Shane Williamson’s Reviews > The Old Testament and God > Status Update

It is constitutive of human sinfulness to turn the witness to God through the scriptures into a manageable object and thus fail to reckon with rev elation as a means of encountering the living God on his own terms. (Brevard Childs)

YHWH not only acts in history but simultaneously explains his acts and his character. He reveals himself and thus offers himself to his people...in both deed and word. (476)

In Scripture God is truly rendered to us narratively and creedally: in the narratives of his actions and in the creed-like summaries of those actions. (405)

The patriarchs encountered God as living, and certainly the confrontation with Pharaoh, the exodus and the Sinai event, as well as the fact that God dwelt among his people in the tabernacle, would all have left the Israelites in no doubt whatsoever that YHWH is the living God. (400)

Spinoza moved away from a world view grounded in the Mosaic distinction to one comparable to those of the ANE nations...in which the divine and the world are all part of the same thing. If nothing else, this should alert us to the fact that the emergence of historical criticism cannot be seen simply as the triumph of neutral objective science. (372)

Just as the early Church had to draw on its surrounding culture and intellectual developments in order to craft its world view, so too Israel drew on her environment as she crafted hers. (367)