At least three times in this book, Brent Strawn assures readers that he doesn’t believe that Christian preachers and teachers intentionally tell lies about the Old Testament. But that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the mistruths that are prevalent in pulpit and pew.
Strawn calls them mistruths rather than lies in part to emphasize how dangerous they can be. “In the case of a lie, the truth simply needs to be brought to light for things to be set right,” he writes. While lies can be set straight with the truth, mistruths are harder to identify. They have deeper (and often unexamined) roots of misinformation or prejudice. “Mistruths are thus far more insidious and intractable than a bald-faced lie,” Strawn explains.
The book covers ten mistruths touching on a variety of topics, including God’s nature, violence in the scriptures, what the law is (and is not), and how the Old Testament relates to Jesus Christ.
Strawn begins with the common mistruth that “the Old Testament is ‘someone else’s mail,’” meaning that it wasn’t written for Christians. Pastors and teachers often convey the narratives and teachings of the Old Testament in a way that fails to connect them with the Christian story. And yet the humanity of many Old Testament characters makes them inspiring examples for Christians. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam model how to live in the midst of adversity; Daniel and Esther exemplify the need to be courageous. The Old Testament’s teachings, too, offer timeless truths that seek to connect us with God and our neighbors.
Perhaps a more puzzling mistruth is that “the Old Testament is a boring history book.” Au contraire! The stories of the Torah in particular are quite scintillating at times. Are there troubling stories in the midst of them? Yes, and Strawn addresses some of these, especially in his discussion of the mistruth that “the Old Testament is hyper-violent.” These and the other mistruths that Strawn raises are important for Christians to consider as we learn more about the Old Testament and its role in our own tradition.
“The Old Testament isn’t spiritually enriching” is a very unfortunate mistruth for those who have adopted it. The chapter on this subject is one of Strawn’s strongest. He draws out the many ways Old Testament genres—the Psalms, narratives like the exodus—have historically been and continue to be sources of great inspiration when we allow them to enter our hearts as well as our heads.
I would have liked for Strawn to spend more time unpacking the mistruth that “the Old Testament has been rendered permanently obsolete.” Of all the mistruths, I’ve found this one to be the most prevalent in my own ministry. I’ve encountered many Christians with supersessionist beliefs, in which the church is seen as the new Israel. In the New Testament there is a lot of language contrasting what is new with what is old—think old and new wineskins, for instance. Strawn counters this idea with the fact that much of the New Testament draws on the Old Testament “in terms of citation and allusion.” He argues that “old doesn’t mean bad” and “new doesn’t mean Christian.” Yet I fear that the mistruth of supersessionism is major fuel for anti-Semitism in the church’s teaching.
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