Philip Yancey is editor-at-large of Christianity Today, and author of a number of Christian books which have appeared in recent years and proved immensely popular, including The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and Where Is God When it Hurts? This book, as the title indicates, is about the Old Testament.
After acknowledging and responding in a general way to some of the common blockages people have to valuing the Old Testament, the author offers a sampling of its contents. The proof, after all, is in the eating! One chapter each is devoted to Job, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and the Prophets - a fair representation of the different kinds of Old Testament literature. A final chapter (‘Advance Echoes of a Final Answer’) moves beyond the Old Testament to Jesus.
There is a lot I like about this book. It is beautifully and passionately written. The author involves us in his own personal struggle to come to terms with books which at first confused, shocked, or simply bored him, and the joy of his own discovery becomes our own. Philip Yancey has clearly been deeply affected by the rugged realism and soaring visionary character of the Old Testament. Furthermore, for the most part, he has managed to get his finger on the pulse of each type of literature he has sampled.
Although the style is popular, it is not superficially devotional. The insightful engagement with the text comes partly from the fact that the author has clearly read a great deal of quality literature and understands how it works. I especially like the way he shows how the existential questions which trouble many of the Old Testament writers (‘Do I Matter?’, ‘Does God Care?’, ‘Why Doesn’t God Act?’) find their true answers only in Jesus Christ.
However, precisely because this book is so engaging, certain cautionary remarks are called for. Yancey has a tendency to be too existential, and not enough theological. The Bible, in the end, is not about our personal struggles, but about God’s kingdom and glory. Yancey himself knows this, but at times it tends to be submerged. The treatment of Deuteronomy is too racy for me, and too focused on Moses (Prince of Egypt style). The ‘movement towards grace’ which the author detects in the Old Testament seems not to recognise sufficiently that the Old Testament is founded on grace (creation and promise) from the beginning.
One could go on, but that would be churlish. The main thing to realise is that this book is an appetiser. Bible study groups will need something else, but it may well provide the motivation for people to study the Old Testament.
