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THE argument of the three foregoing chapters has led to results which may be summarized as follows:
The quotation of passages from the Old Testament (whether or not under
a formula of quotation) is not to be accounted for by the postulate of
a primitive anthology of isolated proof-texts.
The composition of "testimony-books" was the result, not the
presupposition, of the work of early Christian biblical scholars.
The evidence suggests that at a very early date a certain method, of
biblical study was established and became part of the equipment of Christian
evangelists and teachers.
This method was largely employed orally, and found literary expression
only sporadically and incompletely, but it is presupposed in our earliest
sources.
The method included, first, the selection of certain large sections
of the Old Testament scriptures,
especially from Isaiah, Jeremiah and certain minor prophets, and from the
Psalms.
These sections were understood as wholes, and particular verses
or sentences were quoted from them rather as pointers to the whole context
than as constituting testimonies in and for themselves.
At the same time, detached sentences from other parts of the Old Testament
could be adduced to illustrate or elucidate the meaning of the main section
under consideration.
But in the fundamental passages it is the total context that is
in view, and is the basis of the argument.
The relevant scriptures were understood and interpreted upon intelligible and consistent principles, as setting forth "the determinate counsel of God" which was fulfilled in the gospel facts, and consequently as fixing the meaning of those facts.
This whole body of material—
the passages of Old Testament scripture with their application to the gospel
facts—
is common to all the main portions of the New Testament, and in particular
it provided the starting point for the theological constructions of Paul,
the author to the Hebrews, and the Fourth Evangelist.
It is the substructure of all Christian theology and contains already its
chief regulative ideas.
The question must now be raised, whether the principles
and methods followed by the early oral tradition of Old Testament interpretation
lying behind the New Testament have continuing validity as a means to the theological
understanding of the gospel facts.
Our study of the treatment of testimonies, will at any rate have shown
that the New Testament writers do not, in the main, treat the prophecies of
the Old Testament as a kind of pious fortune-telling, and seek to impress their
readers with the exactness of correspondence between forecast and event.
This kind of argument was freely used by Christian apologists at a somewhat
later period, but it is less convincing to us than it presumably was to its
original public.
It is not entirely absent from the New Testament.
It seems clear, for example, that the Matthaean version of the story of the
Triumphal Entry of Christ into Jerusalem has introduced a second donkey, where
Mark has only one, in order to exhibit an exact correspondence with the actual
wording of Zech.ix.9.
[This modification must apparently
have been the work of someone who did not understand the nature of Hebrew parallelism.]
But instances of this kind are rare, and have been given an altogether disproportionate
emphasis in discussions of the subject.
Certainly in the body of testimonial which we are entitled to regard
as primitive this particular motive, if not absent, is always subordinate.
To carry into our study of the New Testament even a half-unconscious expectation
of finding everywhere this dubious factor at work is to prepare for inevitable
misunderstanding.
The assumption which the New Testament writers do make is a different one.
They interpret and apply the prophecies of the Old Testament upon the basis
of a certain understanding of history, which is substantially that of the
prophets themselves.
Though not stated explicitly in the New Testament it is everywhere presupposed.
History, upon this view, or at any rate the history of the people of God, is
built upon a certain pattern corresponding to God's design for man His
creature.
It is a pattern, not in the sense of a pre-ordained sequence of inevitable
events, but in the sense of a kind of master-plan imposed upon the order of
human life in this world by the Creator Himself, a plan which man is not at
liberty to alter, but within which his freedom works.
It is this pattern, disclosed "in divers parts and divers manners" in
the past history of Israel, that the New Testament writers conceive to have
been brought into full light in the events of the gospel story, which they
interpret accordingly.
This is a view of history which merits consideration in its own right.
It coheres with the entire Hebrew-Christian Weltanschauung:
its conception of the nature of man, of the relations between man and the universe,
and of the relation of both to their Creator.
Its specific character emerges when we compare and contrast it with some rival
views, for example the theory of recurrent historical cycles, dominant in antiquity
and formulated in masterly fashion by Plato, or the nineteenth-century theory
of progressive development on the lines of biological evolution.
For the prophetic view no such simple diagram as a circle or an ascending curve
or straight line is appropriate, since it deals in personal relations not susceptible
to diagrammatic formulation.
The prophets saw history as the field upon which the living God perpetually
confronts man with a challenge.
To this challenge he must respond;
his choice is free, but free within limits;
and by his response he helps to shape the course of events to ends beyond his
surmising.
Thus the prophets deny that history moves under its own steam, that man has
in himself power to direct it, and in general that the movement of history
can be understood entirely within, and out of, itself.
There is a mysterious factor, praeter-human and praeter-natural, which is real
and powerful, and without the recognition of this factor history remains unintelligible.
This supra-historical factor in history is the living God Himself.
His impact upon human society reveals itself negatively as judgment upon human
action, positively as power of renewal, or redemption.
This twofold rhythm of the pattern of history finds characteristic expression
in terms of death and resurrection.
This, and neither cyclic recurrence nor linear development, is the real nature
of historical action.
Such was the meaning which the prophets distilled out of the tragic course
of events in which they were partakers.
They bore witness that it would emerge fully only in an event in which absolute
judgment and absolute redemption should become actual among men.
Taking up this view of history the earliest thinkers of Christianity declared
that in the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ this act of absolute
judgment and absolute redemption had taken place.
This complex event therefore becomes the centre from which the whole history
of the people of God, both backwards and forwards in time, is to be understood,
and ultimately the history of all mankind.
This is the assumption which underlies the application of Old Testament prophecy
to the gospel facts.
Stated in those terms it is bald and abstract; but if we follow the guidance
of the New Testament writers, and study those parts of the Old Testament to
which they refer us, sympathetically, with an open mind, having always before
us in imagination the story of the Gospels, we shall find that they penetrate
in a variety of ways, and in differing detail, into the real, permanent moral
situation of men in history, and so to our own situation.
In general, then, the writers of the New Testament, in making use of passages
from the Old Testament, remain true to the main intention of their writers.
Yet the actual meaning discovered in a given passage will seldom, in the nature
of things, coincide precisely with that which it had in its original context.
The transposition into a fresh situation involves a certain shift, nearly always
an expansion, of the original scope of the passage. There are prophecies interpreted "messianically" in
the New Testament where it is a matter of dispute whether or not the Old Testament
writer had any intention to foretell the coming of a person bearing the character
and functions which came to be designated by the term "Messiah," or
indeed had in mind any personage of the future at all.
Among passages important from the first as a source of testimonies, Ps.ii is
only one out of many scriptures which have been, and still are, variously understood
by scholars as referring to an historical monarch or to an ideal figure of
the future.
[According to the Scandinavian
school, this and other "messianic" scriptures have behind them the
ritual myth of the Divine King.
Upon this view the alternative—"historical" or "eschatological"?— is
no longer exclusive.]
Ps.cx, again, is generally understood to have been originally a song for the
enthronement of some victorious Israelite or Jewish ruler whose period has
not yet been determined.
But both these psalms are confidently treated by our authors as prophecies
of Christ.
Still clearer is it that Ps.viii has been subject to re-interpretation.
In its original intention it is a poem upon the startling contrast between
man's position in the universe as lord of creation and his insignificance
in the sight of God, the contradiction being resolved by the recognition that
man is whatever he may be, solely as the object of God's care, and because
God willed it so:
his littleness and his greatness alike testify to the glory of God—
a fundamental idea which in one form or another runs all through the Bible.
But as applied in the New Testament this psalm becomes the vehicle of a singularly
profound conception of what messiahship means, a conception, we must suppose,
strange to the ancient Hebrew poet.
To recognize all this is not to deny validity to the New Testament interpretation
of the Old Testament. It would not be true of any literature which deserves
to be called great, that its meaning is restricted to that which was explicitly
in the mind of the author when he wrote.
On the contrary, it is a part of what constitutes the quality of greatness
in literature that it perpetuates itself by unfolding ever new richness
of unsuspected meaning as time goes on.
The ultimate significance of prophecy is not only what it meant for its author,
but what it came to mean for those who stood within the tradition which he
founded or promoted, and who lived under the impact of the truth he declared.
It is a thoroughly unhistorical proceeding to attempt to read the biblical
documents as if they were (let us say) newly discovered Ugaritic texts, coming
to us out of a forgotten age, across an unbridged chasm of time.
They have had a continuous life within the community to which they belong,
and belonged from the first, in its changing forms, Israelite, Jewish and Christian.
The Old Testament Scriptures formed part of the daily environment of the writers
of the New Testament, as the writings of both testaments form part of our own
daily environment in the Christian Church.
The meaning of the writings cannot remain static while the life to which they
belong changes with the centuries.
In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that the plain, original meaning
of the documents, as it may be recovered by the most searching historical criticism,
is unimportant, or that any and every reinterpretation, the product of profound
insight, of mistaken ingenuity, or of mere fancy, is equally legitimate or
equally valid, even if the interpreter be a canonical writer himself.
I am only concerned to disarm the prejudice which has long haunted critical
studies (understandable enough as a reaction from earlier exaggerations)—
the prejudice that the treatment of the Old Testament in the New is in principle
of no more than antiquarian interest, and incapable of making any serious contribution
to our understanding of the Gospel.
I have tried to show that when we abandon the mistaken idea that this treatment
is essentially a mechanical process of bringing together isolated
"proof-texts" and their supposed "fulfilments," and recognize
that the governing intention is to exploit whole contexts selected as the varying
expression of certain fundamental and permanent elements in the biblical revelation,
we find genuine illumination upon theological questions of the first importance.
There are places where the valuation of interpretations offered or presumed
is a delicate problem.
Each case is to be considered on its merits.
In a broad way I would suggest that in any given case the question should be
asked whether the meaning which the New Testament writer found in a passage
of the Old Testament when he reflected on it in view of the gospel facts is
an organic outgrowth or ripening of the original thought, or whether it amounts
to no more than an arbitrary reading into a passage of a meaning essentially
foreign to it. In the former case the theological value of the citation is
likely to be greater.
In the examples I have just given, Ps.ii, viii and cx, I believe reflection
will show that the development of meaning is a living growth within the given
environment, and that the doctrines associated with these passages by New Testament
writers gain in depth and significance when we have regard to the original,
historical intention of the psalms they cite.
Without pursuing this problem further, I would submit that, while there is
a fringe of questionable, arbitrary or even fanciful exegesis, the main line
of interpretation of the Old Testament exemplified in the New is not only consistent
and intelligent in itself, but also founded upon a genuinely historical understanding
of the process of the religious—
I should prefer to say the prophetic—
history of Israel as a whole.
In conclusion, I would offer some corollaries regarding
the character of New Testament theology, as a model of Christian theology in
general.
In the recent past an impatient reaction against the speculative systems of
earlier periods took the form of attempts to ground Christian theology upon
"religious experience," conceived to be immune from the assaults
of philosophical scepticism and historical criticism alike.
That movement has now spent itself, and it is not necessary to rehearse either
its achievements or its weaknesses.
But it may be useful to recall, for the sake of contrast, the way in which
it dealt with the biblical material.
It set out to show that the genesis of New Testament theology could be accounted
for out of the "religious experience" of the primitive Christians.
That the evidence available for reconstructing that experience was scanty had
to be admitted.
But in the Pauline epistles there seemed to be a good deal of information about
the inner life of one at least of the creators of Christian theology.
Sustained attempts were made to show that Paul's theology was spun out
of his experience of conversion on the Damascus road, and the "visions
and revelations of the Lord" which ensued, whether these were conceived
as
"mystical" or as "prophetic" in character.
But such attempts were doomed to failure.
Paul refuses to exploit his "visions and revelations of the Lord" as
a basis for doctrine.
He alludes to them reluctantly, and only because his bona fides as a
Christian teacher and prophet had been impugned.
The ἄρρητα ῥήματα (II
Cor..4) which he heard in paradise remain unspoken.
That he heard such words the Corinthians should know,
in order that they may rightly estimate both his qualifications and his limitations;
what he heard is no concern of theirs.
His "religious experience" is a private affair.
He would speak of it only "to himself and to God" (I Cor.xiv.28).
Nor does he ever make his conversion experience the basis for doctrine,
though he alludes to it obliquely, from time to time,
in explication or corroboration of his teaching.
It is of course true that any theology speedily becomes abstract and barren
which does not verify itself in experience;
Paul's did so verify itself.
But this is a different matter from making such experience its ground, and
this Paul never did.
He expressly bases his theology upon the kerygma as illuminated by the
prophecies of the Old Testament;
or, in other words, upon the historical facts which he had "received" (ὅ
καὶ παρέλαβον)
from competent witnesses, set in the larger historical framework witnessed,
both as fact and as meaning, by the prophetic writers.
Upon this fundamental material he sets reason and imagination to work, in the
context of an active Christian life of labour, prayer and charity within the koinonia of
the Church, and so brings forth his massive theology for the enlightenment
and guidance of generations of Christian believers.
If even Paul, who does in his letters so "unlock his heart," found
a securer basis than his own "experience" for the theology he taught,
still more is this true of other New Testament writers, whose experience in
any case has to be conjectured, since they say nothing about it.
This was not what early Christian preachers talked about.
On the day of Pentecost, we are informed, their theme was not the amazing experience
of being possessed by the Holy Spirit:
it was "the mighty works of God" (τὰ
μεγαλεῖα τοῦ θεοῦ,
Acts ii.11).
Similarly, in the First Epistle of Peter, those whom God has "called out
of darkness into his marvellous light" do not talk about the experience
of enlightenment, but about "the victorious achievements" (ἀρεταί)
of God (I Pet. ii. 9).
And these mighty works, these ἀρεταί,
are known through the testimony to the Heilstatsachen, the "saving
facts" of the Gospel, understood in their total context.
If however in some quarters New Testament theology has been explained as nothing
but the rationalizing of Christian "experience," others have laid
stress upon a speculative element in it, akin to Hellenistic thought of the
period, and have sometimes gone so far as to represent it as little more than
a special case of the general development of popular religious ideas in the
Hellenistic world.
It is certainly true that the development of Christian theology was profoundly
influenced by the religious thought of Hellenism, and it cannot be questioned
that this influence is already at work in the New Testament, notably in some
parts of the Pauline epistles, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the Fourth
Gospel.
I see no reason to regret this, or to make any such attempts to minimize it
as are often made at the present time.
In the providence of God it was the Greeks who taught mankind the use of the
logical faculty, and the early Church profited greatly by being their pupil.
Eusebius and other Fathers were not mistaken in believing that the Greeks had
provided a praeparatio evangelica.
Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and many others did good and lasting service
to the understanding of the Gospel by their acute use of the methods and categories
of Greek philosophy.
I am not among those who deplore their influence, nor am I persuaded by those
who tell us that the great task of theologians of this generation is to purge
Christian theology of the last dregs of Platonism.
All this, however, is matter of opinion. What is certain is that while the
theology of the New Testament contains a substantial Hellenistic element, its
fundamental structure, on the other hand, is not Hellenistic but biblical;
and , this biblical substructure is so firmly bonded into the whole edifice
that no amount of Hellenizing ever destroyed, or ever could destroy, its basic
character.
In the controversy with Gnosticism in the second and third centuries the main
point at issue was whether the Christian faith could be detached from its biblical
and historical basis and presented as a form of Hellenistic theosophy.
Victory in the controversy lay decisively with the party which rejected the
Gnostic proposals for a thorough Hellenizing of Christianity, though this party
included theologians who made extensive use of Greek philosophical categories
to formulate and defend Christian dogma.
During the period when the Greek spirit was most active in shaping the dogmatic
system, creed and liturgy continued to bear witness to the biblical foundation.
The ecumenical creed of Christendom as it emerged from the period of stress
in the form called (with doubtful propriety) Nicene confesses Christ who "rose
again according to the Scriptures," and the Holy Spirit "who spoke
by the prophets."
It thereby ties the whole Christian faith to its biblical origins.
The two evangelical sacraments are directly based upon biblical foundations,
whatever importance Hellenistic ideas may have had in elucidating and extending
their significance.
Baptism is the expression of that central conception which we have seen to
be most deeply rooted in the scheme of testimonia, the conception of
death and resurrection through which the Church came into being and through
which each several member is incorporate in the Son of Man, and a branch of
the true Vine.
The Eucharist rehearses the passion and resurrection of Christ in terms of
the covenant-sacrifice and sin-offering of the Servant of the Lord, who is
also the Son of Man.
Early liturgies repeat and emphasize the primitive insistence on the creative
and redeeming acts of God to which the Old Testament bears witness, as the
antecedents of His final act of re-creation and redemption in Christ.
The very ancient series of lections for the season of Advent, for example,
still preserved in the Roman rite,
includes the great prophecies of Isaiah which we have noted as part of the
primitive substructure:
the vision of glory in chapter vi,
the prophecy of Immanuel in chapter vii,
the Stem of Jesse in chapter xi,
the foundation-stone of Zion in chapter xxviii,
the ordination of the Servant in chapter xlii.
These are examples of the way in which the ancient body of scriptural testimonies
was incorporated in the forms of the Church's worship, which thus conserved
intact the biblical and historical foundations of Christian theology while
the subtle processes of Hellenistic philosophy elaborated the superstructure.
The work that the Hellenistic theologians did was an example to theologians
of every period.
They sought an expression for the fundamental truths of the Gospel in terms
which would give them relevance to the large questions which in that age were
being asked about God, man and the universe.
We in turn have the task of giving them relevance to the large questions which
are being asked by men of our time.
But if theology seeks an accommodation with temporary fashions of thought by
cutting loose from its firm foundations in kerygma and testimonies,
as it has sometimes done, it declines into insignificance, and has in fact
nothing to say to the world which the world may not learn elsewhere.
The challenge of a new period with its peculiar problems should force us back
to the pit from whence we were digged and the rock from whence we were hewn.