THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL CHAPTER I AIM AND METHOD OUR purpose is to trace the history of Israel's religion from the earliest discoverable stages down to the Christian era. The subject has been frequently treated in recent years under the name of "Biblical Theology of the Old Testament." The adjective "Biblical" in this title is intended to differentiate this science from dogmatic or systematic theology. Dogmatic theology, which aims to present the philosophy held in any particular religious communion, uses the contents of the Bible to confirm or establish the doctrines of the Church as defined in the creeds. Its purpose may be said to be the discovery of the meaning of the Bible for us and in our philosophical system. With the rise of modern historical science men began to realise that what the biblical writers thought of God and divine things might not always be normative for us. The student of history does not understand a thing unless he can trace the process of growth by which it has come to be what it is. From this point of view it is no longer enough for us to set forth the religious ideas of the Bible in some philosophical arrangement. The principle of arrangement must be organic, according to the stages of growth discoverable in the documents upon which our knowledge depends. Biblical theology, therefore, is correctly defined as the science which sets forth "the theology of the Bible in its historical formation." The same thing is meant by Oehler 1 Briggs, General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture, p. 569. Dr. Briggs adds the phrase “within the canonical books." Whether this conception of the canon belongs here we may be able to determine later. when he speaks of the "historico-genetic presentation of the religion contained in the Scriptures of the Old Testament." "1 The phrase historico-genetic means simply that we are to trace the genesis and growth of the Old Testament religion. Since this is a purely historical inquiry, it seems best to state it in the title, and speak of the history of Israel's religion. The source of our knowledge is, of course, the literature of the Hebrews. For dogmatic theology the same is true. For dogmatic theology the definition of the canon is important; for the historical inquiry this is not so. The canon is the group of books accepted in the Church as authoritative. Historical science knows no authoritative documents; it asks only whether the documents with which it deals contain material bearing on a certain historic development, in this case bearing on the religion of Israel. This consideration shows that the attempt to limit biblical theology to the canonical books of the Old Testament is a mistake. No clear line of demarcation can be drawn between the religion of the canonical books and the religion of those excluded from the canon. The religion of Israel did not stop growing when the latest of the Hebrew books took shape. In fact, as we now know, some of the so-called apocrypha and pseudepigrapha are earlier in date than some portions of the Old Testament. The advantage of defining our subject as the history of religion instead of a theology is seen when we reflect that while the documents with which we have to deal are full of religion, it is doubtful whether they can be said to contain a theology. The endeavour to make them teach a theology is instructive with reference to this point. The early Church was challenged as to its theology, that is to say, as to its beliefs concerning God and the world, sin and salvation, on two sides. The Jews denied that the beliefs of the Christians were authenticated by the Scriptures; the gentiles called upon them to justify their rejection of the an1 Old Testament Theology, § 2. cestral gods. Against both antagonists Christian thinkers appealed to their sacred book. But the stress to which they were driven is made clear by their method of interpretation. It was a boon to them that the allegorical exposition had been so thoroughly adopted by Philo. Origen, the greatest scholar of the Church, appropriated this method and frankly confessed that many passages of the Old Testament, taken literally, did not teach any important theological truth. The literal sense, he held, is only the body of Scripture; we must search for the soul, which is the deeper mystical meaning. It must be evident that this theory and the later assertion of a threefold, fourfold, or even sevenfold sense of Scripture must block the way to a really historical understanding both of the documents themselves and of the religion which underlies them. Protestantism, indeed, rejected the allegorical interpretation and laid stress on the literal interpretation. Luther, although his religious experience gave him a better understanding of the real religious appeal made by the biblical writers than was found among the theologians who preceded him, was not able to free himself from the scholastic philosophy in which he had been brought up, and this is more distinctly true of Melanchthon and Calvin. In one sense the interpretation of Scripture was less open to discussion in the Protestant Churches than in the Church of Rome. In the latter the defects of Scripture could be made good by tradition, and the allegorical method could find a suitable sense almost anywhere. But the Protestants had made their whole system depend on the Bible, and they had rejected the allegories. They must find all that they needed in the text literally interpreted. What actually happened was that a new tradition took the place of the old. What could be used to strengthen the received doctrinal system was taken in the form of proof-texts, and the rest was left out of view. The theory of a fourfold sense now gave way to the doctrine of the analogy of faith, according to which all Scripture, since it proceeded from God |