The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance is attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardness. It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous. To appropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and ‘the Jewish God’ is vulgar beyond belief. And not at all uncommon, therefore.

If what is desired is a God who presents no difficulties and makes no demands, the Old Testament must surely be rejected. But to reject it is one thing, to denounce it another, and to misrepresent it in the course of denouncing it is another still. The Old Testament is not for Christians to denounce because we need only put it respectfully aside, as a Methodist might the Book of Mormon, as a Jew might the New Testament. The Old Testament certainly is not our to misrepresent, since in doing so we slander the culture we took it from, an old and very evil habit among us.

The tendency to hold certain practices in ancient Israel up to idealized modern Western norms is pervasive in much that passes for scholarship, though a glance at the treatment of the great class of debtors now being evicted from their homes in America and elsewhere should make it clear that, from the point of view of graciousness or severity, an honest comparison is not always in our favor.

Since its prophets and poets can be read for texts that seem to promise the Christian Messiah, and since the Gospels and Epistles allude freely to Adam and Moses and Abraham, the significance of the Old Testament cannot be denied. And yet Christianity has tended to define itself by implied or direct disparagement of the Old Testament. The unloveliness of appropriating the sacred literature of another religion in order to put it to such use is hard to overstate.

Those of us who accept a historical tradition find ourselves burdened by its errors and excesses, especially when we are pressed to make some account of them. I would suggest that those who reject the old traditions on these grounds are refusing to accept the fact that the tragic mystery of human nature has by no means played itself out, and that wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one’s own inevitable share in human fallibility.

I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.