remains, and in it there is still the healing of the Nations and the resurrection of the Church, for there is brought to us, in kindly fashion of our common lot, One, who claims us as His Brethren, and lifts us with Himself to God. III THE OLD TESTAMENT IN THE CHURCH1 FOR WHATSOEVER THINGS WERE WRITTEN AFORETIME WERE WRITTEN FOR OUR LEARNING, THAT THROUGH PATIENCE AND THROUGH COMFORT OF THE SCRIPTURES WE MIGHT HAVE HOPE.Romans xv. 4. ST. PAUL has just quoted a passage from the 69th Psalm and applied it to Christ, and here, in the text, he justifies his action on the ground that the Scriptures, which, of course, in his mouth mean only the sacred writings of Israel, have an abiding value. In the second Pastoral Epistle the apostolic doctrine as to the same Scriptures is still more clearly stated in a passage which we may usefully have before us on the present occasion. "Every Scripture inspired of God," we read, "is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: that the man of God may be 1 Preached on the second Sunday in Advent, December 6, 1903, in St. Margaret's, Westminster. complete, furnished completely unto every good work." It is perhaps easy to read more into St. Paul's words than they properly contain; certainly it is not an universal validity which is affirmed, nor an indiscriminating use which is suggested. Even in asserting the value of the Scriptures, the apostle indicates the limitations of that value. "Two points St. Paul teaches: the permanent value of the great moral and spiritual truths of the Old Testament, and the witness of the Old Testament to Christ. His words cannot be quoted to prove more than this.” 1 Christianity, we know, grew out of Judaism, and in its earliest stage had the aspect of a reformed Jewish religion. We do not always remember that, in the age which witnessed the final ruin of the Jewish national polity, the Jewish Religion, though still in theory passionately nationalist, was yet organised as an international association, and engaged in an eager propagandising. The Synagogue and the Septuagint were potent solvents of Jewish nationalism: the one undermined the local patriotism which found its sacred centre in the Temple worship; the other set the Jews free from the trammels of a language, already becoming obsolete, and brought 1 Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 396. them by right of their literature into the very centre of intellectual activity. The Old Testament, read in Greek by men who had grown up in a Greek atmosphere, and were familiar with Greek philosophy, was a new book. Read indeed simply, as a record of fact, it presented at every turn spiritual paradoxes and moral crudities which were to the Greek mind intolerable; but then, alongside with these, it exhibited a religious and ethical superiority to his own literature so manifest that, in spite of his resentment, the Greek could not withhold his admiration. An escape from this contradiction was discovered by the acceptance of arbitrary and, to modern thinking, fantastic methods of interpretation. The true sense of Scripture, it was maintained, is not that which lies on the surface of the text, but that which is buried in the text as a treasure in the earth, or concealed in it as a message in cipher. The more crude and offensive the text, the more likely to enshrine, as in an unusually careful protection, a precious spiritual truth. A whole system of exegetic rules was devised, by means of which the hidden sense might be discovered; and that allegorical interpretation, which had mitigated for the Greeks the repulsive features of the Old Testament, lay ready to the hand of Christian expositors when, in their turn, they should come to the same Scriptures with new requirements. In short, the Old Testament with which the first disciples had to make their count was already extensively spiritualised by the allegorists of Alexandria. Nothing was what it seemed, but was only the symbol of something invisible. The history of the Old Testament was here sublimated to a history of the emancipation of reason from passion." » 1 So long as Christianity remained within the Jewish sphere, the authority of the Old Testament remained unquestioned, and the current interpretation, always with a reference to Christ, served all the purposes of the Church; but when, thanks mainly to the missionary achievements of St. Paul, the Gospel had been carried to the great centres of non-Jewish life, the cities of the Empire, then, necessarily, a new situation was created. The Old Testament was intensely national in itself and, still more, in the exposition of the Rabbis throughout the synagogues of the Dispersion; and this wider Christianity, which embraced on equal terms both Jews and Gentiles, was the very negation of nationalism. As the Old Testament had had to be spiritualised by the Jewish allegorists in order to 1 Harnack, History of Dogma, i. 223. |