Who do we think we are?

Last week’s contribution to this series looked at our roots in the times of the apostles, and we saw something of the long history stemming from that time, which is part of who we are.

This week, I would like to go back even further.  One of the early disagreements that happened in the life of the Church was with people who thought that we should leave aside the Old Testament books of the Bible and just concentrate on those of the New Testament.  The same people also wanted to delete parts of the New Testament.

It is no wonder that parts of the Old Testament leave people questioning their value, and may even be shocked by them.  However, the Old Testament gives us a history of God’s contact with real people just as they were – warts and all.  There is a development running through the Old Testament, which is a development of people’s understanding of God, beginning from quite raw ideas of God into much richer, deeper and more refined ideas.  This is connected with a development of human religiousness, a growingly spiritual development.

All those ideas and emotions which appear in the books of the Old Testament, are still present among human beings, as a quick look around our contemporary time would show us.  We can find ourselves, and our times, reflected back to us in so many of the incidents, ideas and feelings expressed in the Scriptures.  The development at work in the history of the Bible is a development which needs to keep taking place in us and among us.

The Old Testament flows into the New and much of the New Testament needs the Old for its proper understanding.  The Old Testament belonged to the inheritance of Jesus as a Jewish man and so much of what he handed on to us comes out of his pondering and reworking of the biblical inheritance he received. 

Thus, it is that the Old Testament is part of our inheritance; it is part of who we are as the Christian People, as the followers of Jesus.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin

Published: 30 August 2024