The first chapter is the Introduction to the volume, in which he reminds us that the three volumes focus on, in order, Israel’s Gospel, Faith and Life. Goldingay is trying to “encapsulate the vision” of the First Testament with the conviction that it “implies a vision” for the church and the world of the 21st century. “Life” is important because a gospel is only seen as effective by the people it produces. Our real theological beliefs are shown by what we do.
Israel has a shared story; a destiny, to reveal God to the world; a way of life, which is to be the means of that, as it is characterized by virtues such as faithfulness, decisiveness, compassion, discernment, visionary realism and an openness about failure and wrongdoing, along with with means of dealing with these; forms of worship, festivals, disciplines and rites that give expression to the way of life and the virtues, and encourage their cultivation; and forms of leadership that also encourage their cultivation. 14
The way you believe is the way you pray, or the way you pray is the way you believe. The way you pray, the hymns you sing, indicates (frighteningly), what you believe and shapes what you believe. Doctrine needs to be singable; songs need to be believable. 15-16
Goldingay begins by analyzing Christian ethics in terms of God, Community, Self. What do these things look like in Israel and how do they interrelate? Unlike most philosophies he starts with God rather than self. He works down from God, through the community, to the individual. Also, unlike our tendency in the West, he tries to see these aspects holistically. We can’t divide worship from ethics or even politics. Spirituality must affect all areas of life.
In the order of being, God comes first. God's reality undergirds the reality and significance of humanity, and the community's reality undergirds the reality and significance of the individual. 16-17
...The discipline of Christian ethics urgently needs to be reframed through the lens of Christian worship...Eventually this raises the question whether there can be any ethics that is not theological, and how far Jews and Christians can make common cause with the secular world about issues such as justice or marriage or contraception or abortion. 21
Both worship and spirituality can be me-focused. The First Testament's vision is for them to be God-focused. 26
He then looks at The First Testament as a Source. We have to understand the Old Testament as having developed over Israel’s history as mainly a revelation of God through narrative, not an instruction manual about how to live. Torah is instruction, not a Western rigid law code. There are tensions in the OT, that seem like contradictions, that encourage us to think through how God, God’s community and God’s people should think and act in this broken world. The prophets provide God’s inspired commentary on the narratives while the Psalms and Wisdom literature provide inspired responses of worship and reflection on them. Each generation of Israelites had to take God’s revelation and apply it in a new context (wilderness, nation, exile, province) through teaching and practice. The foundational stories and the 10 commandments are mainly there to reveal God and his character and challenge us as to how covenant people are to respond to them.
Viewing the torah as "law" is inclined to make us think of the Torah as a kind of manual for the courts to use, one whose main point was literal implementation. But its nature shows that it is more like the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of illustrations of how life with God, with other people and with oneself is supposed to work out. And its narratives offer not merely examples to follow or avoid, but stories that shape our thinking about God, about the community and about ourselves. 30
This awareness does not remove the bite from the teaching in the Torah...If the teaching expresses a vision or provides illustrations of how principles may be embodied in life or teaches us about the way God wants us to look at different areas of life, it places greater demands on us. We have to ask how we could redream and implement this vision, how we could embody it, how we need to change our thinking in the light of it. It is not open to being treated legalistically. 41
Genesis's failure to make explicit moral judgments in its stories links with the fact that it is a story about how God acted and acts, not about how we ought to act. The most important way its stories shape our moral lives is by its vision of God and of God's relationship with the world and with us, which can revolutionize our understanding of ourselves in relation to God, the world and other people. 48
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