pidgin Christianity

today was my last class (save the final exam) in a yearlong course on the Old Testament. i cried a little. no, seriously.

it was one of those rousing moments of intellectual glory when Prof. Strawn's last power point flashed across the screen and he gave a modest nod of his head--we all jumped to our feet and applauded, hearts warm and minds willing to put the thought of that final final aside for a few seconds at least.

that was not when i teared up. that was a moment of basking in the glow of the celebrity that is the notorious BAS, who has drawn me even deeper into the mystery and wondrous beauty of the OT. no, i got emotional over linguistics.

in his points of closure on the year, Strawn returned to an analogy that he made long ago, but it really hit its mark this time. if you've ever studied linguistics, you'll have heard of pidgins, creoles, and language death. a pidgin is a simplified form of a language, a creole is that pidgin adopted by a new generation as their functional language, and language death is when an original language literally falls out of use because it has morphed into something else entirely. a language can die over the span of only one generation. that's twenty years.

the canon of Scripture is our original, full language--the high dialect of Christianity. but the ill-use, misuse, and under-use of the Old Testament has changed that fullness into a pidgin form. we are speaking high, holy, sacred Scripture as a pidgin, a modified/commercialized/reductionist version of God's word when we neglect it in preaching and teaching, when we simplify complex biblical figures to superheroes, when we assume that we already know everything it has to tell us.

but what if it's not just a pidgin? this is certainly not a problem that has emerged just now in our generation. so what if the full language of Scripture, of the OT specifically, is dead?

this is when i cried. i mourned that loss. my eyes blurred for the way that we, as humans, time and again, take something beautiful that God has given us and twist it and manipulate it and neglect it until it is unrecognizable. and isn't that what the world sees? the atheists and agnostics, those abused or alienated by the church--they're only seeing and hearing a pidgin Christianity. they can't see it in its fullness because we've let our holy language die.

my every prayer is that i can be a minister of the Gospel who is faithful to the voice of the Old Testament. this class has given me this fire in my belly to preach--to preach these beautiful texts and witnesses because they aren't being preached. mediocre books that we written in the last 5 years are being preached, vaguely-relevant video clips are being shown, overused Bible verses are being passed out like fortune cookies, stupid jokes and gimmicks are being dreamt up while the Bible lies dormant. it lies dormant when the stories and wisdom and truths held inside could knock the pants off a thousand goofy/poignant sermon illustrations.

"O Book! infinite sweetness! let my heart/suck ev'ry letter...
Thou art all health...thou art a mass/of strange delights, where we may wish and take...
thou art heav'n's ledger here...heav'n lies flat in thee/
Subject to ev'ry mounter's bended knee"
-George Herbert

i know a lot of classmates have been looking forward to New Testament and Jesus. those red letters are coming! and having class with Luke Timothy Johnson won't be too shabby, i suspect. but it's surprisingly painful to leave this world of the Old Testament behind. i am determined, however, that i will only be leaving the OT behind in the sense of this classroom. i am determined to play my role in the attempt to revive this abandoned book of treasure and to bring the language of Scripture back into its high and holy dialect.