by Potter Cain McKinney
The Articles of Religion, especially towards the beginning, cover uncontroversial and, perhaps to some, uninteresting material. Article VII, On the Old Testament, may be one such article. But its subject, the Old Testament, has so much depth, so much baggage, so much influence, that I cannot help but take every statement about it very seriously. In Appalachia and many other parts of America and the world, the Old Testament is our mythological corpus. Its tales capture the imagination of every child, religious or not, as would the best of Homer and Hesiod. I was not raised religious in the slightest, but even I knew many of the great stories and saw them as my reservoir of narratives by which I communicated to myself my own narrative, if we consider that to be mythology. In our adult lives we cite its laws or see them cited as guides for our nations, engaging with them whatever our political affiliation may be. So how we understand this collection of texts is extremely important: it might just be the most interesting and most dangerous book in the world.
The Elizabethan Church agreed on the following statement of understanding of the Old Testament in Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion:
The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises. Although the Law given from God by Moses, as touching Ceremonies and Rites, do not bind Christian men, nor the Civil precepts thereof ought of necessity to be received in any commonwealth; yet notwithstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the obedience of the Commandments which are called Moral.
This Article does not seem to have ever been the subject of much dispute in the Church of England. That’s because this Article puts forward a consensus of the Church’s tradition that even Catholics can and did agree with. Understanding this Article, then, is to understand a key principle not only of Anglicanism but of all truly catholic Christianity. We can distill it into three key and interrelated points:
Firstly, the Old Testament does not contradict the New. Within Christianity, it would be nonsensical to say otherwise; if both are in some sense revelations of God, and God isn’t ever self-contradictory, then these two revelations of God likewise can’t contradict each other. The two Testaments depict a single story of God’s action in the world, from creation to the end of time. This is probably obvious to most Christians, but some others frequently deny it. These others frequently compare the “God of the Old Testament” unfavorably to the “God of the New Testament,” or to claim that the Old Testament doesn’t “apply” to Christians, as if the testaments were written by two different deities. This Article, and I’d say the New Testament, does not allow for such a view.
Secondly, the Old Testament is a testament to Jesus Christ just as the New Testament is. The same “God of the New Testament,” the deity of mercy and charity manifest in Jesus, is the “God of the Old Testament” and offers that same mercy to the world in the Old Testament laws, stories, poetry, and prophecy. When the authors of the New Testament proclaimed the Gospel, they looked to the Old Testament to do it, citing the “promises to our fathers, to Abraham and his children” as in the Magnificat, looking back to God’s acts in the midst of Israel as their foundation. Christians today can look back to Joseph, who selflessly forgives his brothers for selling him into slavery out of jealousy (Genesis 50:15-21), God’s provisions for Israel in the wilderness, and many other stories of God’s love conquering our unfaithfulness. When the figures of the Old Testament heard God’s promises, and when God’s people read these stories, prophecies, psalms, and sayings, they were growing in union with the God who sent us Jesus. Look in Acts 7 and you will read St. Stephen preach the Gospel by starting on the firm foundation of the Old Testament history of Israel. Likewise, the same method and foundation is present in Irenaeus of Lyon’s On the Apostolic Preaching. All this indicates that the Apostles understood that the foundation of the Gospel and the context in which Jesus can be properly understood is the Old Testament and its history, promises, and hopes.
Thirdly, we must realize that the Law is still relevant to Christians. The Old Testament isn’t relevant only because it teaches us the Gospel. The Law is, in part, still a manifestation of God. Many Christians in history have reasoned that some laws in the Old Testament are different from others, placing them all into one of three categories: Civil, those laws which pertain to the governance of the Kingdom of Israel; Ceremonial, those laws that describe the functions and process of the Temple and the Priesthood; and Moral, those laws which mandate what is and is not ethically acceptable behavior towards God and neighbor. These same thinkers figured that the since the Kingdom of Israel and the Temple priesthood no longer exist or factor into Christianity, the Civil and Ceremonial laws no longer apply to Christians. However, they reason that the Moral laws are not based on any standard other than the unchanging, eternal God. Therefore, these laws are still authoritative for Christians. This is the underlying logic that allows Christians to reason that mixed fabrics and food laws do not apply to Christians, but commandments such as “do not murder” and “do not commit adultery” still hold. This is particularly important to stress because this is perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of traditional Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. When faced with the magnitude and specificity of the Law, it is easy for anyone to haphazardly arbitrate between all the commandments based on how relevant or tasteful it seems to us. So, we see some quote a particular passage to batter LGBT people, others quote another passage to win an immigration debate, but usually both parties deny the relevance of the other’s passage (though both tend to agree eating shrimp is okay). This sort of behavior is fallacious: it is a manner of inquiry which is not fitting for what is being inquired into, namely, the Scriptures and God revealed in them. Christian interpreters traditionally sought to impose a standard based on the internal logic of Scripture itself, rather than any external standard such as relevance to our lives or personal taste, a principle we must adopt in any real inquiry, theological and otherwise.
These three principles were enjoined upon us in this Article by a synod of men five hundred or so years ago, but are they still useful for the Church today? Were they ever true in the first place? Traditional Christian interpretation and use of the Old Testament has come under fire on many fronts in the past and today, and many merit serious attention.
The most obvious is that many do not find the Old Testament and the New Testament to be compatible. As mentioned earlier, many see God depicted in the New Testament as a universally loving and inclusive God whose property is to always have mercy, while they see God in the Old Testament as jealous, capricious, even murderous. One might also discern a difference between a God whose embodiment is an exceptional act in the Incarnation (disjointed from the Father as hypostasis) in the New Testament and a God depicted with anthropomorphisms quite frequently in the Old, or a God in whom there is no variability (James 1:17) and who is perfect (Matthew 5:48) and a God who is often shown as one who repents from and regrets past actions (Genesis 6:6). These were observations relied on by the Gnostics, particularly a group known as the Marcionites, very early on in the history of Christianity, and by many critics of Christianity today. This latter and more philosophical concern regarding the appearance of anthropomorphism and possibility should not jostle us much: what issue can we reasonably take with anthropomorphic imagery for God if we believe God is most perfectly manifest in an anthropos, one truly human in every way? When this human being, Jesus Christ, laments over the people of Jerusalem and cries out in pain on the cross, how can we take issue with God being shown as pained by interaction in and with a fallen world? Christians who understand that Jesus is the premier manifestation of God for the world should have no trouble with such descriptions.
However, it’s another matter when we see God caught up in moral evils. This moral accusation is perhaps the hardest to wrestle with in the traditional Christian interpretation of Scripture: how do we feel comfortable with depictions of God carrying out infanticide or genocide, or leading destructive military campaigns that put modern war crimes to shame? These are explicitly contrary to how Jesus taught his disciples to behave, which I believe is in a non-violent and life-affirming manner. Nor is it how Jesus reveals God as one more likely to submit to evil, even to death, to ultimately undermine it and convert it to good, than to wipe it out directly. I struggle with this still, but there is a way which I find useful to reconcile these stories with God revealed in Christ.
The first place we must look is towards the ancient tradition of allegorical readings of Scripture, following celebrated patristic interpreters such as Origen of Alexandria. Doing this, we would hold that the point of a story such as the Israelite invasion of Canaan isn’t that the Israelites slaughtered all the Canaanites on God’s command, but that God commanded and helped carry out the complete destruction of evil in ourselves under the symbol of a worldly war. We can view each story that challenges us in such a way, looking to the guidance of the Spirit in doing so. We then allow ourselves distance from the atrocity and can gain spiritual edification from it. The story becomes a means for communicating a spiritual truth which is a revelation of God, but the genocidal story is not the revelation. This is a very popular way interpreters throughout history have applied our second principle of the Article and have found Christ in the spirit if not in the letter of the Old Testament.
Taking this route, however, will get us into trouble with the other sort of critics: those who challenge Christian readings of the Old Testament that discount the historical experience of its authors or the Jewish readers of Scripture today. In many ways, I am this sort of critic, so on this front I will say that we should not, as Christians, interpret away the thoughts and cares of the Israelite authors of the Old Testament, even when we are severely challenged by it. Furthermore, as I elucidated above, it is fallacious to inquire into Scripture according to our own standards of relevance or taste and not the nature of Scripture of itself, which is a sure risk we face in allegorical interpretation understood by itself. Scripture is, whether we like it or not, a subject both human and divine in nature..
How, then, can we respect the dignity of the authors and the nature of Scripture without attributing evil acts to God? To do so, I believe we must extend the rationale of the article, not deny it. Just as the article teaches that Christ is manifest in the text and revelatory content of Scripture, we must also see God’s Christly logic in the act of revealing and inspiring Scripture itself.
It was very common in the ancient Near East to write annals of war which gave extremely unlikely and hyperbolic accounts of kings and armies wiping out their enemies, not out of any disdain of the enemies so much as out of a desire to glorify the nation, their king, and their God. For example, the Pharaoh Ramesses II wrote about himself single-handedly and totally defeating the enemy army at the Battle of Qadesh, not out of malice for the enemy but for the sake of his glory as a king and a god. The Israelites likely wrote about themselves in this way when they wrote in memory of their military conquests, and we know this was also done by their nearby neighbors. So, we can reason that when God wanted to communicate his infinite divine glory sovereignty to the Israelites, he chose to condescend to what the Israelites understood glory to be, just as God condescended to be in human form as Jesus Christ for humans, as God condescends to us as sinners in Jesus’ capitulation to the cross, and as God condescends to showing and communicating grace to us creatures by means of bread and wine. It is not the image of war violence but the divine glory that we need to see, and for the Israelites divine glory was best communicated by hyperbolic, violent stories of conquest, though for the modern reader this may be uncomfortable more than doxological.
This is really the same principle of cultural relativism the Articles apply to the Civil and Ceremonial laws but applied to the stories of the Old Testament. We can likewise apply this principle to the Moral laws, to the Prophets, to the poetry, and to the wisdom literature. Not only do we then have a hermeneutic which respects both the letter and the spirit of the Old Testament and both its divine and human authors, but we do so by following the ways of the past recorded in the Articles of Religion.
The only failure in Article VII that I can detect is that it does not fully utilize its principles as it could. But in utilizing them so, we gain a hermeneutic which allows Scripture to interpret itself, in cooperation with our reason and tradition, and allows the Holy Spirit to continuously fill and renew the letter of Scripture for the Church each and every day as our daily bread, a hermeneutic just like our Reformation forbearers hoped to pass down to us.
Potter Cain McKinney is a student and vestry member of Canterbury, The Episcopal Church at William and Mary, and a Sunday school teacher at Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, VA.