Quest to Save the Old Testament

David Ney

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Torá
• Ketuvim
• Nevi'im
• Old Testament
• Judaism
• History of religions
• Christianity
• Ketouvim
• Le livre des prophètes
• Torah

Informations

• Publié par: Lexham Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 0001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683596271
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

THE QUEST to SAVE the OLD TESTAMENT
Mathematics, Hieroglyphics, and Providence in Enlightenment England
DAVID NEY
STUDIES IN HISTORICAL AND SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
The Quest to Save the Old Testament: Mathematics, Hieroglyphics, and Providence in Englightenment England
Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology
Copyright 2022 David Ney
Lexham Academic, an imprint of Lexham Press
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You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books.
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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the from the Authorized (King James) Version. The Authorized Version of the Bible (‘the KJV’), the rights in which are vested in the Crown in the United Kingdom, is reproduced here by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, New International Version ® , NIV ® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. ® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
The image on page 114 is “The Christian Covenant in Hieroglyphics” by Hubert-François Gravelot . c. 1730s. Public domain.
Print ISBN 9781683596264
Digital ISBN 9781683596271
Library of Congress Control Number 2022933803
Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Elizabeth Vince, Allie Boman, Mandi Newell, Abigail Stocker
Cover Design: Brittany Schrock
CONTENTS
Foreword by Wesley Hill
Introduction
1. A Catalogue of Numbers: Isaac Newton’s Old Testament
2. Left for Dead: Samuel Clarke’s Old Testament
3. A Storehouse of Hieroglyphs: John Hutchinson’s Old Testament
4. An Equal Witness: George Watson’s Old Testament
5. A Monument of the Divine Order: George Horne’s Old Testament
6. The Voice of Providence: William Jones of Nayland’s Old Testament
Conclusion
Epilogue: The End of Hutchinsonian Scriptural Emblematicism
Afterword by Ephraim Radner
Bibliography
Subject & Author Index
Scripture Index
FOREWORD
In St. Paul’s letter to the churches in Galatia, we witness a fascinating and, to us moderns, counterintuitive phenomenon. Portraying the Galatians’ dire crisis of standing on the precipice of apostasy, Paul “reads” the Galatian Christians as the post-exodus generation of Israelites wandering in the wilderness on their way to Canaan.
The Lord of Israel had said to Moses in Deuteronomy that the people of Israel, freshly delivered from their slavery in Egypt, “have been quick to turn from the way that I commanded them” (9:12 NRSV; the Septuagint’s word for “quick” is ταχύ ). Borrowing this language, Paul writes to his Galatians converts, who have lately been “set … free from the present evil age” (1:4): “I am astonished that you are so quickly [ ταχέως ] deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel” (1:6). What underlies Paul’s rhetorical move here?
Pastor and New Testament scholar Todd Wilson has argued that Paul here performs “a recapitulation and transmutation of [the story of Israel] in the life of his churches.” 1 But it might be even more accurate to say that he “scripts” his churches into the scriptural narrative of God’s elect people. 2 Either way, Paul’s creative engagement with the text of Scripture demonstrates that, for him, the Old Testament is no past prologue; it is an active divine agent that allows Paul to understand the true stakes of the crisis in Galatia.
This way of reading the Old Testament is unfamiliar to most modern biblical scholars. Or, if it is familiar, it remains deeply unconvincing. The importance of David Ney’s study of the “Hutchinsonian” tradition of reading the Old Testament is that it shows, historically, why Paul’s mode of biblical exegesis became so unappealing to modern readers and that it demonstrates, theologically, why it can and ought to be revived.
There are now many advocates for Christian “figural” reading of the Old Testament, but none that I am aware of showcase the historical attention, theological acumen, and hermeneutical incisiveness of this one. It should be read not only by historians but also, and hopefully especially, by those who wish to contribute to the ongoing work of reading our world in light of the story God is writing in and with the text of Scripture.
Wesley Hill
Holland, Michigan
The Third Sunday in Easter 2022
INTRODUCTION
In 2017 Brent A. Strawn published a book with the provocative title The Old Testament Is Dying . This turn of phrase broadcasts the author’s uncomfortable conclusion that “for many contemporary Christians, at least in North America, the Old Testament has ceased to function in healthy ways in their lives as sacred, authoritative, canonical literature.” These individuals, Strawn continues, “do not regard the Old Testament in the same way (or as highly) as the New Testament, do not understand the Old Testament, would prefer to do without the Old Testament, and for all practical purposes do exactly that by means of their neglect and ignorance of it, whether in private devotion or public worship both.” 1 The steady stream of proposals for a newly invigorated and authentically Christian reclamation of the Old Testament indicates that Strawn is not alone in his assessment. 2 The problem for Strawn and the rest is not that isolated figures such as Andy Stanley vocally dismiss the Old Testament. Such dismissals are indicative of this more ominous problem: a church which has functionally embraced a New Testament Christianity.
The conviction that the Old Testament struggles to function as Scripture for Christians in the modern West has a long history. At the end of the nineteenth century, A. F. Kirkpatrick (1849–1940) complained that the Old Testament had “become a discredited, and therefore disused book,” and he therefore set out to refute the popular opinion that “the Old Testament is of no particular moment, all that we need being the New Testament.” 3 Kirkpatrick was not the first to publicly decry the death of the Old Testament. That honor should probably be given to the idiosyncratic natural philosopher John Hutchinson (1674–1737). In his 1724 work Moses’s Principia, Hutchinson argued that the death of the Old Testament should be placed squarely on the shoulders of the author of the Principia Mathematica and his disciples. According to Hutchinson, the Old Testament had fallen into disrepute because while people were praising Isaac Newton (1643–1727) as the font of wisdom, they should have been looking to Moses. That Christians have decried the degradation of the Old Testament since the dawn of modernity is extremely important to note, as it confirms that the status of the Old Testament is bound to culturally specific perspectives upon the text. Old Testament degradation is the product of the particular cultural context known today as “modernity.” This much is uncontroversial. What is less obvious is the nature of the tie that binds them. This study will follow Hutchinson’s lead and test, as a hypothesis, his intriguing claim that Old Testament degradation was the result of the rise of Newtonian science.
Historians have found it all too easy to dismiss Hutchinson and his followers—known then and now as Hutchinsonians—as Counter-Enlightenment buffoons. 4 It is curious that they have been treated this way given that they were, in the words of David Katz, “absolutely central to English and Scottish theology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.” 5 But eighteenth-century historiography has long been fertile ground for what Herman Butterfield famously called “Whig History.” Butterfield complained against the “Whiggishness” of his fellow British historians, which compelled them to interpret sequences of events as causal lines of progressive development and therefore led them to only engage particulars that could be easily conformed to this pattern. 6 “Nowhere,” laments Katz, “is [the] tendency towards ‘Whig History’ more apparent than in the almost complete neglect suffered by the Hutchinsonians.” 7
The time has come for a reassessment of their work. In the first place, recent scholarship confirms that Hutchinson was acute in his assessment that the Old Testament had been decisively compromised. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the status of the Old Testament was at an all-time low in England, and it is Hutchinson and his disciples, more than anyone else, who speak into this issue of critical concern. Hutchinson is more than just another voice that can be added to the chorus of contemporary Old Testament advocates. When he wrote in defense of the Old Testament, he wrote as one who had experienced the important cultural and intellectual shifts which took place in the years 1680–1715—years which have long held interest to historians as crucial for the construction of modernity as the dawn of the Enlightenment.
A reassessment of Hutchinson and his followers must extend beyond the simple acknowledgement that they identified the modern problem of Old Testament degradation. Their explanatory claims must be taken seriously. When they are, it becomes possible to appreciate why they were regarded by many serious and devout scholars as not only credible but compelling. We can begin, on this score, with Hutchinson’s foundational observation that his contemporaries were looking to Newton rather than Moses for natural-philosophical wisdom. This claim was plausible because many Christians had, in recent memory, looked to Moses as the philosopher who had hidden esoteric knowledge (known as prisca theologia or prisca sapientia ) in his text. And while this practice was in full retreat by the time Hutchinson entered the fray, many Christians continued to take for granted that the Bible spoke truthfully about the natural world, and they were thus intuitively disposed to attentively consider Hutchinson’s proposal. According to Hutchinson, C