THE BIBLE JESUS READ
BY PHILIP YANCEY
1999 Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 221 pages
FOREST HILL LIBRARY 221.6 YAN
A Book Review by Joseph Ng
February 2003
Who’s afraid of the Old Testament? Behind that query lurks another: why afraid—due to knowledge or ignorance? As a friend of mine says, “Yancey is fun.” And so is the Old Testament, if one could overcome certain hangups and actually read it. It should be obvious that the Bible Jesus read was the Old Testament, but with the preponderance of preaching in this age coming out of the latter third of Bible, the New Testament, one wonders about the black box that comes before it. The Old Testament is relegated to a couple of familiar Sunday school stories, proverbs, and obscure allusions in New Testament, its canonicity receiving mere lip service.
Such an attitude was scarcely the case in the early church. Peter it was who affirmed that some of Paul’s hard-to-understand writings were the Scriptures (a reverential term reserved for the Old Testament Bible), when he compares the Pauline Epistles with these “other scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). The Old Testament was the benchmark of canonicity for the New Testament books. It was also given to us New Testament believers “so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). And, once again, Yancey’s pen powerfully—and, I think, successfully—invites the reader into the authority that Jesus and the Apostles trusted.
DESCRIPTION
The Bible Jesus Read comprises seven chapters:
1. Is the Old Testament Worth the Effort?
2. Job: Seeing in the Dark
3. Deuteronomy: A Taste of the Bittersweet
4. Psalms: Spirituality in Every Key
5. Ecclesiastes: The End of Wisdom
6. The Prophets: God Talks Back
7. Advance Echoes of a Final Answer
The book opens with a chapter that’s also available for free reading on the Internet (reference below). Yancey tells of how his brother’s “life verse” humorously underscores the general obscurity of the Old Testament to modern minds—even in seminaries! It is with such a human analogies and biographical touches that the author bridges the chasm between the ancient and the contemporary, the Middle Eastern and the North American. Of Job’s suffering and trusting God against all adversity he says (p. 68):
When a pastor goes to prison for his peaceful protest against injustice, when a social worker moves into an urban ghetto in order to rebuild community from the ground up, when a couple refuses to give up on a difficult marriage, when a parent waits with undying hope and forgiveness for the return of an estranged child, when a son or daughter chooses to care for a terminally ill parent rather than investigate euthanasia, when a young professional resists mounting temptations toward wealth and success—in all these sufferings, large and small, there is the assurance of a deeper level of meaning, of a sharing in Christ’s own redemptive victory. “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (Romans 8:19).
For the Psalms, Yancey encourages the reader to know the Psalms by heart in order to pray them—in all their diversity of praise, petition, and even imprecation (cursing)—at the appropriate times (p. 123):
The odd mixture of psalms of cursing, psalms of praise, and psalms of confession no longer jars me as it once did. Instead, I am continually amazed by the spiritual wholeness of life by brining to God every emotion experienced in daily activity. One need not “dress up” or “put on a face” to meet God. There are no walled-off areas; God can be trusted with reality.
Yancey also addresses the notion that the prophets are all the same, boring but weird (p. 180-81):
The prophets drew very startling figures indeed, and the more I studied them the more I liked them. Urbane Isaiah walked around stripped and barefoot for three years to make a political statement (imagine how the Washington press corps would treat such a protest today); Jeremiah staggered under an ox yoke to draw attention to his message of doom; Ezekiel lay on his side for months at a time, bound by ropes, facing a clay model of Jerusalem. In these ways the prophets conveyed something too strong to be reduced to words. Weird? When a tornado is snaking directly toward your neighborhood, you don’t deliver polished speeches: you jump up and down and scream like a madman.
CRITIQUE
Anyone wishing a soft landing in the Old Testament should read this book. As usual, Yancey makes great reading. He brings out unusual angles for looking at the familiar and uses excellent emotive devices to pull the reader along. In The Bible Jesus Read I have noticed fewer objectional elements than in his other books. Here, he remarkably spends less time promoting Roman Catholic, ecumenical, and existentialist icons.
Probably my biggest flap would be his unnecessary patronage of “the Jews” in his first chapter, where he claims (quoting Thomas Cahill, p. 23):
... we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movements of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-speech and pro-democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines, and even China.
In the light of popular Christian Zionism, Yancey would do well to highlight what he means by “the Jews”—whether he is referring to those claiming that name according to the circumcision made with hands but rejecting Jesus, or to those in the tradition of the patriarch Abraham, who was circumcised at heart and rejoiced by faith to see Jesus revealed (John 8:56). Abolitionists William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, and labour activist the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury[1] were motivated by love of the Son of God who is today rejected and persecuted by mainline Judaism.[2] The Old and New Testaments, of course, represent a very different “Jewish heritage” from the modern synagogue, much of whose traditions emanate from those rebuffed by our Lord when He countered the Pharisees of His day. It is not “the Jews” but born-again Christians, as salt and light of the world, who have brought about the freedoms that much of the world enjoys.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. 1993. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
Wallace, Daniel B. 1995. Granville Sharp: A Model of Evangelical Scholarship and Social Activism. Online article at http://www.bible.org/docs/soapbox/gsharp.htm
Yancey, Philip. 1999. The Bible Jesus Read. Christianity Today. The online article corresponds to the first chapter of the book by that name, entitled “Is the Old Testament Worth the Effort?”— http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/9t1/9t1062.html
[1] More heroes of the faith at: http://www.apchurches.org.uk/articles/our_christian_heritage.htm
[2] Pastors in the Holy Land have complained about the lack of awareness of their plight among Christians in the West, who are constantly fed misinformation from the Christian Zionist platform: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7891/falwell.html