Professor John Rogerson was formerly at the department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield and is Canon Emeritus of Sheffield Cathedral. He has published many books and is the editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible and co-author of The Old Testament World.

How should Christians approach the Old Testament? Should we use it to reconstruct what people believed several millennia ago? Or should we ask what the Old Testament says to us today and consider how it addresses today's world? J. W. Rogerson firmly believes that we should take the latter approach. Rogerson, an internationally respected scholar, has dedicated much of his academic life to probing the possibility of the abiding significance of the Old Testament. He shows how texts written for a strange and distant world with different social, religious and cultural factors can still speak to moral issues today.

John Rogerson

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Author Information

Title page

Dedication

Imprint

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. History and cultural memory

2. Creation accounts as critiques of the world of human experience and human actions

3. Aspects of communication: interpersonal relationships

4. Disrupted communication: social relationships

5. Disrupted communication: divine–human relationships

6. What does it mean to be human?

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Rogerson, John

How should Christians approach the Old Testament? Should we use it to reconstruct what people believed several millennia ago? Or should we ask what the Old Testament says to us today and consider how it addresses today's world? Rogerson firmly believes the latter.

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John Rogerson was one of my lecturers at University when I attended in the early 1990s. Even then he talked about writing his theology, so I was very interested to see what it was about when it was finally published this year.   
 Since my University days I've found it more and more difficult to take the Old Testament seriously in the light of the modern world. The activities of a group of people who portray themselves as successfully warlike (although the evidence is rather thin for that historically) and who wander around the Middle East trying to keep themselves separate seems far removed from our world, let alone the fact that their God is, at times, fairly unpleasant. I had hopes that this theology might address some of those thoughts.  
But this theology isn't a systematic theology or an explanation of how the God of the Old Testament reconciles with the God of the New Testament. It is actually a rather interesting new angle (to me at least), which was taking the Old Testament and applying some of the underlying themes to the modern world, to global dilemmas that we face. John Rogerson approaches stories and characters that are very familiar to us (Jacob, Joseph, Job, some of the laws in Deuteronomy) and from them extracts ideas about how the ancients may have understood communication - us with the divine - and more.  
I found the book very interesting and Rogerson's excellently clear writing style was present as usual. His own translations of many extracts from the Old Testament were also fresh and readable, with Hebrew characters transliterated into Roman for those who don't read Hebrew. His interest in and thorough study of German theologians comes through at all times in this book and the enormous bibliography, and the vast amount of research that has clearly been done for this book, make it an excellent read for all those interested in the Old Testament.

A Theology of the Old Testament

Cultural Memory, Communication and Being Human

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A Theology of the Old Testament

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