One question, four answers

Diana Paulding
‘It is a really, really good story’

Far too often, I have sat through a service in which the Old Testament is completely ignored. For many it is seen as too messy, too complex, too violent. It contains depictions of God that jar with our ideas of a heavenly Father. It shows a world before Jesus came into it. In that case, what’s the point of spending time on these passages in a service? Better to skip ahead in the story…

Diana Paulding is an Associate Tutor in Biblical Studies at the Luther King Centre and Westminster College

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Charles Middleburgh
‘The Tanakh has no agenda but to be itself’

I’ll start by reframing and re-phrasing the question: Why should Christians read the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible)!

The starting point has to be that the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are not one and the same thing. The former is a text edited in the 5th-10th centuries CE by a group of scribes and scholars known as the Masoretes; the latter is a text that with the New Testament forms the core of Christian scriptural tradition….

Charles Middleburgh is a rabbi and is the Dean and Director of Jewish Studies at Leo Baeck College, London

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George Mwaura
‘It is like discovering family photo albums’

My late father, bless his soul, always said that the reason the Old Testament appealed to him was its rawness; it didn’t pull punches. I agree. And perhaps for this reason, the Old Testament often remains unopened in many Christians’ homes. Some find its ancient laws perplexing, its violence troubling, and some of its narratives seemingly disconnected from daily faith. Yet this magnificent collection of texts, making up roughly three-quarters of our Christian Bible, holds riches that can transform our understanding of God, and our discipleship….

George Mwaura is a URC minister at Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes and is East Midlands Pastoral Consultant

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Olga Fabrikant-Burke
‘It gives us a language for our lives’

The main gift that the Old Testament gives us is a new vocabulary, indeed a different language, with which to speak of the reality of our lives in all their complexity and ambiguity, beauty and pain.

Make no mistake about it, this is a difficult language. It is a language that may not come naturally to us. It may seem obscure and off-putting. But it is a language that we desperately need, and it is a language that connects with the universal experience of being human. The power of the Old Testament lies in its honesty and realism…

Olga Fabrikant-Burke is Lecturer in Old Testament at Ridley Hall, Cambridge

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This is an extract from an article published in the Issue 3 – 2025 edition of Reform

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