The Friendship of the Lord

The Friendship of The Lord
By Deryck Sheriffs
Paternoster Press. 363 pages. £17.99
ISBN 0 8536 464 6

In this book, Deryck Sheriffs looks at spirituality as described in the pages of the Old Testament, and considers how it should inform and shape the spirituality of the contemporary Christian.
Mr. Sheriffs considers that the Old Testament describes the spiritual journey of people who inhabit a culture very different from our own. He believes that Christian devotional reading of Scripture has often ignored the cultural context of the Old Testament, reading into it the image of our own spirituality rather than being informed and challenged by the text. Mr Sheriffs seeks to look at Old Testament spirituality within its cultural setting, comparing and contrasting it with the religion of its ancient Near Eastern neighbours. He then seeks to bridge the gulf between the cultures and apply the lessons of Old Testament spirituality to us.
The Genesis account of Enoch, Noah and Abraham views the spiritual life in terms of the metaphor of walking with God. Other chapters consider the Exodus as a picture of stages on the journey of faith, Deuteronomy's depiction of spirituality in terms of the covenant, the theme of meditating on God from the Psalms and the contribution of the Wisdom and Prophetic literature. The final two chapters consider the connection between spirituality and time, both in the daily, weekly and seasonal patterns of Old Testament worship and in contemporary life.
I valued Mr. Sheriffs' treatment of the theme from Psalms of 'being still' before God or 'waiting on the Lord' which he views in terms of active trust rather than passive meditation. His chapter on Ecclesiastes was particularly helpful with its call to authentic Christianity, contrasting both with the emptiness of existentialism and the hollowness of Christian triumphalism. A similar call is sounded in looking at the language of anger and despair in Job and in Jeremiah. Mr. Sheriffs considers our contemporary polite language of address to God a mark of unreality: 'Our communities would do well to treasure the expression of confrontation with God, not suppress it' (p. 250).
However, I did have a number of reservations. I was surprised at the readiness of Mr. Sheriffs to accept without question some of the assumptions of Old Testament criticism, such as references to P material in Genesis or Deutero-Isaiah. I missed any serious treatment of the opening chapters of Genesis as setting the scene concerning the relationship between humankind and God.
But my major concern was that Mr. Sheriffs seems to approach the Old Testament from the perspective of the 'New Hermeneutic', with its emphasis on the 'two horizons' of writer and interpreter, each bounded by their own cultural context. I felt that Mr. Sheriffs failed to reckon with the Old Testament as the Word of God. The Old Testament was viewed simply as the testimony of the community of faith from another era and another culture. For us to profit from their testimony, we need to 're-read' what they say, translating it appropriately into our own cultural context. Mr. Sheriffs seems to provide us with no clear guidelines about such re-reading, neither did his treatment of Old Testament spirituality seem to suggest that it is normative for us in a way that, say, Puritan spirituality is not.
I might add that the language used in this book will not make it readily accessible to the average Christian. Mr. Sheriffs lives within and speaks from the perspective of Old Testament studies. I could not help thinking that he writes from another culture with a vocabulary and set of concerns all its own. Preachers and teachers will find many insights in this book to help them better understand the Old Testament, but they will have to do some 're-reading' of this book before its message is ready to be presented to their congregations.

Peter Misselbrook

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