details of daily life are more visible in the Old Testament, and so that would be a point of connection for a contemporary reader. What I wind up telling my students all the time is that the goal of great interpretation—and, therefore, great preaching—is for the interpreter to be able to get themselves back into the shoes of the folks whose stories are being told.

I'm always challenging my students to think about these characters in the Bible, be they Old or New Testament, as real people who lived in real places and had exercised real faith. As soon as these folks become ivory-tower, pedestal icons, their struggles become irrelevant to us, and their stories become distant. ... I'm always trying to bridge that gap by reintroducing historical detail and anthropological detail and talking about real societal structure and the real civic laws that structured their everyday lives: what they ate, how they farmed, that sort of thing.

What is something that most people don't know about the Old Testament?
I would say the structure of their society. I actually open up my introduction to Old Testament with a lecture about what it means to be a tribal society. One of the banes of biblical interpretation is something the missiologists call ethnocentrism, where we, the reader, assume that the folks in the Bible lived just like us. So we read their life interactions as though they were situated in an upper-class little suburb dangling off Madison Avenue and Highland Parks Colony. We miss half the message.

... If you're thinking American Indians or the Arab factions you see throwing rocks at each other on the television screen—that's tribal society. And that's what Israel was, and God chose to reveal himself in space and time to a tribal culture, and so he adapted to that culture. And if we're going to understand the message of the Bible, we're going to have to do our best to get back inside that culture to do proper interpretation and get around the message in real life.

How can we can gain a better understanding of life in a tribal culture?
[L]et me make it very clear that I'm not asking Christians to become tribal. The culture in which the story of redemption is communicated shifts regularly. We start off with tribal nomads, we move to a monarchy, we move to an exiled province, and then we move to the Hellenized, Romanized culture of the New Testament. So we're not about canonizing their culture; we're just about understanding their culture.

I always wind up with audiences saying "Oh, so we should mimic the way they structure their economy, or the way they blessed their children." I'm like no, no, no—you cannot become a pastoral nomad. You can't do that. (laughs) Not in today's economy. But you need to understand it.

[T]he whole first chapter of ... "Epic of Eden," is about tribal culture and what it means to be patriarchal ... and how this value system shaped all of Israel's history, even into the New Testament, so that when Jesus names God as Father, he's actually operating out of a patriarchal mindset. And when he speaks about his father's house, in John 14:2, he's talking about the family compound. And when he speaks of having come as the firstborn to share his inheritance with us, this is all tribal law—he has some very specific cargo that he's trying to communicate to us. So our job is ... to do our best to understand it so we can get a handle on the message.

Is understanding the context of the Old Testament essential to understanding the meaning of what Jesus taught?
I certainly believe with all the campus ministries and Four Spiritual Laws and tracts ... the simplest presentation of the Gospel message can bring someone into the Kingdom—but ... that is just the tip of the iceberg. Who Jesus was, the message he came to bring, the promise he came to fulfill, the lineage that he comes as the final representative—all of these things are Old Testament messages.

I often will joke with my students that if you want to, you can listen to your favorite album on a cheap, one-speaker AM radio, or you can listen to it on Dolby surround sound. Make your choice. You can have one three-step presentation of the Roman Road, or you can come to realize that the last Adam of 1 Corinthians is the typological representation of the first Adam that stood in the Garden, and that the reason Jesus needs to be tempted by Satan in the wilderness is because the first Adam was tempted by Satan; the first Adam failed the test, and the second Adam didn't.

When Jesus stands on the mountain and declares a new law, he's not coming up with a new idea—he's standing on the mountain like Moses did and declaring to a new people, "I am the new lawgiver." When he breaks his bread at communion meal, he calls himself the new Passover and tells his people, "I'll put my blood on the lintels of your house and the death angel will pass over." All of these messages are as old as the hills. We truncate them into this one final expression, and I think it cheapens the message.

Do Old Testament Prophets have something to teach us that is not just a precursor to the coming of Jesus?
Oh, yes, indeed. The Prophets actually spent most of their time confronting social injustice that specifically breached God's covenant law. The role of the prophet, primarily, was to come to the people and to the king and to say to them, "God has given you this law by which you are required to structure your lives, and you're ignoring that law ... so I'm going to stand in the public square and announce how you are ignoring and breaching that law." I think our culture could definitely stand a prophet taking his position in the public square and pointing out our compromise to God's calling.

And Hosea and Amos ... what they're shouting at Jeroboam II is that you're wealthy and you're politically secure, and you're using your wealth and your political security to abuse and oppress the poor. You are busy decorating your house with ivory while the widow is starving in the streets, leaving her there to die. You have folks like Isaiah standing up to the kings and saying: "You're busy plotting out your entire national agenda without any attention to the lordship of Yahweh, of God, in your nation's life. I'm challenging you to pay attention to his lordship before you make your national strategy. Pay attention."

All of these messages I think are quite contemporary.

Today, immigration has been on the table a great deal. Do you think the Old Testament speaks to that issue?
I'm more than a little aware of the political situation in which Israel found itself. ... [O]ver and over again through Egyptian history and Israelite history immigration was a problem for them, too, specifically forceful, or what we would call "illegal" immigration. Egypt actually finds itself in a position where a foreign people takes over the nation simply due to an influx of such large numbers that those numbers outnumber the native populace. ... [R]ead the introduction to the story of the exodus: you read that a new king reigns over Egypt. This new king knew not Joseph, and so he isolated and segregated the Israelites and oppressed them with hard labor. And his rationale was, "we need to control this immigrant populace, lest they become so numerous that when someone strikes against us, they join with our enemies and overturn our native control of the country."

So that would be one of many examples of a nation that's struggling with more immigrants than it thinks it can handle. But what's interesting in that story is that our heroes, the Israelites, are the unwanted immigrants—and the exodus is, in part, the story of a nation trying to figure out what it's going to do with its immigrant class. Later in Israel's history, and you bump into ... Joshua being commanded to clear out the indigenous population of Canaan, settle the territory and don't let the Canaanites back in—that it would be a matter of sin to allow large-scale immigration. So then our heroes would be the new indigenous population (who) are keeping immigrants out.

But then ... read the story of Ruth the Moabitess, this wonderful young woman who is an exemplar of integrity and high-class behavior, and she's a Moabite, and she's unwanted by the Bethlehemites. They don't want her there, they don't need her there; they see her as an illegal immigrant who snuck over the border and is busy sharecropping in the fields. Yet she turns out to be this great hero, and the Bible incorporates her into David's lineage.

So I would have to say the Bible is a book about real people and real nations. ... I don't have any solutions to America's problem—but I can say that Israel has felt our pain.

Do you feel like the book of Job is well understood in our culture?
No, I don't feel it's well understood at all, even in scholarly circles.

... Job is an intentional mimicry of ancient wisdom literature, which was a Mesopotamian and Egyptian innovation. What our biblical authors are doing is taking the highfalutin philosophy and epistemology of their day and passing it through a faith-lens—what I would call a Yahwistic lens—and incorporating it into the corpus. But exactly what they intend us to gain in that transition is sometimes hard to get your head around.

People often talk about the patience of Job and how he suffered without complaint and what an amazing man he is, when in reality there's chapter after chapter ... of Job yelling at God: "Why are you doing this to me? I'm a righteous man! Why am I suffering? It'd have been better if I had never been born! I hate my life! You're an unjust God—show up and let me argue you down!" I don't see that as a man who's not complaining, or a man who's showing a very high level of patience, either. So, yeah, I think Job is misunderstood.

Ecclesiastes feels like one of the most contemporary books. I found it approachable early on. Is it understood?
No, I also think it's very poorly understood, but I totally agree with you that it's a very contemporary book. ... I believe that what Ecclesiastes is doing is also quoting the wisdom literature of its day, which tends to be somewhat nihilistic, declaring that the only real satisfaction in life will come from being the most powerful, the wealthiest, the best-looking, the most popular. ...

In this book, what Solomon does is he climbs to the top of the ladder; he steps to the very edge of the cliff. And with all of this success and acquisition, he looks down across the landscape and says: "Oh my goodness, there's nothing here." Being the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most popular, the most sexually attractive, doesn't bring joy. And he turns around from the edge of that cliff, climbs back down the ladder, and (says): "You know what, real joy comes in honoring God, keeping his commandments, loving the wife of your youth, and being content in what God has given you. Be at peace."

We're all living this fast-paced lie that if we're only more accomplished, more successful—if I only made more money or were better looking or had more cosmetic surgery done or got a new wife or got a new husband—that then I'd be happy. But most of us are kept sane by the fact that we never get what we're asking for, so we can hold on to our sanity anticipating that if we got these things, the ache in our hearts would be fulfilled.

Then we look at the other part of our society—the wealthiest, the most popular, the most famous. What do these people do as soon as they get it all? They start self-medicating and self-destructing. They're the saddest stories on the tabloids. They get it all, and then they realize that there's nothing there, but it's too late. In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon goes to the edge, sees that there's nothing there and comes back to tell us.

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Previous Comments

ID

161142

Comment

I read The Epic of Eden when it came out. It is a very interesting and thought provoking book. It is well-written, too. I thought Dr. Richter was at Asbury Seminary. It is great to discover she has relocated to Jackson, MS. Wesley Biblical Seminary is fortunate to have such a person on their faculty.

Author

pwaibel

Date

2010-12-01T11:30:18-06:00