Seven Challenges that Shaped the New Testament: Understanding the Inherent Tensions of Early Christian Faith
By F. Scott Spencer.
Baker Academic, 2024.
Paperback, 240 pages, $27.99.
Reviewed by Ryan Patrick Budd.
I wish someone else had written this book.
I don’t say that because I think the book is poorly written. On the contrary, F. Scott Spencer is an engaging storyteller, a skilled teacher, and a gifted wordsmith. I wish I could write sentences like his. His command of language—blending the impressive learning of a scholar with the illustrative and alliterative power of a pastor—is admirable.
I’m also not saying that the book lacked insight. Particularly when speaking about Revelation (in Chapter 6) or 2 Peter (in Chapter 7), Spencer has wonderful things to say.
I wish someone else had written the book because its subject is so important. Seven Challenges that Shaped the New Testament: Understanding the Inherent Tensions of Early Christian Faith is, in Spencer’s own words, about how “with remarkable humility, honesty, courage, and creativity, the New Testament writers seek to make meaning of the real, rough-and-tumble world in which they and their readers live and move.”
The world of the early Church was full of real people with real pasts, real questions, real pain, and real fears. The writings we now call the New Testament were written primarily to them. But they were also written to those today who are heirs to the first Christians’ task and legacy.
As anyone who has ever really tried it will know, Christianity is difficult, and requires what St. Paul calls a “renewal of the mind” (cf. Rom 12:1–3). While that renewal is yet underway—not having reached Christ’s full stature (cf. Eph 4:13)—many things about Christian faith are hard to understand.
Spencer’s list of seven first-century challenges illustrates this point. How, for instance, is the early Church to claim the authority of the Old Testament, while also claiming to have surpassed it? How are Christians supposed to avoid hypocrisy or self-righteousness but also be properly grateful for being delivered from a life of sin? Does St. Paul really mean that strength is made perfect in weakness—could God’s royal Son really have died on a cross?—and what does this mean? How are believers to understand Christ’s triumph over death when their lives remain full of suffering, helplessness, and drudgery?
These are serious questions, and deserve serious answers. Unfortunately, this book is not likely to help anyone resolve them.
For Spencer, the main thread running through the New Testament is “cognitive dissonance,” meaning the holding of competing or even apparently contradictory ideas at the same time. For Spencer, these questions arise from an apparent conflict between the received data of faith and the experience of daily living. How can Christ be almighty if He suffered—or how can I, part of His body, suffer, if He is now in glory?
The reason Spencer does not seem the right person to approach these questions is that he has not answered them for himself. While “cognitive dissonance” is the aspect of New Testament faith Spencer focuses on most, the most palpable dissonance in this book is Spencer’s own.
In Seven Challenges, we see a believer who is really seeking to know Jesus, but who does not believe he has any direct access to Him. He believes in a “living Christ,” but openly doubts the historical reliability of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, and openly critiques the morality of the pastoral epistles.
Spencer thus envisions a substantial filter between the New Testament writings and the Messiah they proclaim. His project appears to be an attempt to see through the filter by grappling with the historical conditions that were prevalent when the Gospels were written. By understanding the felt needs of the original audiences, Spencer seeks to understand how they were adapting Jesus’s message, and so arrive at “the living Christ.”
But is not any such “living Christ” reconstructed by scholarly conjecture doomed to be a creature of one’s own making? If one does not trust the ultimate authority of the apostolic writings to convey truth, how is he to be sure he knows “the living Christ” at all? While Spencer neither mentions nor attempts to resolve it, beneath the surface of the text this tension is palpable.
Perhaps because Spencer lacks the confidence that more up-to-date scholarship would afford him in the historicity of the Gospels and apostolic writings (see, for instance, Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus; and Gary Michuta, The Gospel Truth), he is forced to approach the New Testament without what traditional Christianity would call the disposition of “repentance” or “faith.” This disposition recognizes that the believer does not know what is good, both because he is mortal and finite, and because sin has obscured his vision. Accordingly, when Jesus’s teaching challenges the believer’s preconceived notions, he willingly—if often reluctantly—sets aside his own thinking and submits to Jesus’s instruction.
To the traditional Christian mindset, receiving Jesus’s teaching is both medicine and food, which will enable the healing of the believer’s heart and his sight. What, at first, does not seem to make sense is first accepted on the authority of God, with trust that everything will make sense in time.
Spencer, on the other hand, seems to approach the New Testament as a resource that can supplement an incomplete but ultimately solid worldview. He relies at least as much on contemporary “hard” and “soft” scientific data and concepts to explain the New Testament as he does on Scripture itself. Furthermore, the Scripture is not allowed to contradict, but only to fill in the gaps of Spencer’s ready-made worldview—governed by what he calls “modern sensibilities”—which is able to critique and determine the usefulness of what Scripture says.
This caution must be kept in mind by anyone attempting to profit from his book. While much profit may be had, it may only be had by one who approaches the book with the appropriate reticence.
While billed as an accessible and clarifying introductory guide to the ideas that shaped the New Testament, I would not endorse this description of Spencer’s book. It is not a book for beginners, nor an introduction, nor a clarifying guide. It is, rather, a mineshaft—dark, with dim lighting—in which the wary may yet strike treasure.
Ryan Patrick Budd is a candidate for holy orders for the Roman Catholic diocese of Steubenville, Ohio, a scholar in residence at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, and author of Salvation Stories: Family, Failure, and God’s Saving Work in Scripture (Emmaus Road Publications, 2024).
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