Every Sunday, I will share a quote from something I’ve been reading. The hope is for you, dear reader, to share your thoughts on the quote and related issues and perhaps pick up some reading material along the way!
Reading the Old Testament as Christian Scripture
Douglas S. Earl’s The Joshua Delusion is an attempt to approach the Old Testament in such a way as to understand it as Christian Scripture. For Earl, what this means is reading Scripture in a way that reflects Christian teaching in the New Testament. Moreover, it may mean that we need not read the Bible the same way contemporaries read it. One of the criteria Earl suggests is the notion of “fittingness” in our reading of Scripture:
[F]or a Christian reader of a biblical text ‘fittingness’ is a criterion for interpretation that relates both to what the text was originally trying to achieve, and to how it is received and used in the canon of Scripture, and subsequently in the Christian tradition. (103, cited below)
Thus, the original intent is set alongside a canonical perspective of reading the Bible, and ultimately set against Christian reading of the Bible. This has wide-ranging implications for how Earl suggests we read the Old Testament, including, often, undermining the historicity of the text in favor of a more allegorical reading.
The Joshua Delusion is a challenging read in many ways. Ultimately, I think Earl takes his position too far–to the point that it becomes difficult to see exactly how interpretation ought to be done. Moreover, his thesis allows Christians to effectively dismiss the original intent and meaning of the text. Is that a truly plausible way to read the Bible? It seems to me that if a view entails the rejection of how a text may have originally been intended, that means that we have lost a deeply important aspect of interpretation. Of course, Earl anticipates this objection and responds to it, thus leading to an engaging book. Interested readers ought to check the book out.
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Source
Douglas S. Earl, The Joshua Delusion (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2010).
SDG.
J.W. Wartick - Reconstructing Faith 
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
Posted by Vincent S Artale Jr | March 27, 2016, 7:19 AMBefore I read your post I was thinking about the title and whether we can go too far; while I think there’s a place for the OT as Christian scripture in our reading but we can go too far as you said.
Posted by SLIMJIM | March 27, 2016, 10:47 PMInteresting thoughts. There certainly is some confusion on how to read the Old Testament as Christians.
Posted by Stephen Bedard | April 4, 2016, 6:23 PM