Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (review)

Professor van Wijk-Bos is a prolific writer on the intersection of Hebrew Bible and contemporary Christian, especially feminist, hermeneutical concerns. Her burden in this latest book is to introduce the Torah to Christian readers. Aside perhaps from a modest florilegium of Sunday school stories, Psalms, and comfortable prophetic bons mots recycled in Handel's Messiah, the Tanakh remains for many Gentile Christians a remarkably unfamiliar book. Indeed, terms like "Law" and "Old Testament" are in Protestant circles often freighted with half-digested theological baggage that make rehabilitation attempts an uphill struggle. Against Christian ignorance and suspicion of the Law of Moses, van Wijk-Bos sets out to present a winsome, accessible, and personally engaging presentation of the Pentateuch as a divine word for Christians today.

Her thesis is that Christians, like Jews, read the Hebrew Scriptures as those who "look back" at the time when God intervened directly in human affairs; they encounter in the Old Testament the God of Israel who is closely involved in his creation. Within this framework, God's care extends especially on behalf of the poor and of God's covenantally chosen people who are called to live in accordance with the Torah's formulation of the divine design. Historical-critical issues are flagged up, but the reading of the text is primarily literary and theological.

After two introductory sections, the extensive Part III takes us into the substance of the Torah, beginning with Genesis 1–11, which sets the context of Torah's "narrative" within the making of its world: Israel's creation and preservation is for the saving of all. So we read of the world's making, marring, and mending, basic themes of creation and fallenness, covenant and sacrifice, promise and genealogy. The New Testament's Romans and 1 Timothy are singled out for their lamentably inadequate rendition of the creation narrative—the lack of "Adam and Eve" typology in Romans, and 1 Timothy for its "subordination of women, a move that is never made in the Old Testament." While Christians can accept Gen 2–3 "gratefully," 1 Timothy 2 is wholly superseded.

In a further 100 pages, Part IV comprises the entire rest of the Torah's "story" as "the making of a people." Structurally, the implicit equation between Gen 1–11 and the remainder of the Torah arguably begs certain questions; but Part IV on its own offers an attractive, if eclectic, Deuteronomic interpretation of the remaining Pentateuch: the "Wandering Arameans" of Gen 12–50, the "becoming" of a people (Exodus 1–24), as well as God's bringing them "to this place" (Num 11; Deut 34) and instructing them about life in the unconditional covenant (Exod 20–23; Lev 19; Deut) and the place and manner of "life with God," i.e., worship (Exod 25–40; Lev).

A synthetic aggiornamento is offered in the concluding Part V ("Living with the Torah," comprising "God in the Torah" and "Christ and Torah" in Jesus and Paul). Where the Torah admirably stresses love for the stranger, the question of "how then shall we live" is for Christians normatively focused on the postmodern political project: the traditio legis, or the "canon within the canon," is Gal 3.28—understood to mandate the "sweeping away" of "old oppressive systems" that perpetuate class and race divisions and construe women as the "other" and "the stranger."

There is a modest 10-page bibliography which, like the indexes, makes no reference to such major contributors to a Christian appreciation of the Old Testament in the New as Brevard Childs, Christopher Seitz, Walter Moberly, Bernd Janowski, Hartmut Gese, James Dunn, Richard Hays, Henning Graf Reventlow, Peter Stuhlmacher, and a number of others.

This reviewer came away with two main queries, both pertaining to the hermeneutical substance of what is here called "Torah." Somewhat surprisingly, Professor van Wijk-Bos does not spend much time on the question of why or indeed how "Torah" should...