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Undervaluation of the Old Testament in Christian Spirituality 17 injunction seems more manageable than the Joseph novella, an Isaian prophecy or even a Psalm or Proverb which can at times turn out to be treacherously taxing just before bed time. This, though popular, is of course a false perception: reading a single verse from the New Testament leaves one as vulnerable to misinterpretation as reading a single verse from the Old Testament. Yet, the perception persists, so that except for a courageous few, the New Testament is preferred for a “quick read.” This leaves the Old Testament, or at least the greatest part of it, under-utilised in the spiritual life of the church as a whole and in that of individual believers. The case here is not that the Old Testament finds no place at all within spirituality. However, these ten reasons offer some explanations for the tradition within the Christian churches that the New Testament nourishes us spiritually, while the Old Testament remains in the spiritual shadows, so to speak. Even when the Old Testament is employed, only two loci from it figure with any given frequency: most beloved, the Psalms, 66 and second, the concept of imago Dei (Gen 1:27). In both cases, better readings are often required, 67 though there are some exceptions that take historicalcritical exegesis seriously. 68 By and large, then, the Old Testament 66 Holt, A Brief History of Christian Spirituality, 29; Houlden, “Bible, Spirituality of the,” 48–49; G. S. Wakefield, “The Psalms,” in Westminster Dictionary of Spirituality (ed. G. S. Wakefield; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 322–23; cf. G. Sklar-Chik, “Prayer: Praying the Psalms,” in Christian Spirituality in South Africa (ed. C. Kourie and L. Kretzschmar; Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2000), 195–208. 67 Sklar-Chik, for example, reads Psalm 57 as Davidic; and the idea of humanity created in God’s image is often so loaded with modern meanings that one can hardly refer to such interpretations as exegesis (see Sklar-Chik, “Prayer: Praying the Psalms,” 204–7; cf. Lombaard, “The Bible in the Apartheid Debate,” 78– 80). 68 W. Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002); C. Stuhlmueller, The Spirituality of the Psalms (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002).
18 The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality plays a much smaller role in spirituality than its proportions in the Christian Scriptures would suggest. This is the case within churches, for individual believers, and where the Bible is a source for instruction. 3. Conclusion Investigating the relationship between the Old Testament and spirituality is no one-sided quest for relevance on the part of the former, though no doubt being relevant to church, society, and individual believers is incumbent upon us. 69 The Bible remains, first of all, a book of faith, but then always with its immediate implications for the broader contexts in which believers find themselves. 70 To change somewhat the imagery of Gorringe, 71 this is like the tango dance, which consists of two steps. Anyone who takes one step only falls over. The second step follows automatically and very rapidly on the first. This too is part of the interactive essence of Christian spirituality: that the Bible will be one step of the dance of life, and Christian practice the other—with neither step taken in half measures. 69 Cf. Nel, “Spirituality and Religion: A Challenge to Near Eastern Studies,” 2– 3. 70 Lombaard, “The Bible in the Apartheid Debate,” 85–86. 71 See Gorringe, The Education of Desire, 106.
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The emerging discipline of Biblical
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