Aging & Wisdom Quote by Randall Terry

The line lands like a doctrinal ultimatum: skip the Old Testament and you forfeit not only theological accuracy but moral competence. Randall Terry isn’t offering a reading recommendation; he’s drawing a boundary around who gets to claim “right doctrine” and who doesn’t. The structure matters. It moves from knowledge (“know their Old Testament”) to authority (“right doctrine”), then discipline (“right correction”), then social outcome (“equipped for good works”). That escalation turns scripture literacy into a credential for leadership and legitimacy, not just personal faith.

The subtext is gatekeeping with a pastoral mask. “Good works” sounds soft, even communal, but it’s tethered to “correction,” implying that moral action requires enforcement and that enforcement requires a specific textual foundation. In practice, that logic tends to privilege command, law, and punishment narratives associated (fairly or not) with popular impressions of the Old Testament. It also quietly challenges versions of Christianity that center the New Testament’s grace-forward messaging: if you lead with compassion but lack the older canon, you’re unserious, maybe even dangerous.

Contextually, this fits Terry’s public persona as a movement entrepreneur in American culture-war Christianity, where biblical fluency is frequently mobilized as proof of political and moral authority. The sentence is designed to delegitimize opponents inside the faith as much as skeptics outside it. It’s less about ancient texts than about who gets to set the terms of righteousness today.