Our Public Shaming on the Way to Death

In The Old Testament is Dying, Strawn makes extensive use of the analogy that the Old Testament is (like) a language. This eventually requires him to talk about language change and even language death. And this is important, because language death is rarely abrupt. Rather, the death of a language is more nuanced, drown out, and complicated. As for the most critical juncture in the process, it’s “when a generation of speakers stops communicating its language on a regular basis to its children” (p. 69).

Sound familiar?

Yet, for the moment I want to focus on the process of death. Namely, I want to focus on what happens to a language as it dies. According to Strawn, a dying language goes through something called repidginization, where said language is massively and abruptly simplified and reduced. It aggressively retracts and loses all notion of sophistication and complexity (pp. 69–70), and the result is something called a pidgin. During this process, a language is on life-support, used only when absolutely necessary and only for as long as necessary. Eventually, there comes a moment when a language is completely ignored and disregarded. At that moment, a language dies.

Nevertheless, repidginization does not have to result in death. The process could lead into another process called creolization. Creolization describes how a pidgin (a severely retracted and dying language) actually becomes a new language. When this happens, the new language takes on the growth cycles of languages, including expansion and initial moments of intense irregularity (pp. 64–65). Perhaps most importantly, a creole need not display very many, if any at all, vestiges of its historical roots. In other words, the process of creolization could be such that any relationship between the original language and its descendant is only revealed by knowledge of the historical process.

Applied to the Old Testament, the data suggests, as detailed extensively by Strawn, that repidginization is upon us. You don’t have to look far to see popular theologies built upon unsophisticated or erroneous ideas of the Old Testament. There are those of the so-called Prosperity Gospel and what I call “life-coaches-posing-as-preachers” (what Strawn calls “Happiologists”—i.e. Joel Olsteen and company). And I don’t have to mention the general lack of use of the Old Testament by preachers. Yet the criticality of the situation is perhaps most clear when one realizes that certain attacks on the faith are actually zeroing in on Old Testament pidgins and not the real language.

In chapter 4, Strawn interacts with the so-called New Atheists, a flamboyant group of educated enemies of Christianity. Their goal seems to be fairly simple—highlight the ostensible ludicrousness and incoherence of the faith to the point that any Christian is assumed to be a moron. What becomes clear, however, is that Dawkins and company assumes an understanding of and interaction with the Old Testament message that does not properly represent the whole. In keeping with the linguistic analogy, Dawkins targets pidgins of the Old Testament and not the language proper.

What I am trying to say is that the death of the Old Testament is not merely an internal phenomenon. Indeed, it started as in internal issue, but it has now metathesized and opened up the community to external attacks as well. In other words, the death of the Old Testament is now more than just the Church forgetting a critical part of its message. The death of the Old Testament is also now about the public shaming on the way to death. The death of the Old Testament comes with a propaganda video designed to highlight fundamental errors and hypocrisies. Thus, our responsibility in reviving the Old Testament must also be about preserving the coherence of our message so that we can respond to those who seek to trivialize our message for purposes of disingenuous attacks.

But make no mistake. Bringing the Old Testament back from the dead is no magic formula. It will not automatically provide answers to all of life’s questions and enigmas and dissolve all attacks from malicious skeptics. What it will do is revive a Canon necessary for formulating proper answers and responses. It will not render critical theological discourse pointless, but it will make it possible and fruitful. Moreover, it will demonstrate that the effectiveness of any apologetic scheme is directly related to a literacy in the totality of Scripture.