The Old Testament Is Dying: A Diagnosis and Recommended Treatment by Brent A. Strawn

Central to the argument of the book is a linguistic analogy, explained in chapter 3. Strawn argues that the Old Testament is (like) a language—it can be “used in the creation of a biblical worldview, or … to perceive the world” (11)—and thus, like all languages, changes over time and can atrophy and even die (59). The processes by which languages die are important. The first way a language might die is through pidginization, the severe reduction of a language into something akin to baby talk, a pidgin. The second way a language might die is through creolization, the invention of a new language, distinct from the original, called a creole, on the basis of an already pidginized form of the original language. Strawn’s thesis is that most Christians in North America speak a pidgin form of the Old Testament or, worse still, a creole. The Old Testament is dying, if it is not already dead!