Old Testament Theology for Christians Quotes

“The Bible is written for us (i.e., we are supposed to benefit from its divine message as we interact with our cultural river), but it is not written to us (not in our language or against our culture). The message transcends culture, but it is given in a form that is fully ensconced in the ancient cultural river of Israel. This message may well give us meaningful information as we think about our cultural river, but it does not address the specifics of our cultural river.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“the law was not intended to give a universal moral/ethical system; it was designed to help Israel know how to live in the presence of a holy God and as his covenant people. It was not so that the people could imitate God, but so they could reflect the holy status that he had conferred on them. To the extent that they were successful in reflecting the identity associated with the status that God gave them, they would bring honor to his name.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“the covenant promise of the land is fulfilled not just when Israel lives there but when Yahweh lives there as well.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“they were seeking a political solution to what was, in essence, a spiritual problem.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“It is also interesting that God begins with relationship rather than law. This order makes perfect sense once we recognize that the function of the law is to help Israel to know how to live in the presence of God (see chapter five). The law would not be relevant to Abram”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“By means of revelation, we come to know of God’s plans and purposes. By means of the saving work of Christ, we are fully reconciled to him, and the relationship with us that God has always wanted is made possible.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“In this familiar formula we see God’s agenda—that through the covenant he would reveal himself to Israel, and through Israel he would be revealed to the world. Israel was thus given the status of a participant in Yahweh’s plan and purpose.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“Yahweh protected Israel and provided for them just as the gods of the ancient Near East did for their worshipers. The difference was that instead of meeting the needs of the gods as their neighbors did, Israel was given a role in the plan and purposes of Yahweh.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“Given that this is the way people thought about deities in the ancient world, it was essential for Yahweh to offer revelation of himself in order to provide the basis for a newly forged relationship with the humans he created.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“The fundamental premise of the theology of the ancient world was that the gods had needs and that people had been created to meet those needs.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“God tells Abram that “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” We may well believe that there can be no greater blessing than in the death of Christ, but we need to enlarge our vision—not only to the Old Testament, but to the larger issues in theology.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“Like the Israelites, God has given us a status that makes us more than what we came from, and that is the identity that we should adopt.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“These ideas stand in stark contrast to Israel’s ancient Near Eastern environment and to our own modern, secular environment. In the ancient Near East, people were merely slaves to the gods; in secular humanism, we are merely slaves to ourselves. Those in the covenant and in Christ are the people of God, members of the kingdom of God, conferred with holiness, and called by his name; we are slaves no longer.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“The Old Testament provides a basic understanding of human identity that remains true today. All humans are dust; they are mortal and frail. Just as all people were made to be more than dust by virtue of the conferred image of God, Israel was elevated to yet a higher status by virtue of the covenant. It continued to function as God’s image, but God also intended it to function as priests, caretakers of the divine presence. Our Christian theology identifies us as all of the above and more.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“we appropriate this theology for today, we can immediately set aside any consideration of whether certain individuals have the image of God or not. Whether someone is spiritually unregenerate, physically limited, mentally incapacitated, old or young, high functioning or low functioning, all who are human have the status “image of God.” The image is not genetic or biological. We cannot lose it or fail to achieve it. As long as we are human, we are part of the corporate image of God.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“To them, the events of history represent only a small slice of reality, and arguably not the most important slice. Reality, to the ancient mind, is a much larger category than that of “event.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“Often this discussion turns immediately to the options of “history” or “mythology.” But these options represent a false and misleading dichotomy that is deeply immersed in our modern cultural river.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“Scripture must derive from the biblical text on the basis of its own cultural river.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“If we are going to interpret the Bible in a way that makes the power of God’s authoritative message consistently and reliably accessible, we should be guided by methods that help us to understand the communication that God gave through the human intermediaries that he chose for the task.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“if we are to interpret Scripture so as to receive the full impact of God’s authoritative message, we have to leave our cultural river behind and try to understand theirs.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“In this ancient view of creation, any one-time material act was of little interest or significance because the ancients did not define existence materially. For them, something did not come into existence when it had materiality; it came into existence when it had been given a role, function, and purpose in an ordered system. Creation and existence found their significance in the spiritual dimension, not in the material one.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“we need to ask what the ancients understood by existence. We should not be surprised to find that they think differently from how we do. For them the focus is not related to materiality but to order.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“identity was found in the corporate community in the Old Testament, rather than in one’s individualism, the relationship with Yahweh was through the people of Israel and reflected in the clan/family. We still see evidences of this mentality in the New Testament. The Philippian jailer, for example, makes a decision to follow Christ not only for himself but for his entire household as well”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“To “be holy” is not to achieve a status but to live a life worthy of that status.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“In the ancient Near East people refrained from killing one another because it disrupted order in society, and the gods required order. The same could be said of Israel, but we would have to add that, more importantly, Israelites were to refrain from killing one another less out of obedience to specific divine instructions and more because their perception of the nature of Yahweh would suggest that they, as his people, were required to hold a respect for life.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“It is also interesting to note that an Egyptian god, Re, is recorded claiming “I am who I am.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“For Israel, a god was defined in terms of what it did, such as establish and preserve cosmic order. For us, however, a god is an entity with a specific (and, in monotheism, a unique) ontology.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“The plot line of presence is more important than the plot line of salvation (salvation history). Jesus did not just become human so that he could die for us; he became human to establish God’s presence among us as one of us—so we would learn more about how we should live in God’s presence.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“The incarnation would have happened, even if there had been no sin for which to die, because the incarnation was an important step in the advancement of God’s presence.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief

“It is the covenant that gives formal articulation to the stages of the relationship between God and his people; it is the promise of God that he will make such a relationship possible; it is the Torah that governs how people may live in the presence of God and sustain relationship with him; and it is the kingdom of God that expresses his role in the cosmos and in which we participate as we live out our relationship with him.”
― John H. Walton, Old Testament Theology for Christians: From Ancient Context to Enduring Belief