Spring 2026 · Vol. 55 No. 1 · pp. 121–124
Book Review
The Beginning of the Story: Understanding the Old Testament in the Story of Scripture
Harrisonburg, VA: Herald, 2023. 239 pages.
Tim Geddert will be well-known to many readers of this journal as professor emeritus of New Testament at Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary and as a prolific Mennonite Brethren author and popular speaker. Geddert’s book targets a lay audience with a conservative evangelical theology.
Geddert’s goal is to “explore what it means to read, interpret, and apply the Old Testament from a Christian point of view, following the model and directions given to us by Jesus and the New Testament” (16). Following these New Testament directions means recognizing that the ministry of Jesus is rooted in the Old Testament story that remains foundational for Christian faith.
In the insightful introduction, Geddert claims that the diverse writings of the Old Testament are part of one grand biblical story that should be understood forward and backward. Jesus and the New Testament cannot be properly understood without knowing the first part of the story, the Old Testament. Because the biblical story moves toward the climax of God’s saving work through Jesus Christ, Christians must also read the story backward, interpreting the Old Testament in light of salvation in Jesus Christ. The Old Testament “both enlightens the New Testament and is enlightened by it” (21).
Most chapters of the book focus on significant sections or aspects of the Old Testament, explaining their role in the larger narrative and their contemporary relevance, always keeping in mind God’s saving work through Jesus. Chapter 1 deals with Genesis 1–2, which remind us that God is Creator of the cosmos and commissions humans to care for creation p. 122 and participate with God in shaping world history. Much of the chapter explains why Christians should not interpret Genesis 1–2 as a scientific account of how God created the cosmos.
Chapter 2, “God, the Ultimate Victor,” focuses on Genesis 3. In response to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, God decrees that humans and serpents will be locked in a perpetual struggle that places both at risk of death (3:15). Geddert attaches great weight to this verse, accepting a traditional interpretation widely rejected by mainstream biblical scholarship that here is the first announcement of the gospel that someday God will triumph over all evil. The last half of the chapter then focuses on how God’s victory happens through Jesus Christ. This chapter illustrates Geddert’s tendency to read Christian theology back into Old Testament passages. I agree with Geddert that Christians should read the Bible backward, but respect for the actual content of Old Testament passages should make us hesitant to flood them with later Christian theology.
When discussing God’s call of Abraham, Geddert makes the excellent point that God creates the people of Israel to “show the world what it means to belong to God, to be saved by God, and to become channels through whom others will find salvation” (67). Then Geddert claims, “God had a special place for this new people group, but that place would not be defined by geography” (70). Geddert seems so committed to reading the New Testament understanding of peoplehood back into the Old Testament that he overlooks how the Old Testament specifically defines Israel’s place geographically. God repeatedly promises to grant Israel the land of Canaan, the Exodus-conquest narrative moves toward Israel’s occupation of Canaan, and centuries later when Israel is in exile the prophets announce that God will restore the exiles to the land of Canaan. Similar misreadings of the Old Testament story are common throughout the book.
A subsequent chapter claims that the salvation of Israel served God’s larger agenda of saving all of humankind. “Israel was called, but this was to be to the advantage and not the disadvantage of the Egyptians, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and all the other peoples around them” (85). Geddert does not explain how to square this statement with the biblical account of how, for the sake of Israel’s deliverance, God repeatedly hardens Pharaoh’s heart and consequently inflicts massive destruction and death on the Egyptian people, and then later God commands and empowers Israel to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Canaanites. Geddert tends to overlook or downplay problematic features of the biblical story, thereby missing an opportunity to help lay Christians learn how to identify and deal faithfully with such problematic features. Because the p. 123 Bible is such an important source of authority for Christians, when they fail to recognize serious theological and ethical problems in biblical texts, they then will be inclined to replicate these problems. One need only think of how the church used pro-slavery texts to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Bible’s conquest narratives to justify European conquest and colonization of non-Western territories, and patriarchal passages to justify contemporary patriarchy.
In his discussion of the relationship of the church to Israel, Geddert rejects the supersessionist position that the church replaces Israel as well as the dispensationalist claim that God’s relationship to Israel and the church runs on separate tracks. Pointing to Paul’s image of the olive tree in Romans 11:17-24, Geddert argues that the church has been grafted onto the people of Israel, which means that “the church is God’s intended continuation of Israel” (128), with the privilege of fulfilling the destiny and calling for which God originally created Israel. This is why Israel’s Scripture, the Old Testament, is now also the church’s indispensable Scripture.
Geddert devotes two chapters to dealing with theological problems in the Old Testament. Following Anabaptist tradition, he argues that the coming of Jesus should change our perspective on warfare passages. Geddert makes a case for believing biblical miracle stories, and he offers suggestions for how Christians might understand the many laws of the Old Testament. When discussing theological problems, Geddert does not always grapple with their seriousness, as in this example: “Some texts sound as though it really was Israel’s assignment to obliterate whole people groups who were living in the promised land (see Deut 7:1–3), but other texts give the impression that God had always intended for Israel to live at peace alongside other people groups in the same geographic area” (181–82). The theological and ethical harm generated over the centuries by multiple texts in which God commands and/or empowers Israel to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Canaanites calls for a bolder confronting of the theological problems.
The penultimate chapter provides a helpful overview of how Christians can beneficially read and appropriate the very diverse writings of the Old Testament. A final chapter explains how Jesus and the New Testament teach us how the New Testament builds on and continues the Old Testament story.
The three main strengths of the book are its explanation of how the Old Testament is essential for understanding Jesus and the New Testament, its demonstration of how the Old Testament is a valuable resource for Christian life, and its call to read the Bible forward and p. 124 backward as a single grand narrative. Each chapter ends with questions for discussion, making the book usable for congregational or small group study sessions.
