Finding your way through Scripture

Ben Crelin talks to Dr Carol Kaminski about how seeing the bigger picture can change the way we read the Bible

Many people, even Christians, struggle to read through the Old Testament. A collection of diverse narratives, poetry, law and history, drawn together over centuries, the Old Testament’s many patterns and threads can be hard to catch onto and keep hold of as we read. Its best-known stories and verses can be cut adrift from their anchoring context and we miss out on the bigger part they play in the story of redemptive history. 

Helping people to see the bigger picture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is the mission of Dr Carol Kaminski, Professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and the creator of the CASKET EMPTY series, a set of biblical timelines and study guides designed to teach the narrative of the Bible. 

Reading in context 

“I think increasing biblical illiteracy is a great challenge facing the Church today. The Old Testament, especially, is read far less and can be more of a challenge because it’s covering a much longer time period and has more books than the New Testament. In fact, one of the first things I say when I teach the Old Testament is that many of the books are not in chronological order. One time after teaching at a church a medical doctor who’d been a Christian for about five years came up to me and said, ‘No one has ever told me that. Of course I can’t understand it.’ To really read it well, we need to have the outline of the biblical redemptive story and be able to read the books within that narrative.”

Kaminski believes that when we aren’t  equipped with a bigger picture of the biblical narrative there are at least three mistakes we can make. “First of all, when reading the Old Testament we can take selected verses out of their context, usually promises, and then we apply them immediately to our own lives. A great example would be the blessings of the covenant in Deuteronomy 28, where people assume that if they obey God then these blessings are going to come upon them. This cafeteria pick-and-choose style doesn’t understand the context.”

The second problem is that without the narrative we miss out on a broader, bigger view of God’s character. “When we think about the character of God, we have descriptions of his attributes in the Bible, such as Exodus 34:6-7, ‘a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness’. But how do we understand these attributes of God in his character? We understand it through what he does, through narrative. In your own life, your knowledge of the qualities of a person is solidified when you see how that person acts. What happens in the Old Testament is that because we don’t know that narrative, we really don’t know the character of God. In my mind, that’s an enormous issue facing the church. Understanding that larger narrative is central to seeing who God is. 

The third mistake is seen in how we apply Scripture to life. All too often our categories for understanding our lives come from somewhere other than the Bible. “If we pick and choose Bible verses, and we don’t know the redemptive narrative, then what ends up happening is it creates a vacuum, and the cultural narratives give us all our categories,” she says. “You could think about the American Dream narrative. We take the Bible verses that fit a prosperity narrative rather than understanding what role things like suffering play in the Christian narrative. The American Dream narrative hasn’t got a role for suffering, but the biblical narrative at the very centre is a crucified Messiah.”

CASKET EMPTY 

It was seeing problems like these that inspired Kaminski to create CASKET EMPTY. While living at Tyndale House, during study for her PhD at Cambridge in the late 1990s, she had the idea for the series. “I was asked by a church to teach an eight-week series on the Old Testament. It would be one night a week, for anyone in the church. As I was preparing I knew I wanted to teach through the redemptive narrative. And since it was eight weeks, I started to think about how I could divide the Old Testament up into parts. I started with creation and then Abraham. And that’s when I felt the Lord really gave me the acronym, CASKET EMPTY. So that was where it all began and, shortly afterwards, I started looking for someone who could be part of the project. I approached David Palmer, a pastor and graduate from Gordon-Conwell, and we have now been working together for a number of years.” 

CASKET EMPTY is an acronym encapsulating the key periods of the redemptive story of the Bible: Creation, Abraham, Sinai, Kings, Exile, Temple (OT), and Expectations, Messiah, Pentecost, Teaching, Yet-to-Come (NT). The title CASKET EMPTY refers to the central point of this story, Jesus’s empty tomb. The series plots each of these pivotal moments in the Bible narrative along visual timelines which line up key figures, events, biblical books and themes. Since their inception, the timelines and study guides have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Farsi, and the team is now looking at a project to bring them to Haiti and Thailand. 

 Seeing the events of the Old Testament in context is key to understanding them: “So first, you’ve got to get the historical context and the narrative. But then you also want to see theologically how things are developing within that narrative. Understanding covenants is a great place to start because they help you to put the narrative together. In fact, misunderstanding covenants can lead to misinterpretation of the Old Testament. For example, we may think that the Old Covenant was exclusively Jewish, and that the New Covenant is open to Gentiles. So since we’re under the New Covenant, this is now open to all. But this misses the missional call from the very beginning of the Old Covenant in Genesis 12:3 and Genesis 17, where you have non-Israelites and non-Abrahamic family being incorporated. Recently, when looking at all the genealogies in 1 Chronicles 1-9, I noticed that the tribe of Judah is the most ethnically diverse within the genealogies. You know, you don’t hear too many sermons on that. We just assume that it’s exclusively Jewish. So a good grasp of the covenant theology is so important as we consider that larger narrative.”

Knowing your history 

The Books of Chronicles are a perfect example of the value of knowing the  overarching storyline of the Old Testament. Reading these books can feel dense and difficult. You can find yourself stuck in chapter after chapter of long and detailed genealogical lists, wondering why we need repeats of stories you’ve read before in 2 Samuel and the Kings. Through her current work on a commentary for Zondervan’s Story of God series, Kaminski has been putting her vision for reading the Bible with a bigger perspective into practice by putting the Books of Chronicles in context 

“The author of Chronicles, whom we call The Chronicler, is telling the history of God’s people from Adam all the way through to King Cyrus. It’s a sacred history with beautiful theology, and he’s drawing out themes from the stories of Israel’s kings that are relevant for his time period. It’s in the final period of the Old Testament, that last 100 years: the Israelites have gone into exile, they’ve now returned to Jerusalem, but they’re still under the rule of the Persian Empire. Jerusalem has been in ruins, so they’ve had to rebuild, and the land is much smaller than it was, and they’ve now become the minority within a majority culture. Life is difficult.

“The Chronicler’s question was: how do we live in this new context? And I think it has a lot of parallels for us today. The Chronicler draws on themes like seeking the face of God: 2 Chronicles 7:14 “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face”. We also see the themes of prayer and worship, even joyful worship, which is so fascinating, because here they are during this really difficult time period. And yet the Chronicler is focusing on prayer and joy in worship.

“You can see an example of this when Hezekiah is king in 2 Chronicles 30. Here the Chronicler mentions (and it’s not in the corresponding narrative we have in 2 Kings) that Hezekiah invites all the Northerners to the Passover. It is this wonderful story of the reconciliation of former enemies resulting in worship and prayer. This chapter is really a commentary on 2 Chronicles 7:14 and a great story for thinking about our context today when there’s so much conflict and animosity. Here’s King Hezekiah inviting the Northerners, their current enemies, to be part of the Passover. And how is it that there’s unity? God is giving them one heart. These are some of the jewels of the Old Testament.” Something as simple as seeing Hezekiah and the Books of Chronicles on a timeline can be the difference between realising the remarkable nature of this joy in a joyless context, and skipping over it as a small moment in a long history. 

Making connections 

Kaminski is quick to note the care that is needed when relating Old Testament texts directly to our situation today. “We want to look at the Old Testament through the New Testament rather than going straight from the Old Testament to our own lives. God can use particular Bible verses to speak to us. But when we’re thinking of a hermeneutic principle (a way of reading and interpreting), we want to see the Bible as one narrative, and then look at the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. And ask, ‘what does the New Testament do in terms of taking up those theological themes?’”

When read alone, the Old Testament ends with a lot of unanswered questions. “Think about the prophets or the promises made to Abraham and David. If you understand the Old Testament storyline, you’ll know the Messiah hasn’t come yet. God promised a new covenant, but it hasn’t arrived. The ending of the whole story is driving us to say, ‘The things that God promised haven’t come to pass.’ The context shows you that there is something else coming. Then the New Testament begins with Matthew’s genealogy, that Jesus is the son of David, the son of Abraham.” When we read the Old and New Testaments together, with each shining light on the other, we see the real significance of these details.