Laurence Turner, on “Countering Old Testament Illiteracy”

Brent A. Strawn, in his book The Old Testament Is Dying, draws an analogy between the contemporary Christian church’s competence in reading the Old Testament and the ability to speak a language fluently.

Acknowledging the limitations of any analogy, he argues that the church is losing its ability to understand the Old Testament in much the same way that second- and third-generation immigrants increasingly lose their ability to understand and speak the language of their parents and grandparents. The church, he argues, has lost “fluency” in the Old Testament and it now speaks about it in a “pidgin”.

Pidgins strip down the complexities of language to provide a simplified form of communication between people who do not share a common language. Numerous pidgins have arisen, one of the most extreme being Russenorsk. Now extinct, it was used as a form of communication between Russian and Norwegian traders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its grammar was simple in the extreme. For example, it lacked conjugated verbs and had just a single preposition. Its total vocabulary was no more than three hundred words. It allowed the most basic of conversations between traders who did not share a common language, but its utility stopped there. Tolstoy’s War and Peace was never translated into Russenorsk! Strawn argues that the church’s engagement with the Old Testament has reached this level of meagre simplicity. And what is more, most pidgins, like Russenorsk, finally die out. Hence the title of his book.

My experience as a lecturer in Biblical Studies confirms the general truth of Strawn’s thesis. During my career I witnessed accelerating biblical illiteracy, but its pace is faster in the Old than in the New Testament. This should concern Adventists. The first of our fundamental beliefs begins, “The Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, are the written Word of God, given by divine inspiration”. Several doctrines and practices of our church are heavily based on Old Testament passages. However, an increasing number of members find it difficult to “get into” the Old Testament.

In our Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar, we will not attempt a general apology for the Old Testament to show its current relevance. Rather we will  try to “get into” the heads and minds of the Old Testament writers. How did their culture, language, and ways of thinking influence what they wrote? And how do the answers to those questions enable us as twenty-first century readers to understand their “language”, and to read what they wrote with increased competence?

Teacher: