The Liturgical Authority of the Old Testament
By Rev. Dr. Robert S. Rayburn
July 20,1999

There is a scene in the film Dead Poets Society in which Robin Williams, playing a New
England Prep School English teacher, begins a class by asking a young student to read the
introduction to a text on English poetry. The student begins, but after a few lines, Robin
Williams interrupts him and tells him that what he has read is all wrong. Rip out that page, he
tells the student. The student smiles. Of course the teacher is joking. No. Rip it out! Rip that
page out of the book. Well, one doesn't have to tell a class of adolescent boys more than twice
to rip pages out of their textbooks. He rips the page out of the book and his fellow students do
the same.

Now, I have told that story to my own congregation and then gone on to tell them that there is
a page in their Bibles that is all wrong as well and ought to be ripped out. I haven't ripped that
page out of my own Bible because I have written too many notes on it. But it does not belong in
the Bible. In fact, it is the only page in the Bible that the Holy Spirit did not put there. It is the
page that separates Malachi from Matthew, the page that suggests so powerfully, however
subtly, that when one moves from Malachi to Matthew, from the Old Testament to the New
Testament, one is crossing a great divide, a great frontier, that one is moving from one spiritual
world into another, from one way of looking at faith and life to another. But the Bible never
teaches us that. It never teaches us to look at the first thirty-nine books of the Bible in any other
way than as the living Word of God to be believed and obeyed. That page between Malachi
and Matthew suggests something the Bible itself never does. It is important to remember that
when we read in the NT that Holy Scripture is God breathed and so useful for teaching...and
training in righteousness, the Scripture being referred to was, by and large, what we today call
the Old Testament!

Christians today are, as a rule, quite ambivalent about the first thirty-nine books of the Bible.
By and large, they believe that what is called the Old Testament represents a preliminary and
inferior stage of religious development. That is, those books of what we call the Old Testament
- a term the Bible never uses for the first thirty-nine books of Holy Scripture - provide the
historical and theological background against which the New Testament can be understood
and appreciated. Important as those books are in some ways, as an account of faith and life, the
Old Testament is obsolescent.
But, as a matter of fact, in many ways these same believers do not treat it as such. When they
are in trouble, they immediately turn to the Psalms for words with which to express their woe
or to formulate their cries to God. They do not think then that the Psalter expresses an
outmoded and outdated faith. They do not hesitate to mine the riches of Proverbs for daily
wisdom. Their ethics, by and large, are drawn as much from the Old Testament as the New.
Their theology, in many parts and subjects, is almost entirely derived from the Old Testament.

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