Liberal Response to Old Testament

This solution was advocated by liberal theologians during the nineteenth century. Accepting the validity of Wellhausen’s theory of an evolutionary development in the Old Testament, they not only looked at the Bible as a historically conditioned book but also recognized its human aspect as a whole, something which had largely been ignored by orthodoxy over the centuries.

The liberal writers observed that the Old Testament had over time evolved from primitive to more developed forms and had gone through a fundamental change during this developmental process. They accepted the person of Jesus along with his teachings as their point of orientation and looked into the Old Testament from that perspective. As the New Testament is the only record of Jesus and his teachings, they therefore based their value judgment on the principles of the New Testament. By imposing these principles on the Old Testament, they separated passages of a normative nature from primitive, immoral, outgrown, and non-Christian ones contained within it, without denying the Old Testament’s authority.

A. B. Davidson, for example, argues that “we must neither deny all authority to the Old Testament in favor of the New nor place the Old Testament on the same level as the New, but study the Old Testament in view of “its climax in the New Testament.” E. Sellin maintains that “the Old Testament Canon is significant for the Old Testament theologian only in so far as it was accepted by Jesus and his apostles. That is to say, Old Testament theology is only interested in the line which was fulfilled in the Gospel.” F. W. Farrar informs us: “Is it not enough that, to us, the test of God’s word is the teaching of Him who is the Word of God? Is it not an absolutely plain and simple rule that anything in the Bible which teaches or seems to teach anything which is not in accordance with the love, the gentleness, the truthfulness, the purity of Christ’s Gospel, is not God’s word to us, however clearly it stands on the Bible page?”

This liberal approach to the Old Testament was unique in the sense that it neither fully followed Marcionism, nor the official, traditional solutions. Rather it assimilated thoughts from both camps without following any of the tendencies in toto. The position of the Liberalists was and still is quite complicated. Whilst they attempt to honor the Old Testament with historical and religious importance, they simultaneously cut it into a thousand pieces, treating some elements as binding and others as insignificant. Such an approach is in effect tantamount to their imposing their own authority upon the text of the Old Testament and determining which of the text should be religiously significant and which should be ignored as irrelevant. Through this approach, of which A. Harnack and H. Gunkel are good examples (as mentioned earlier), the liberals brought to modern Christianity “at least the camel’s nose of Marcionism.”

The result was that large parts of the Old Testament lost their importance as well as practical authority, and the effective liberal canon became a rather small one, usually containing the life and teachings of Jesus and some other biblical passages which might add some moral or spiritual point of view to these teachings.

It is justifiable to ask whether the Old Testament is divinely inspired or not. If the answer is yes, then it follows logically that it cannot be taken in parts. Either the Old Testament is fully inspired and authoritative in its entirety, or it is not authoritative at all. In fact, Jesus’ person and his teachings cannot be taken as the yardstick to determine authoritative passages from non-binding ones in the Old Testament due to historical reasons. The Old Testament existed historically before the person of Jesus Christ. And he followed it as Scripture (as is commonly held) and did not change it or cut it into pieces. On the other hand, the true facts about his historical life and teachings are themselves problems of great magnitude, as will be seen in the next chapter. The solution put forward by liberals not surprisingly encountered problems and limitations similar to those of Marcionism and the Orthodoxy, and the individual interpreter’s understandings were again to play a vital role in interpreting the accepted passages of the Old Testament. This ultimately led to individualism and very often to mutual contradiction, confusion and utter subjectivism.

It is clear from the above discussion that mainstream Christianity has preserved the Old Testament as something sacred and canonical and an intrinsic and inseparable part of its Holy Scripture whilst at the same time maintaining that it has been superseded by the New Testament. In this Christianity’s view of the Old Testament differs sharply to that of Judaism, which latter regards the Old Testament as sacred and unsuperseded. Theoretically the Old Testament is regarded as authoritative by Christianity and a part of its Holy Scripture, practically however, it is the New Testament which enjoys unitary, undisputed and unsuperseded authority. Christians read, understand, evaluate and explain the Old Testament in light of the New Testament and as a result accept its validity only to the degree that its teachings accord with those of the New. In doing so modern Christianity toes the line delineated by early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen.

Although these Fathers clearly subordinated the Old Testament to the New Testament since the early part of the second century, one can also see similar mixed and confused views concerning the real significance and authority of the Old Testament in the very early Christian Church dating back to the first century. Harnack summarizes the situation of the time in the following words: “The fact of the New Testament being placed on a level with the Old proved the most effective means of preserving to the latter its canonical authority, which had been so often assailed in the second century.... The immediate result of this investigation was not only a theological exposition of the Old Testament, but also a theory which ceased to view the two Testaments as of equal authority and subordinated the Old to the New. This result, which can be plainly seen in Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen, led to exceedingly important consequences. It gave some degree of insight into statements, hitherto completely unintelligible, in certain New Testament writings, and it caused the Church to reflect upon a question that had as yet been raised only by heretics, viz., what are the marks which distinguished Christianity from the Old Testament religion?”

The Early Church, like most modern Christians today, could not completely reject or accept the Old Testament. It also harbored contradictory views about the Old Testament, as Harnack observes: “An historical examination imperceptibly arose; but the old notion of the inspiration of the Old Testament confined it to the narrowest limits, and in fact always continued to forbid it; for, as before, appeal was constantly made to the Old Testament as a Christian book which contained all the truths of religion in perfect form. Nevertheless the conception of the Old Testament was here and there full of contradiction.”