Not knowing quite what to do with the Old Testament is a hallmark of modern Christianity. In his magisterial The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World the late German exegete Hening Graf Reventlow argued that rationalist philosophy and historical criticism complicated the status of the Old Testament as Divine Word at the dawn of modernity. Other important works likewise provide complementary accounts of the Old Testament’s demise. In my recent monograph, The Quest to Save the Old Testament, I argue that developing conceptions of providence, which embraced nature rather than history as the primary forum of God’s beneficent oversight, had a devastating effect upon Old Testament authority.
While few modern Christians go as far as Andy Stanley in explicitly repudiating the Old Testament, the contemporary landscape is populated by functionally New-Testament-only Christians. Health and wealth Christianity is perhaps the most glaring example of this revival of the ancient Marcionite heresy. We also see it explicitly in progressive theologies of mainline Protestantism that pit a wrathful judge of the Old Testament against the New Testament Jesus of love. Functional Marcionism is also evident in Pentecostal and New Apostolic movements. These restitutionist movements claim (as all restitutionist movements do) to have captured the essence of the pristine Church found in the Book of Acts.
The 1919 publication This Is That is illustrative in this regard. In this work, early Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson gives an account of the wild and wooly pneumatic phenomena that accompanied her early ministry. She claims that this new thing is that which the apostles experienced in the early chapters of the Book of Acts. “If this work be of men it will come to naught” (Acts 5:38) McPherson writes, quoting Gamaliel. And this work is not merely that work the Apostles performed. It is hers.
McPherson, who quotes the Old Testament liberally, can hardly be accused of being a Marcionite. McPherson knows well that Acts 2:17—“I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams”—is a direct quotation of Joel 2:28, and she is careful to exegete this Old Testament text. Yet there can be no doubt that the Old Testament is, in her hands, a prophetic handmaiden. Its purpose is to justify the work of the apostles and therefore her new apostolic ministry. Like so many modern Christians, McPherson struggles to see that the tie that binds the old and the new is thicker than the cord of prophetic fulfillment.
In short, while the Book of Acts is, as the revelation of Jesus the Christ, an apocalypsis or unveiling, it is an unveiling of that which has already been given in the Old Testament. “And it shall come to pass afterwards,” Joel says (2:28). His words can be at least partially understood along a chronological access, as a longing and an anticipation of that which he does not now behold. But the ultimate fulfillment of his words (and all of Scripture’s words) is not the experience of the apostles but the consummation of all things when Christ returns.
As an Old Testament Israelite, Joel speaks of a gift given in trust. It is given in his words since they are, as Divine and as scriptural words, God’s. And God’s words are efficacious, tearing down, building up (Jer 1:10), and even creating as they are spoken, as we see in Genesis 1. “Unto us a child is born,” the prophet Isaiah says (9:6). He speaks of a Divine Son, whom he now possesses as a child of the promise, even if he only possesses it in trust.
The church of Acts is the congregation of redeemed Israel, its exiled children gathered from the four corners of the earth (Acts 2:9). We can describe this Israel as eschatological Israel, to be sure, unveiled for a moment in space and time, and we can call it reconstituted Israel, as the true Israel that is gathered around Jesus, the true Israelite. But it is Israel nonetheless. It has to be, even if we speak of it thinly and only in terms of prophetic fulfillment: A word first given to Israel as a promise is only fulfilled when it is fulfilled for Israel.
The problem with restitutionism is that it is governed by an implicit supersessionism. Another way of saying this is that restitutionism does not acknowledge the place of the Elder Testament in a two-testament canon. As apocalypsis, the second testament is, paradoxically, the unveiling of the meaning and identity of the first.
There can be no doubt that restitutionist movements have injected much fervor into modern Christianity. But there has been a high price to pay. The Church of England is a case in point. John Wesley’s Holy Club was unremarkable in the sense that Wesley’s England was filled with restitutionist societies that were all convinced they had found the key to restoring the pristine Church.
The zealous young Wesley, who was known to friends as “Mr. Primitive Christianity,” was convinced that he could restore primitive Christianity through the liturgy and piety of the early Church. He changed his mind after his Aldersgate experience, and he soon became convinced that the Holy Spirit, manifest in the bond of love that united Methodists, confirmed that the movement was demonstrably apostolic. Edward Pusey, for his part, thought the early liturgies were, as the young Wesley had supposed, central to the restitutionist project, and he hoped to revive primitive Christianity by means of the material culture of the early Church. “Whatever I received,” Pusey told Oxford’s bishop-elect, “I received on the authority of the ancient Church.”
Anglican evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism were both restitutionist movements. This insight opens a reading of them both that recognizes they are not the polar opposites they are now supposed to be. This being said, their rivalry also highlights that primitive Christianity is something of a wax nose. The Church of England’s evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism today look nothing like one another, despite their common restitutionist foundation. The free market of American Christianity equally illustrates restitutionism’s entropic tendency. The vast number of sects and denominations that litter the landscape are a testament to the endurance of the restitutionist impulse.
We might object that the New Testament in itself isn’t the problem. But that’s just it. In itself it is. In itself it is not capable of serving as a blueprint for ecclesial life, as Richard Hooker forcefully argued in his debates with radical Puritans at the close of the 16th century. Though it provides glimpses of eschatological glory, notably in the spectacular ministry of Christ and the dynamic witness of the early Jerusalem Church, these instances are to be taken alongside the many other Old and New Testament texts that describe the life of the Church in terms of hardship, confusion, difficulty, and defeat.
Jesus promises his fledgling Church that the one who endures to the end will be saved. But this promise is only demanded because he also promises his disciples that they will be given up to tribulation and killed, that they will be hated, and that many will be offended and will betray one another, that false prophets will rise and deceive many of them, that lawlessness will abound, and that the love of many will grow cold (Matt. 24:9-13).
The euphoric experiences and remarkable growth that sometimes mark New Testament Christianity are the experiences that sometimes mark Israel’s life in the Old Testament, with the difference that what was veiled in the Old Testament has now been unveiled and beheld as participations in Christ’s resurrection life. The 20th-century Chinese evangelist Watchman Nee insisted that the “normal” communion of the Christian with the Holy Spirit is so intimate that decisions as small as choosing which socks to wear are directed by his voice.
But Nee’s remarkable piety can hardly be described as the normal experience of most of the Christians of history. While the leaders of new congregations and new religious movements often boast that such remarkable intimacy with God is something that they alone can offer, this marketable promise only serves to alienate Christians from the Scriptures. For in the Scriptures such beatific ecstasy is given to only a handful of blessed individuals, men and women who are themselves gifts that Christ gives and then takes from his Church, much as he gave and took away the experience of his earthly body.
The story of Christ and his Church is something like a marriage. Probably because it is a marriage. It began, as so many marriages do, with fireworks. And though fireworks have reappeared from time to time (as they often do in healthy marriages), these divine gifts were never intended to provide an alternative to the slow, steady grind of learning to love. God has given his Church the fleeting experience of ecstasy and victory, along with the more enduring experience of exilic wandering, anarchic tribalism, ungodly rulers, brutal subjugation, and exile. It is a good thing that the historical record flagrantly contradicts the progressivist notion that for the Church, “every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before.” Such remarkable progress could hardly be squared with the scripturally described experience of the people of God. I have come to see that if it is true, as the New Testament teaches, that the Church has been ingrafted into Israel (cf. Rom. 11:11-31), then the Church should expect nothing else than to live the life that Old Testament Israel was elected to live and which Christ himself perfected, a life which, as he demonstrates, must conclude with utter loss if it is to be the object of a fully gratuitous Divine redemption.
This is not to say that the Church of history has not also graciously been given the pneumatic manifestations of the New Testament Church. But such experiences do not replace the life of Old Testament Israel. They are, rather, superimposed upon this life as apocalypsis. Through the lens of the New Testament we behold the mystery that the Old Testament experience of wandering and hardship is the Christian path of redemption, for it is the path that Christ walked in the power of the Holy Spirit as he set his face toward Jerusalem (Luke 9:51).
The problem with the New Testament is that when it is received without this Old Testament backdrop, as it often is, it quickly becomes the grounds of disillusionment with the difficult and uncooperative world Christ has asked his Church to inhabit. To escape from this world, though, is to escape from the world in which the Spirit is appointed to encounter us, fill us, and graciously lead us as we journey home.
The Rev. Dr. David Ney is a native of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, and a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. He currently serves as associate professor of Church history at Trinity Anglican Seminary, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania.
