Christianity Today invited me review Brent Strawn’s The Old Testament is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment.
Here is my review (titled, “Man shall not live on the New Testament alone”).
I sure hope the Old Testament isn’t dying, because that might mean I’m out of a job. I love the Old Testament, as did Jesus and Paul. If you love the Old Testament, check out Strawn’s book.
Here’s my prescription for health: “When we make a commitment to regularly read, teach, preach, and sing the Old Testament, we’re doing more than nursing a dying language back to health. We’re also connecting personally to a living God.”
Interestingly, the Old Testament is receiving a revival amongst many nonChristians due to the lectures of Jordan Peterson, a psychoanalyst out of Toronto.
Geoff, thanks for the reference. I’ll look out for Peterson’s lectures. What does he focus on?
Here’s a link to him ending a two hour lecture on Abraham without ever really getting to Abraham:
Here’s a link to his whole lecture series:
He’s an interesting guy on several levels, one of which is that he’s run afoul of the Canadian government and his own university for his opposition to certain forms of postmodern ideology.
As an aside, have you read Yoram Hazony’s book Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture?
I’ll shoot you some links when I’m not on my phone. But he basically does a Jungian archetypal reading of the text, taking it as much as he can on its own terms. So he’s done a series of lectures from Genesis 1-16 or so. But he often gives tremendous psychological background to help secular folks make sense of how such a story could have ever been believed in the first place. His lecture on how Abraham heard the voice of the Lord is basically two hours background on altered states of consciousness and psychological markers of wellbeing. Then he ends saying, “anyway, I guess that helps you see that it’s not weird to hear God…we’ll talk about Abraham next week.”
Thanks for the links. No, I haven’t ready Hazony’s book. Peace.