Among most Christians the Old Testament is little read in comparison to the New Testament. Furthermore, much of what is read is of...ten distorted by prejudice. Frequently the Old Testament is believed to express exclusively the principles of justice and revenge, in contrast to the New Testament, which represents those of love and mercy; even the sentence, "Love your neighbor as yourself," is thought by many to derive from the New, not the Old Testament. Or the Old Testament is believed to have been written exclusively in the spirit of narrow nationalism and to contain nothing of supranational universalism so characteristic of the New Testament.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the... New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them--Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles--appe...ar to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing by a wild beast!--between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealousy, and the king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen as his examples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Old Testament teems with prophecies of the Messiah, but nowhere is it intimated that that Messiah is to stand as a God to be w...orshipped. He is to bring peace on earth, to build up the waste places--to comfort the broken-hearted, but nowhere is he spoken of as a deity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Don't you realize that this is a new empire? Why, folks, there's never been anything like this since creation. Creation, huh, that... took six days, this was done in one. History made in an hour. Why it's a miracle out of the Old Testament!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have for years been intrigued with the ways in which Jews and southerners are alike--stepchildren of an anguished history. From ...the period before the Civil War, southerners have used Old Testament analogies to portray themselves as "the chosen people," surrounded and outnumbered but destined to survive and triumph against overwhelming odds. This analogy has endured deep in the southern psyche, influencing subconsciously its reactions to events. For example, in 1967, during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, polls showed that the South was caught up in military fervor and admiration for the lightning victory of the Israelis. It was almost as if Moshe Dayan had become the Israeli Stonewall Jackson, outthinking and outfighting his Arab foes, just as the boys in gray had done in the Shenandoah Valley against vastly superior numbers in the 1860s.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is still a great deal of legalism in the Old Testament idea of sin. The emphasis in the Sermon on the Mount is very differen...t from that in the commandments that Moses brought down from Sinai. The commandments have been translated into beatitudes. "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth," is not a sentence one could read in the Old Testament without a jolt, but by the time we reach it in the New Testament, we have been prepared for it. It is set in the context of the rest of Christ's life and teaching. Without that example the sentence carries little conviction because there is no evidence that the meek do or ever will inherit the earth. We have been turned away from a concern merely with our outward acts, to contemplate what lies most deep in our innermost selves, hidden from all but ourselves and God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And it seems to me a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit is Love. In the Old Testament it is an Eagle: in the New it is a Dove. ...Christ insists on the Dove: but in His supreme moments He includes the Eagle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »