Books
Covenant and Commandment
Introduction: A Covenant with the Reader
What Kind of Book is This?
Several years ago I purchased a book about the American Civil War from the sale table of a local bookseller. When some days later I began to read it, I quickly became frustrated. I lost patience with the careless scholarship of the historian and the numerous inaccuracies of detail. Characters of dubious historicity mingled with people named McLellan, Grant, Longstreet, Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. My frustration led me to look more closely at the credentials of the author, only to discover on the dust jacket three words I previously overlooked: “A Historical Novel.” This was fiction! When I returned to the text—not a little abashed at my careless rush to judgment—I now found the unfolding narrative gripping, and persuasive.
In every meaningful or successful communication between the creator of the written word and the reader or consumer of that word there exists a covenant of discernment and understanding. It is the reader’s part to deal honestly with the writer and with the writer’s creation and to accurately discern the character of the text, including the intentions and purposes of the writer. It is the reader’s part to avoid forcing purposes and intentions on the text that are foreign to the writer’s purposes. Failing to do so is courting misunderstanding.
Not all truth is expressed in the same way. The truth of a novel is not the truth of a history textbook, nor do we search for the meaning of a poem in the same way that we ask about the meaning of a philosophical proposition or an essay on physics. Different genres “speak” in different ways and must be read according to their speaking.
What is the writer’s part in this covenant of understanding? Is it not to communicate that vision cogently to the reader? Therefore, part of the writer’s duty is to make clear to himself and to his potential readership what audience he seeks to address, so that the reader may determine whether to invest time and energy in reading the work.
To whom is this book addressed? It is intended not for the professional biblical or scholarly community—although I would hope it has sufficient integrity of scholarship to merit the approval of that community. It is intended rather for the intelligent and inquiring layperson or minister, and especially for the layperson who is not sure that the Bible as a whole is significant for responsible modern living and who may be even less sure about the relevance of the Old Testament.
I also hope it might find among its readers the kind of audience that has played a key role in shaping the book’s insights. It reflects the influence of several generations of college students whose curiosity about the Bible and about Christian theology has provided me with continuing stimulation and challenge. I have been impressed by the seriousness with which many college and university students take both the biblical heritage and the responsibility to understand it and live it.
In short, this book is directed to intelligent, thinking, and inquiring Christians who would like to consider how their faith relates to and participates in the rich but sometimes opaque heritage in the Hebrew Scriptures. I will attempt to speak to the thoughtful person who has felt uncomfortable with the easy and shallow application of biblical dicta to the complex social, ethical, and political issues of the present but who by instinct, heritage, or conviction is prepared to take the biblical faith seriously and find it relevant to life in the world.
Bootlegging Theology
When asked to speak to religious groups, Dr. Abner McCall, former president of Baylor University and a widely respected layman, always made it clear that he did not carry papers of ordination. Rather, he said, he was “a bootlegger of the gospel.” There is a sense in which this volume aims at more than the title might suggest, and to keep my covenant of honesty with the reader, I must make this more plain.
It is, indeed, a biblical study, an examination of the traditions and texts of the Hebrews. Its insights and interpretations were developed through forty years of teaching the Old Testament to more than 10,000 college students. But its perspectives on the Old Testament have been shaped and colored by my primary training and commitment. I am a theologian by trade. This needs to be understood in case I am suspected of bootlegging Christian theology into the Old Testament. Far from denying such a charge, I confess it gladly! Still, widespread misunderstanding about the theologian’s task and theology’s place in biblical and church life makes brief explanations necessary.
Although there have been obscure and abstruse theologies, there is nothing abstruse or mysterious about theology. Theology is what happens when we reflect on our experience of God and of life in the world. It is the verbal expression (whether spoken or thought) of religious experience. Theology is our thought about God and about all our insights and encounters that have anything to say about God. It is our attempt to give expression—as consistently and accurately as possible—to insights that in some respects lie too deep for words. Theology is what we think and say about our faith and about God.
If this is a valid definition of theology, it becomes clear that every person who has ever given thought to faith, however primitive and imperfect, is a theologian. The believer has no option about being a theologian. The only available choice is between a thoughtful, consistent, and creative theology and a fragmentary, confused, or uncreative one.
Explanatory Doctrines
We have argued that theology is our attempt to express our religious experiences in words. But our words at their best carry the imperfections of language in general and our own language in particular. This means that no doctrinal expression, either of an individual or a church, can express the truth of God fully and without flaw. All theology is in the final analysis human. Every doctrine is an attempt to find words adequate to the reality we have met. Thus we must always be ready to “listen through” religious language and expression in order to hear the underlying reality and truth. Difficult theological notions often become clearer and more meaningful if we can trace them back to the experiences they seek to explain. I call these “explanatory doctrines.” There will be occasions in the following pages when this phrase will be helpful in clarifying our meaning.
It is also clear that any biblical study is inescapably a theological study. If theology is our reflection on God and our experience of God, then the whole text of Scripture takes on a theological cast, since it consists of the confessions of men and women who lived and expressed the life of faith. We will ask how the Hebrews understood the world, themselves, and God in the wake of their great encounter in the exodus. But since their experience and their reflection has become part of the Christian story, we will not hesitate to see them in the light of the Christian faith and tradition.
Since this book is primarily a theological interpretation of a well-known part of the Old Testament, it is not intended for devotional reading, even though we will be concerned with the practical implications of law and covenant. Nor, as we have said, should it be seen as a careful exegetic or textual analysis, although I will not hesitate to avail myself of the work of such scholarship.
It is also not intended to be read without serious effort. I hope it is in no way difficult or unapproachable. Nevertheless, I will not hesitate to ask the reader to wrestle with ideas that will carry him or her beyond the devotional level, but that may have the power to open up new dimensions of meaning in the Decalogue and in the Hebrew and Christian traditions. Some passages may require rereading and careful digestion, especially when they ask the reader to rethink old ideas in different ways.
The language used may also from time to time ask for close attention. I will seek to avoid the scholar’s tone, but I will not hesitate to ask the reader to engage new or unfamiliar words, especially where such words will help clarify and deepen our insight into the text.
My inescapable focus will be the faith tradition in which I exist. As I have suggested above, I will not hesitate to interpret covenant and law through Christian eyes, and this is a confession that will be looked upon in some scholarly circles as unworthy. In fact, for some it will disqualify the whole project. There are certainly good reasons for caution in the approach we will take, and there is undeniably more in the Hebrew Scriptures than is likely to be discerned through the perspective of Christian faith. But it is still a legitimate enterprise. This is and will remain the case so long as the Christian community accepts the Old Testament as a part of its sacred Scriptures. By claiming for themselves the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians affirm that the roots of their own distinctive understanding of God, humankind, and the world are still deep in those ancient writings.
Martin Luther’s “Christocentric” principle for the interpretation of the Old Testament—namely, that we find its authority for faith in its foreshadowing of Christ—is decisive if Christians are to acknowledge the Old Testament as part of their sacred canon. However, such a procedure is risky. Often this “viewing through Christ” has resulted in the distortion of what Luther himself called the “plain historical meaning” of the Old Testament. It has led to sometimes fantastic speculations and to the “discovery” of “typologies” of Christ and of Christian doctrine everywhere in its pages, often where a clear, unprejudiced eye could see that none existed. Nevertheless, it is still true that the Old Testament remains normative for Christians only because it speaks meaningfully to the faith that is the heart of the Christian story.
While the Christian would not be a Christian without assuming the embracing character of the New Testament vision, the continuity of the Hebrew and Christian visions has been affirmed throughout Christian history. Again, Christians affirm this unity when they call the Hebrew canon Scripture. Although the two faiths are not identical, in most respects they stand on the same ground, or, to use a more contemporary metaphor, they share the same horizon. The question then becomes, “How does the Hebrew vision illuminate the Christian vision?”
Story and History
What we have said above means that we acknowledge the Judeo-Christian community as our chief context, and this provides the frame of reference for this book. This frame of reference will guide us in the selection of themes and materials and also in their interpretation and application. The following study will be an interpretation based on the “story” of a community in which we assume both the writer and the reader will participate. To the extent that Jews and Christians share a common heritage, it will be “our” shared story. We will seek to set the commandments within a narrative framework. We will not ask, at least at the beginning, about the objective “truth” of that story or the universal applicability of the life-principles or laws it sets forth for living.
By asking about the meaning of law and covenant within the framework of story, we will recognize several things. First, we will acknowledge the narrative character of the Hebrew mind and therefore of the Hebrew Scriptures. Occasionally a student in one of my Old Testament introductory courses will comment that mostly what we do in class is “tell stories.” I usually congratulate such a student for discovering a fundamental fact about what it was to be a Hebrew and about how the Hebrew looked at the world. Story is the Hebrew vehicle for truth. This fact is reflected in the structure of the Hebrew language, which is largely built upon verbs and tends to center meaning in events, rather than in objects. This fact is not unrelated to the Hebrew manner of conceiving God and God’s relationship to the world. If you ask a Greek to explain the nature of things, he will offer you a logical syllogism or draw for you a diagram. If you ask a Hebrew the same question, he will tell you a story.
Second, when we inquire about the meaning of covenant and law as a part of the Hebrew/Christian story, we acknowledge the current widespread interest in narrative as a vehicle for meaning. Experts in many of the scholarly disciplines—literature, philosophy, sociology, and psychology among them—have in the last few decades become aware that in all human society the story is the basic means of communicating moral, communal, and theological meaning. In this sense, we will be doing a kind of narrative biblical theology. This narrative nature of our enterprise will determine the kinds of questions we bring to the text. It will also mean that some kinds of questions often asked of the Hebrew Scriptures will have secondary or even marginal interest for us.
For instance, we will not be greatly interested in the historical or archeological accuracy of the Hebrew story. Indeed, we will assume that Israel’s own telling of its story, however ancient her memories, were codified and given their definitive shape well after the exodus. We will not become embroiled in the question whether the exodus and conquest and settlement narrative as recorded in the Hexateuch—the first six books of the Old Testament—are consistent with the archeological record as now interpreted. We won’t worry about whether the process of nation-forming described in Judges and in the Samuel literature can be accepted as historical. These questions, interesting and important as they are, are not the sort we ask of the storyteller.
Several years ago I counseled a student who was having personal problems. In one session, the student confided to me a childhood experience of great terror that, she reported, still reappeared in her dreams. Later, in conversation with the student’s parents, I found that the episode was actually so different from what she had told me that it was hardly the same event.
What would have been the proper response to the student when she approached me afterward? Should I discard her account as meaningless and dismiss her as unworthy of my future trust and confidence? Had she not badly misled me? Or would such behavior on my part have been irresponsible in the extreme, because as a counselor and friend I was not primarily concerned with the facts? I did not care about what some might call “external history.” Nor did I care about the accuracy of her recollection. I was much more concerned with personal history, with what those facts, having passed into the flux of her life, came to mean to her, the person who had lived them.
Now, while the Hebrew story is rich with the raw materials for historical inquiry and reconstruction, it is nonetheless their story. It is not “mere history,” in the sense of a bare recitation of facts, but interpreted history. It is events recorded and shaped by the Hebrews’ need to understand for themselves and to tell to subsequent generations who they were, how they got that way, and where they hoped to go. Thus it is no surprise that their remembrance of past things was shaped and altered by subsequent history. The Hebrews did not hesitate to retell their story and to alter it in light of subsequent experiences, just as each of us lives, relives, retells, and reunderstands the pivotal events of our respective lives. This Hebrew reliving and reunderstanding is witnessed to by the frequency in the Old Testament of “twice-told tales,” in which the specifics of the tellings are significantly different. It is witnessed to by the manner in which pre-exodus history is reshaped and given meaning by the unforgettable events of the exodus itself.
Such a distinction between personal history and external history will be troubling to some, since in each case we are confronting the phenomenon of time and asking about the meaning of events. Can a story be true and important in any sense if it is not true in every sense? Can the meaning of a story be distinguished from its facts? It isn’t rare for students who become aware for the first time of the many historical problems posed by the Hebrew Scriptures to dismiss the Old Testament in its entirety. My attempt to distinguish between the meaning of the story and the details of its telling is sometimes lost on them. “If I can’t believe all of it,” they tell me, “then I can’t believe any of it.” Yet the same students make different demands upon their own stories or the stories of friends or of their generation.
On Selecting Our Past
Our concern, then, will be to unfold the story of the Hebrews as it ordered and shaped their awareness of being a people, and to understand, at least in some limited respects, how it has been incorporated into and illuminated by the story of the church.
Every story is selective. As we tell our story we highlight events and encounters that throw light on who we are and how we got that way. In fact, every story has its central event or constellation of events in the light of which the past is re-remembered and newly understood and in the light of which the future is dreamed of, planned for, and acted upon. Now, to attempt to tell our story—meaning the shared story of Hebrew and Christian—and to do so from the special point of reference of the Christian community is to admit to selectivity. In the present study, we will have three main points of focus:
(1) We will focus our attention on the event that was for the Hebrews absolutely central: the exodus. (2) We will consider what its implications were for the central event of the Christian story: that of Christ. The fact that the Christian faith can embrace the exodus as its own is a measure of how deeply the two stories are bound together.
There are most certainly other, sometimes contrary, themes and motifs in the richness of the Old Testament than those of exodus, covenant, and Decalogue on which we will concentrate. Likewise, there are elements in the Christian experience that remind us that the two faiths are not always and at every point compatible. We will argue that no Hebrew/Christian story is possible that ignores these pivotal realities.
3) We will also ask about the relevance of that story to the larger story of humankind. Our selectivity in handling the Hebrew story will not reflect merely its exodus experience and Christ event. It will reflect our situation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Because we live in a different epoch, we may ask of our Hebrew predecessors questions that they in their own time might not have dreamed of. We will attempt to assess the relevance of the Hebrew notion of covenant and of the Ten Commandments for life in our world. The infinite variety of problems that confronts the believer in our day—for instance, questions of genetic engineering, organ transplants, prenatal sex determination, environmental preservation, or nuclear warfare—reveal the impossibility of a simplistic biblicism.
If biblical faith is relevant to our world, it must be able to speak to questions such as these. Our concern will be to ask whether the Hebrew vision, as understood through the embracing perspective of the Christian vision, can speak meaningfully to our world. In other words, we must ask at a later point in our study whether there is a connection between our story and “the” Story.
Notes
1 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1944), 11f.
2 Sam Keen, To a Dancing God: Notes of a Spiritual Traveler (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1970, 1990), 25.
