{"id":1270,"date":"2010-11-30T09:19:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T09:19:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/bibleandculture\/2010\/11\/on-the-richter-scale--sandy-richter-in-the-news.html"},"modified":"2010-11-30T09:19:32","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T09:19:32","slug":"on-the-richter-scale-sandy-richter-in-the-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/11\/on-the-richter-scale-sandy-richter-in-the-news.html","title":{"rendered":"On the Richter Scale—- Sandy Richter in the News"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"richter.jpg\"<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

Well it isn’t the cover of the Rolling Stone, but I am proud to say the newspaper in Jackson Ms. was smart enough to interview our friend and colleague Sandy Richter, who taught for us for many years (still does online, I believe) and is now full time at Wesley Biblical in Jackson.   Here the Q+A part of a recent interview they did with her. <\/p>\n

What is the message we’re not hearing from the Old Testament?<\/b>
\nThe message of a redemptive God, a merciful loving deity who is
\nextending himself as far as he can to redeem humanity. We tend to hear
\nthat message from the New Testament, but we overlook it in the old. In
\nfact, I’m often asked the question when I teach in lay circles: “Why is
\nit that the God of the New Testament is the God of mercy, and the God of
\nthe Old Testament is the God of judgment?” I’m always partly
\nentertained and partly aghast at that question, because I see a God who
\nhas been working since the foundation of the world to redeem humanity
\nmarching all the way through the Old Testament. And I typically have to
\nremind the church that the Second Coming is all about judgment, so don’t
\nthink you’ve missed out on judgment just because you’ve claimed the New
\nTestament and not the Old.<\/p>\n

\nDo you think God communicates in the Old Testament differently from the way he communicates in the New?<\/b>
\nNo, but I think the audience is very different–and that is the great
\nchallenge. In … “The Epic of Eden,” that actually is my exact quest:
\nto help the New Testament Christian understand the audience of the Old
\nTestament message, so that they can hear it as it was intended. The Old
\nTestament truly is long long ago and far far away. Just reaching back to
\nAbraham, we’re reaching back … to 2,000 BC. … So this is ancient
\nancient history, and it’s an entirely different economy an entirely
\ndifferent social structure.<\/p>\n

These folks are nomadic pastoralists who are very wealthy, but live in
\nan ephemeral society–meaning that they’re changing rotations regularly,
\nthat their bread and butter is raising sheep and goats, and their
\nlifestyle is following the seasonal pasturage of their flocks. This is
\nradically different from 20th-century westerners. Radical isn’t even a
\nstrong enough word.<\/p>\n

… [T]hen, as we march through the tribal lineage of ancient Israel,
\nwe’re introduced to a very patriarchal tribal culture in which kinship
\nties are everything, … this very male, very clan-based society. Then
\nwe move into the monarchy, which is … centralized.<\/p>\n

All this to say it’s just a very different audience, and Israel itself
\nis geographically very different and economically very different. So all
\nof this makes for a message that sounds quite foreign to the modern
\nreader, whereas when you move into the New Testament, Hellenism has
\nalready blanketed the Middle East, and Jesus is at least at some point
\nspeaking Greek. This is a more urban environment, and people have
\nbusinesses and trade; it sounds more familiar. So I think that is the
\nessence of the change. I don’t think the message shifts that much, but I
\nthink the audience does.<\/p>\n

\nAre there ways we resemble the audience of the Old Testament more than the New?<\/b>
\nI think we resemble both audiences in that the needs of the human
\nheart haven’t changed much. Just as in Abraham’s day, and in Peter and
\nPaul’s day, the average citizen is worried about the next meal, the next
\nmortgage payment, how their children are going to turn out and this
\neternal ache in their souls. I would say that is common to the Old
\nTestament audience, New Testament audience, and contemporary audience.<\/p>\n

… I love following the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and
\nwatching them stumble through real life, bumping into their God and his
\nexpectations, messing up on those expectations, trying again. It
\ncomforts me to see that David was a bad parent, and still, the kingdom
\nsurvived.<\/p>\n

So I think sometimes the details of daily life are more visible in the
\nOld Testament, and so that would be a point of connection for a
\ncontemporary reader. What I wind up telling my students all the time is
\nthat the goal of great interpretation–and, therefore, great preaching–is
\nfor the interpreter to be able to get themselves back into the shoes of
\nthe folks whose stories are being told.<\/p>\n

I’m always challenging my students to think about these characters in
\nthe Bible, be they Old or New Testament, as real people who lived in
\nreal places and had exercised real faith. As soon as these folks become
\nivory-tower, pedestal icons, their struggles become irrelevant to us,
\nand their stories become distant. … I’m always trying to bridge that
\ngap by reintroducing historical detail and anthropological detail and
\ntalking about real societal structure and the real civic laws that
\nstructured their everyday lives: what they ate, how they farmed, that
\nsort of thing.<\/p>\n

\nWhat is something that most people don’t know about the Old Testament?<\/b>
\nI would say the structure of their society. I actually open up my
\nintroduction to Old Testament with a lecture about what it means to be a
\ntribal society. One of the banes of biblical interpretation is
\nsomething the missiologists call ethnocentrism, where we, the reader,
\nassume that the folks in the Bible lived just like us. So we read their
\nlife interactions as though they were situated in an upper-class little
\nsuburb dangling off Madison Avenue and Highland Parks Colony. We miss
\nhalf the message.<\/p>\n

… If you’re thinking American Indians or the Arab factions you see
\nthrowing rocks at each other on the television screen–that’s tribal
\nsociety. And that’s what Israel was, and God chose to reveal himself in
\nspace and time to a tribal culture, and so he adapted to that culture.
\nAnd if we’re going to understand the message of the Bible, we’re going
\nto have to do our best to get back inside that culture to do proper
\ninterpretation and get around the message in real life.<\/p>\n

\nHow can we can gain a better understanding of life in a tribal culture?<\/b>
\n[L]et me make it very clear that I’m not asking Christians to become
\ntribal. The culture in which the story of redemption is communicated
\nshifts regularly. We start off with tribal nomads, we move to a
\nmonarchy, we move to an exiled province, and then we move to the
\nHellenized, Romanized culture of the New Testament. So we’re not about
\ncanonizing their culture; we’re just about understanding their culture.<\/p>\n

I always wind up with audiences saying “Oh, so we should mimic the way
\nthey structure their economy, or the way they blessed their children.”
\nI’m like no, no, no–you cannot become a pastoral nomad. You can’t do
\nthat. (laughs) Not in today’s economy. But you need to understand it.<\/p>\n

[T]he whole first chapter of … “Epic of Eden,” is about tribal culture
\nand what it means to be patriarchal … and how this value system
\nshaped all of Israel’s history, even into the New Testament, so that
\nwhen Jesus names God as Father, he’s actually operating out of a
\npatriarchal mindset. And when he speaks about his father’s house, in
\nJohn 14:2, he’s talking about the family compound. And when he speaks of
\nhaving come as the firstborn to share his inheritance with us, this is
\nall tribal law–he has some very specific cargo that he’s trying to
\ncommunicate to us. So our job is … to do our best to understand it so
\nwe can get a handle on the message.<\/p>\n

\nIs understanding the context of the Old Testament essential to understanding the meaning of what Jesus taught?<\/b>
\nI certainly believe with all the campus ministries and Four
\nSpiritual Laws and tracts … the simplest presentation of the Gospel
\nmessage can bring someone into the Kingdom–but … that is just the tip
\nof the iceberg. Who Jesus was, the message he came to bring, the promise
\nhe came to fulfill, the lineage that he comes as the final
\nrepresentative–all of these things are Old Testament messages.<\/p>\n

I often will joke with my students that if you want to, you can listen
\nto your favorite album on a cheap, one-speaker AM radio, or you can
\nlisten to it on Dolby surround sound. Make your choice. You can have one
\nthree-step presentation of the Roman Road, or you can come to realize
\nthat the last Adam of 1 Corinthians is the typological representation of
\nthe first Adam that stood in the Garden, and that the reason Jesus
\nneeds to be tempted by Satan in the wilderness is because the first Adam
\nwas tempted by Satan; the first Adam failed the test, and the second
\nAdam didn’t.<\/p>\n

When Jesus stands on the mountain and declares a new law, he’s not
\ncoming up with a new idea–he’s standing on the mountain like Moses did
\nand declaring to a new people, “I am the new lawgiver.” When he breaks
\nhis bread at communion meal, he calls himself the new Passover and tells
\nhis people, “I’ll put my blood on the lintels of your house and the
\ndeath angel will pass over.” All of these messages are as old as the
\nhills. We truncate them into this one final expression, and I think it
\ncheapens the message.<\/p>\n

\nDo Old Testament Prophets have something to teach us that is not just a precursor to the coming of Jesus?<\/b>
\nOh, yes, indeed. The Prophets actually spent most of their time
\nconfronting social injustice that specifically breached God’s covenant
\nlaw. The role of the prophet, primarily, was to come to the people and
\nto the king and to say to them, “God has given you this law by which you
\nare required to structure your lives, and you’re ignoring that law …
\nso I’m going to stand in the public square and announce how you are
\nignoring and breaching that law.” I think our culture could definitely
\nstand a prophet taking his position in the public square and pointing
\nout our compromise to God’s calling.<\/p>\n

And Hosea and Amos … what they’re shouting at Jeroboam II is that
\nyou’re wealthy and you’re politically secure, and you’re using your
\nwealth and your political security to abuse and oppress the poor. You
\nare busy decorating your house with ivory while the widow is starving in
\nthe streets, leaving her there to die. You have folks like Isaiah
\nstanding up to the kings and saying: “You’re busy plotting out your
\nentire national agenda without any attention to the lordship of Yahweh,
\nof God, in your nation’s life. I’m challenging you to pay attention to
\nhis lordship before you make your national strategy. Pay attention.”<\/p>\n

All of these messages I think are quite contemporary.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well it isn’t the cover of the Rolling Stone, but I am proud to say the newspaper in Jackson Ms. was smart enough to interview our friend and colleague Sandy Richter, who taught for us for many years (still does online, I believe) and is now full time at Wesley Biblical in Jackson.   Here the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nOn the Richter Scale- Sandy Richter in the News - The Bible and Culture<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/2010\/11\/on-the-richter-scale-sandy-richter-in-the-news.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On the Richter Scale- Sandy Richter in the News - 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A graduate of UNC, Chapel Hill, he went on to receive the M.Div. degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from the University of Durham in England. He is now considered one of the top evangelical scholars in the world, and is an elected member of the prestigious SNTS, a society dedicated to New Testament studies. Witherington has also taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt University, Duke Divinity School and Gordon-Conwell. A popular lecturer, Witherington has presented seminars for churches, colleges and biblical meetings not only in the United States but also in England, Estonia, Russia, Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Australia. He has also led tours to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Witherington has written over thirty books, including The Jesus Quest and The Paul Quest, both of which were selected as top biblical studies works by Christianity Today. He also writes for many church and scholarly publications, and is a frequent contributor to the Beliefnet website. Along with many interviews on radio networks across the country, Witherington has been seen on the History Channel, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Discovery Channel, A&E, and the PAX Network.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/author\/bwitherington"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}