How the Old Testament Fits in the Christian Canon

 

For some time now I have had a running debate with one of my beloved fraternity brothers, Joe Deutschman, on that poor mechanism for such debates called Facebook.  This relates to how Christians see, use, and/or understand the Old Testament, and its necessity as a part of the canon.  Joe, a non-believer, has several very ignorant misconceptions about this, and I again tried to enlighten him.  I have opted to change mediums, because the discussion on Facebook will not do us service.

 

The most recent give and take started with re-sharing of a post by Mark Rowden that I preamble as such:  “The apostasy of the literalist fundamentalist reading of the collection of books, letters, narratives, and stories we have come to call the Bible, continues to plague believers and especially nonbelievers.  Thanks for this reminder and explanation of the truth of the matter.”  Here is the post in question by Mark:  https://www.facebook.com/mark.rowden.12/posts/6569646289782477.

 

To that, Joe wrote the following:  “This is why I've never understood why Christianity keeps the Old and New Testaments together in one book. Given what the faith is professed to believe, wouldn't it make more sense to have the New Testament be "The Bible", the main text of the religion, and the Old Testament be kept around as a reference text?”

 

To this I provide an analogy to the relationship between the US Constitution and the corpus of English/British law that preceded it, to how the Old Testament relates to the New Testament as the progenitor and necessary context to understand the scriptures fully.  Eventually, Joe stipulates that, “We [Americans in the Constitution] included specific terms and concepts, not every single one. Nowhere in the US Constitution did we say "reference the Magna Carta for anything not explicitly covered here", which is exactly what Christianity did with the Old Testament - "If it's not directly contradicted in the New Testament, the Old Testament is still the [religious] law".

 

To this I have responded:  “Joe Deutschman where in Christianity does it say “if it’s not directly contradicted in the New Testament, the Old Testament is still the [religious] law.”?

Answer: nowhere. That is a completely wrong understanding of the place of the Old Testament in relationship to Christianity or scripture at large. Clearly you’ve got to spend much more time actually studying and understanding what is and is not a part of said faith and the place of the writ within them.

My analogy is exceptionally apt. There are those that have mistakenly disabused how the Old Testament is to be understood and used within Christianity. Those exceptions, however, doesn’t make that false understanding true. This is akin to certain people who hold to completely fraudulent understandings of the US Constitution, most recently as it relates to electoral college vote certification, for instance.”

 

At this point, Joe has most recently responded with the following:

 

“Maybe that's not how you view it or personally believe, but looking at it objectively for the religion as a whole you are wrong (and the majority of American Christians clearly disagree as well, given their political actions). Below is an image of the most common Bible used in the US. This is the formal "holy book" recognized as the foundation of the religion by the majority of American Christians. It is the book preachers use day-in and day-out for their sermons. Any verse from any part of the book. Today maybe they're preaching from the Book of Luke. Tomorrow maybe from Psalms. It is the book passed out to youth, it is the book kept in the pews. Absolutely nowhere is it written "second half is what matters, first half is just there for historical reference". No preacher starts a sermon with "today we're using a verse from the Old Testament, so it's not as important/literal/whatever as yesterday's sermon from the New Testament." The two halves are given equal credence in that book. Until Christian sects segregate the Old Testament and formally declare it to not be given equal credence to the New Testament, it will continue to have equal effect and impact.

 

Meanwhile, I have never once seen an instance of the US Constitution published with the Magna Carta alongside it. So no, the fact that the NT and OT are almost always published together, and the Constitution/Magna Carta are not, makes your analogy fail.”

 

It is at this point where I am picking up in this discussion with this post.

 

Joe,

 

Since you have decided to literally judge a book (or more accurately an anthology/compendium of books, letters, legends/myths/moral stories, poetry, histories, prophetic texts, apocalypses, and other literature) by its cover, I have had to turn to a medium that is more appropriate to respond.  What has become exceptionally clear to me is that while you hold this strongly held opinion, it is based on a false foundation.  I don’t blame you entirely, because popular culture has aided and abetted in this willful ignorance, but I just cannot let you remain as such, especially in a relationship where truth, caring, and being “of good heart” must prevail.  I will do this in a point by point manner related to your last response to me, so as to be forthright in how I approach this discussion.

 

Let me first start with your opening sentence, namely:  “Maybe that's not how you view it or personally believe, but looking at it objectively for the religion as a whole you are wrong (and the majority of American Christians clearly disagree as well, given their political actions).” So you are invoking what the understanding is of the Old Testament related to the New Testament “objectively for the religion as a whole”.  Well, let’s get straight what the make-up of the “religion as a whole is”. 

 

First, the religion as a whole has a population in excess of 2 billion persons globally.[1]  Of that population, 62% are part of Catholic or Orthodox expressions of the faith, with Protestants representing approximately 37% of the world’s Christian population, or about 740 million persons.[2]  Orthodox and Catholic expressions have some very specific ways that they understand scripture, especially as it relates to how the Old Testament is to be understood in light of the New Testament, as well as having large corpuses of extra biblical literature to draw on for specific teachings that are considered on par with the Bible (aka Sacred Tradition) that further aid in how this is done.  They also require, in their liturgies and in their preaching, that there be a reading from the Old Testament, a reading or chanting from the Psalms, a reading from the epistles (e.g. letters) of the New Testament, and conclude with a reading from the Gospels.  Guidance is clear that the process of speaking to scriptures by priests is to use the Gospel lesson as the primary guide to understand and ruminate on the other readings which are paired and sequenced for every service offered in a deliberate way in what is called a lectionary.  This lectionary is not optional and not open to modification on whims, excepting approvals by higher levels of hierarchy which require good justification.  Point being, just from this point alone, yea, there is a much more clear understanding that ay given word, phrase, story, etc. in the Old Testament is not “equal to” any given word, phrase, story, etc. in the New Testament, for more than half of the world’s believers, looking at it  “objectively for the religion as a whole”.

 

But to bring the point home even further, within the Protestant ranks there is less strict rules of the road, but even then, for the vast majority, they have a clear heuristic approach to the Bible that preferences the use of  the New Testament to interpret and understand the Old Testament, a mechanism often entitled “scripture interprets scripture”.  Most also follow what is called the common lectionary (akin to the Orthodox and Catholic, but leaving out certain non-biblical festivals and celebrations) that necessitate that heuristic being applied in preaching regularly.  As indicated by Pew Research, approximately 13.1% of the world’s Christian population (or 285 million persons) is “Evangelical”.[3]  It is in these ranks that you are finding the folks you are talking about that “…[t]oday maybe they're preaching from the Book of Luke. Tomorrow maybe from Psalms.”  And even within evangelical circles the approach can be more or less akin to what you’ve implied is that case, meaning that is it is a small minority that would even try to say that one should use the Old Testament as a manner to interpret the New rather than vice versa, “objectively for the religion as a whole”.

 

But, you then go on to cite and criticize within the American context.  If you look at that landscape, of the various groups with 1 million or more members (representing some 113 million American Christians), only 25.4 million America Christians could fit into the “Evangelical” bracket as you are using it (in a very liberal use of the term, meaning this is over counting the likely number that are).[4]  That is 22.4% of Americas, max.  Meaning that clearly, “majority of American Christians” don’t disagree with me in how the Bible is approached”.  But you have appended this with “given their political actions”.  Well that is an interesting statement, as this charts show, Christians in their political persuasion are more or less evenly split:[5]

 

[6]

 

[7]

 

Point being, that if you are implying that Christians, because in your estimation a majority, are using the Old Testament as a reason to prescribe radically reactionary policies, the data, facts, do not bear you out.  Rather, the data, facts, show that the vast majority get that the Old Testament is to be interpreted in light of the New Testament and used as the context to understand said interpretative responses and proclamations.  What you are in error about is what you see as a loud, galvanized, and very politically active minority that is punching over it weight in places like you live because they’ve brought along or have gone in league with non-believing conservatives that happen to like the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” provisions in the Old Testament, even if they are not Christians themselves.

 

With that part settled, let me take on the next claim you make:  “Below is an image of the most common Bible used in the US [the King James Version]. This is the formal "holy book" recognized as the foundation of the religion by the majority of American Christians. It is the book preachers use day-in and day-out for their sermons. Any verse from any part of the book. Today maybe they're preaching from the Book of Luke. Tomorrow maybe from Psalms. It is the book passed out to youth, it is the book kept in the pews.”

 

First, I will commend that you indeed know the most common read version of the Bible in the US.[8]  But here is the thing, even at 31% saying they use the King James Version (KJV), over 61% use a different version.  Did you know that for the 51 million Catholic Americans, they utilize a different canon for the Old Testament than do the Protestants (and thus don’t use the KJV as a result)?  And for Protestant groups like Lutherans, Episcopalians, UCC, and some others that they have those extra books in the bible as “Apocrypha” or “Deuterocanonical” texts that are included as additional materials, akin to an annex?  And do you have any idea how many commentaries, exploratory discussion texts, or historical context books are available to help guide and inform preachers, never mind those that study or read the Bible?  And you’d be massively surprised to hear that the Bible volume itself is complete absent from most Catholic, Episcopal, and many Presbyterian and Lutheran church pews in the US, as the verses for the day are either printed in a “missal” or in the bulletin, for easier access during the worship services.

 

Point is yup, it’s a book in common usage, the Bible.  And yes it is “foundational”, but only as much as many other things in life.  Preachers don’t just rely on the text of the Bible itself, and use many other resources.  And, as I articulated above, most don’t get the choice either by mandate or by normative practice to choose what they get to preach on, as the lectionary is prescribed for them.  They don’t get to choose to preach from “[a]ny verse from any part of the book”, they have to wrestle with an contend with several verses that are meant to convey a thread and/or larger moral concept that can and does get drawn out from those passages, using a specific “lens”.

 

This brings me to your next claim that “Absolutely nowhere is it written "second half is what matters, first half is just there for historical reference". No preacher starts a sermon with "today we're using a verse from the Old Testament, so it's not as important/literal/whatever as yesterday's sermon from the New Testament." The two halves are given equal credence in that book.”

 

So this is where you are so dead wrong, again thanks to complete and utter biblical ignorance (to which I pray you actually read the Bible and see what it actually says instead of presuming to know what it says).  Let me start with what Jesus himself says about where the Old Testament, the scriptures of his time, and what it says about faith, life and more, in relation to what he, as the center nexus point, was to them.  When asked about the old Law, Jesus himself states how it is to be viewed: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:34-40). As he made clear, the Old Testament strictures on particulars are not what matters, it is understanding the core moral ethic behind those strictures, centers on this very interpretation.[9]  For this reason, Christians are not to just read the Bible as if every part of it is equal, but we are to read the scriptures, especially the Old Testament, through “the lens of Jesus” (e.g. read it as if we did so through Jesus eyes).[10]  And later writers push this even more, that “when there seems to be a conflict between Old Testament laws and New Testament principles, we must follow the New Testament because it represents the most recent and most perfect revelation from God (Hebrews 8:13, 2 Corinthians 3:1-18, Galatians 2:15-20).”[11]  This article in particular lays this very well, with extensive citations: https://www.christianbiblereference.org/faq_OldTestamentLaw.htm.  Paul of Tarsus, in particular, articulates much of this very important understanding in his letter to the Romans (Chapter 2 through 13:10) where he comes back to the same summary that Christ himself offers in the quote above.

 

Lastly, you stipulate that “[u]ntil Christian sects segregate the Old Testament and formally declare it to not be given equal credence to the New Testament, it will continue to have equal effect and impact.”

 

So, succinctly, we (Christians) already “segregate the Old Testament” (its in its own section and distinctly understood in the canon as a separate and distinct).  Jesus himself declared it to “not be given equal credence to the New Testament” (in that he declared he was the one that was the ultimate interpreter of the Old Testament for all times (and was ultimately killed for making such bold claims), and the New Testament is a recording of his proclamations and life as well as letters then went on to give further heft and depth to that declaration).  So bottom line, you simply have an erroneous assumption or a great strawman you have created for yourself to bluster and beat on.  That strawman is that you continue to believe that Christians, give equal credence and thus a resulting “equal effect and impact” between the two Testaments in the Bible.  That simply, as demonstrated, not just by my opinion, but the statements by the religion’s very founder and further extensively cited works, that you are wrong to continue to hold this opinion.  This is an objective analysis of what the religion of Christianity actually says about itself and its “holy writ”.

 

Lastly, and as a complete rabbit hole you seem to want to go down on this topic, I actually have a book somewhere that has numerous documents foundational to liberal constitutional republican democracy that included the Magna Carta along with things like the Treaty of Westphalia, up to and including the US Constitution (it admittedly skips over a bunch of things, and is a rather incomplete text/anthology/compendium in that regard).  But the fact they are in one printed book or not, was not the point I made in my analogy.  The analogy was how English/British legal and governmental traditions and concepts (among them the Magna Carta, but a whole host of other things too) were necessary and a full part of how we understand the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and much more; to the point that SCOTUS justices continue to use case law and decisions in pre-independence courts in contemporaneous decisions (e.g. Dobbs).  Your utter fixation and fetishizing on the fact that the Bible publishers have conveniently put into one volume the precedent/background/contextual documentation for the latter part of the book instead of separating them physically, has led you to a) a bad strawman understanding of the biblical corpus and b) falsely understanding the very parallel comparison I made to our foundational documents.  Yes, most folks don’t try to put in one volume the better part of western political thought/jurisprudence from Justinian’s Codex to Four Freedom’s Speech by Roosevelt, because that would be one massive book that wouldn’t be humanly possible to pick up.  In the case of the Bible, however, one can do so, but it doesn’t mean that there’s equal credence to each part or that there isn’t an interpretive aspect of how you read the older part relative to the newer/current understanding any more or less than we do so in our current socio-political context.  But again, this is a sidebar intended to help you understand how Christianity understands the Old Testament as it relates to the New Testament, and not to get into a rabbit hole debate of whether the Magna Carta was ever printed in the same physical book as the US Constitution or whether there is an explicit reference to the Magna Carta as a whole in the US Constitution or other foundational document, even as we still hold fast to principles that originate in that 13^th century document.

 

So with all this, I hope I am putting to bed some serious misunderstandings/ignorance that has pervaded our conversations on this topic.  I ask you just get over the “because its in one book, they are equal things” false presumption about the Old and New Testaments in the Bible, as the vast majority of Christianity understand its holy scriptures.  Yes, there are those outliers that are akin to the Pharisees who fall back into the trap of emphasizing the old law found in the Old Testament, over the explicit directives of the one they profess to follow.  That is why I have come to call them pseudo-Christians, because they use the labels of what Christianity uses, but applies them in the opposite way from what they are often explicitly meant to mean.  You may be around a lot of those folks and I will be blunt that they are over boisterous and over hyped (often because of the way it sells in the media).  But that doesn’t make it the mainstream, majority or even right understanding if you actually engage with the texts themselves.  You really need to do so, engage with the Bible, if you are going to continue to claim to be making an objective claim about a religious group that you are not a member of.  I can promise you that reading the Bible will not force you in any way to believe what is written or the God that is being discussed and struggled with to understand.  You may opt to, but you may also, like Dr. Bart Ehrman, remain an atheist/agnostic, but with a much more educated appreciation for Christianity and the various claims made within and without that religion.

 

Thanks.

 

IUAT,

 

Erik

 

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[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2011/12/19/global-christianity-exec/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid

[4] https://www.christianity.com/church/what-are-the-most-popular-denominations-in-the-us.html

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/christians/christian/

[6] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/christians/christian#party-affiliation

[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/christians/christian#political-ideology

[8] https://www.statista.com/statistics/299402/preferred-bible-version-usa/#:~:text=The%20graph%20presents%20data%20on,James%20Version%20of%20the%20Bible.

[9] https://www.christianbiblereference.org/faq_OldTestamentLaw.htm

[10] https://bicus.org/2021/10/reading-the-bible-through-a-jesus-lens/

[11] https://www.christianbiblereference.org/faq_OldTestamentLaw.htm

The High Risk in Risk Aversion

One of the things that I have learned by being a construction professional and US Army officer, is that risk is a thing that needs to be managed. I learned early on, and have had it reinforced through practice, that all risks should be managed by the party, in any construction project/mission, that has the best tools and control of that risk in the effort. To that, I want to be clear, to manage risk is to not avoid risk or be averse to risk, because doing so only shifts the risk away from your control or awareness, and is almost always the riskier proposition.

What do I mean by this? Let’s start with my experience on the contractor/construction manager/executor side of things. One of the pesky things that happens in any construction project/military mission is the need to maintain physical safety protocols and conduct cleanup/housekeeping. Safety is a paramount focus on any construction or military training site. There are oodles of training sessions given and ongoing emphasis to make sure jobs are “safe”. The reality is that construction has numerous and varied ongoing risks to personal life and limb throughout the process. It’s just a risky business in that way. And it requires diligence and an “all hands on deck” approach to mitigating those risks from becoming a hazard that could hurt someone. So when it comes to making sure we have all of the safety measures in place, who holds responsibility is a matter of a “both everyone and no one” quandary. By that, I mean technically everyone from the worker to the employer to the owner has the responsibility to take ownership of job site safety, but that also means no one individual has ultimate responsibility for all, each and every, of the job site safety measures.

As a contractor/executor side of this, I’m probably the best person to manage safety focused risks on the job site. But how does it get done? In working for several organizations, I can tell you there’s a range of responses. On one extreme, one approach by the CM/GC was to assign this entirely to the trade contractors (primarily through the various trade contracts), without any real mechanism to ensure that there was consistency across how said trade contractors approached or executed their safety measures. This risk averse approach, took all liability away from the firm I worked for at the cost of creating varied and in some cases inherently more risky conditions.  One such example was as it related to how labeling protocols resulted in floor hole coverings that had one person mistake it for a work platform before they were told it wasn’t safe location to work. Or another example was where a trade contractor would orally promise to use chain link fencing to barricade a part of the site, to only opt to later install orange plastic construction barrier (a significant downgrade), to which there was not any real recourse. This “hands off” because “we don’t own it” approach was problematic at best and (based on the random/perhaps not random OSHA inspection we went through) was lucky not to cause serious injury.

This was as opposed to another firm I worked for that literally had prescribed safety boards for each site, with mandated first aid and other PPE kits, a required safety manual (that subs had to sign off on), regular and educational safety inspections, and a “we want to control our sites” approach to job site safety. It was night and day. Yes, we took on, because of our direct involvement as the GC, liability as a result of having trade contractors comply to our standards. But, by doing so we actually reduced the risks on the job and resulted in no recorded injuries across numerous job sites over many years (reducing actual liability exposure, with a corresponding decreased premium rate). It was clear then, as much as it is clear now, taking the risk averse approach only heightens and actually creates more risk. I had similar experiences working on the owners side, where in one case “it’s all the contractor’s responsibility” risk averse approach was the mantra as opposed to “this is our installation, and we have to take case of everyone on it, even the workers of the contractors on site” approach. The latter was a clear example of an underlying philosophy that one should own/embrace the risk so you can manage it effectively.

And this applies beyond construction. It can be in financial matters, political decision making, and even operational approaches.  Recently, I was discussing the need to update the computer purchase recommendations for our academic department for incoming students. Some years ago, prior to and upon my assumption of the role of Department Executive Officer (XO), it was abundantly clear that the general university computer recommendations were just not sufficient for upper division courses in our area, because the university base model was based on functionality at the least common denominator level for all programs (resulting in a lack of disk space, memory, etc. for various applications in engineering). The previous leadership took the risk averse approach, in that they didn’t want to be held responsible for recommending something different than the IT department had given as they’d have to answer if those recommendations were insufficient or more expensive (eg they’d get blamed not the department leadership). I, on the other hand, was much more concerned with the complaints that were regularly being voiced, and corresponded to, about how we should have told them they needed X or Y capacity and how they couldn’t use their laptop to do course work because they were seriously deficient (thus relying on campus computer labs, which became an acute problem during the COVID pandemic). The question was which risk are you dealing with? Being held to account for telling people what they need or being held to account for failing to do so?

My approach was not the risk averse one, it was the risk management one. I drafted a memo, laying out open ended but specific specs, making clear the pros and cons of what was needed and giving two levels. Knowing well that most families only buy a laptop only once for their loved one’s collegiate experience, they were written to enable the computer purchased upon arrival to, more likely than not, function all the way to the end of that experience and still keep up with software updates 4 to 5 years hence. You know how many complaints we received? Zero, none, nada, not even a one. There were some concerns raised once or twice about cost, but once they were aware of the intent (laid out up front of the recommendations as a clear rationale for them), in every case they were thankful. And more often than not, when parents, students, and others would ask about similar recommendations for other majors, the refrain was “I wish others did this too so we’d know what to buy that would last the duration”. Yes, there’s a risk in putting out something that went above and beyond what IT put out, but what was the down side? Appreciation and an exhibition of better performance for the students with an ending of the constant litany of complaints on why they didn’t know answer couldn’t function the way they wanted to?  Was that really a problem? The bigger risk? Answer, no.  They’re really weren’t any downsides at all, other than having to periodically update the recommendations. Managing the risk, in other words, was less risky than avoiding or being averse to it. WE have the responsibility to make OUR students be in the best position possible to succeed in OUR curricula in OUR department based on what WE know. We can and should manage this risk and not leave it up to others who know less, are less likely to receive the complaints, and are less equipped to resolve the problem ahead of it becoming a problem.

Risk management is about knowingly and carefully assuming risks while putting in place mechanisms and tools to mitigate the potential downsides of those risks should they occur (as well as building in capacity to deal with the unknowns).  Life is risky, period. Everything we do has risks. Some are greater and others smaller. And, yes, there is absolutely such a thing as taking on too much risk. But here is the thing, avoiding risk, being risk averse, is actually doing just that, assuming too much risk. It’s an attempt to push out of the way that thing that you have a very important part of the pie in addressing. The mere fact you’ve chosen to avoid or be averse to it doesn’t make the risk go away. No you’ve made a deliberate choice (a bad one I’d surmise). It just means others (or no one) is going to manage it, and they may or may not do it well or be equipped to address it so as to not have the downsides actually occur. That is inherently the more risky proposition. While I fully get that it’s prudent to insulate yourself from financial and other legal liability, especially in a litigious environment like the United States, that doesn’t mean you avoid risk. There are tools for those things, like insurance, peer review, checks and balances, and so forth. But none of those are avoiding or being averse, they are part of a comprehensive risk management process that enables you to better address the risks. And they also help you avoid the trap of perceiving risks that aren’t really there (or if they are they were just ones you’ve been blind or adverse to recognizing and managing properly).

In conclusion, manage risk don’t be averse to it.  And in that, risk, if you’re going to choose to avoid it and do a stiff arm against actively managing it, it either a) needs to not be a risk at all (and not an opportunity either, meaning it’s a waste of time), b) you have 100% confidence in whomever or whatever will be in place to manage it outside your control, OR c) you’re fully willing to accept the consequences when your aversion ends up biting you in the proverbial forth point of contact.  Any of these should be a last resort to working to managing the risk appropriately and by the best parties to do so effectively.