consideration for comparative purposes, in order to show their influence positively and negatively upon the development of biblical doctrine; for the biblical religion is a religion in the midst of a great variety of religions of the world, and its distinctive features can be shown only after the elimination of the features that are common with other religions. We must show from the historical circumstances, the psychological preparations, and all the conditioning influences, how far the origin and development of the particular type and the particular stage of religious development of Israel and the Church were influenced by these external forces. We must find the supernatural influence that originated and maintained the biblical types and the biblical religion as distinct and separate from all other religions. And then these other religious forces will not be employed as coördinate factors with biblical material, as is done by Reuss, Schwegler, and Kuenen, and later writers of the school of Ritschl, who make Biblical Theology simply a history of religion, or of doctrine in the times of the Bible and in the Jewish nation. Rather these theological conceptions of other religions will be seen to be subordinate factors as influencing Biblical Theology from without, and not from within, as presenting the external occasions and conditions of its growth, and not its normal and regulative principles.

Thus Stade urges that Old Testament Theology is a historical discipline and that it cannot be limited to the Canon of the Old Testament. He insists that there should be a return to the sound principles of De Wette and Von Cöln.1 Deissmann also thinks that the theology of the New Testament should not be limited to the Canon; but that its purpose is to give the theology of primitive Christianity rather than the theology of the New Testament writings. He represents that it has three chief problems: (1) to present the religious and moral contents of the thought of the age in which Christianity originated; (2) to give the special formations of the primitive Christian consciousness; (3) the comprehensive character of the whole. Under the second head he would give: (a) the

1 Zeitschrift f. Theologie und Kirche, 1893, s. 48. "Sie hat sich an dem A. T. als Institution und nicht an dem A. T. as Canon zu orientieren," s. 46.

synoptic preaching of Jesus; (b) the Pauline Christianity; (c) the Johannine Christianity. The climax is reached in Wrede, who proposes to do away with the term "Biblical Theology" and substitute for it the term "History of the Primitive Christian Religion." 2

There is doubtless room for a special discipline devoting its attention to the history of the primitive Christian religion, and using other sources than the Biblical sources, the Canon of Holy Scripture. But such a discipline can never take the place of Biblical Theology, which is entitled to the name Biblical only so far as it uses the Biblical writings as not only normal to the discipline, but also as defining its scope. The biblical limit must be maintained; for the biblical material stands apart by itself, in that the theology therein contained is the theology of a divine revelation, and thus distinguished from all other theologies, both as to its origin and its development. They give us either the products of natural religion in various normal and abnormal systems, originating and developing under the influence of unguided or partially guided human religious strivings, or else are apostasies or deflections from the religion of revelation in its various stages of development, or else, at the best, represent the genuine strivings of Christianity apart from and beyond the biblical guides.

2. The discipline we have defined as presenting the theology of the Bible. It is true that the term "Biblical Theology" is ambiguous as being too broad, having been employed as a general term including Biblical Introduction, Hermeneutics, and so on. And yet we must have broad term, for we cannot limit our discipline to Dogmatics. Biblical Dogmatics, as rightly conceived, is a part of Systematic Theology, being a priori and deductive in method. Biblical Dogmatics deduces the dogmas from the biblical material and arranges them in an a priori dogmatic system, presenting not so much the doctrines of the Bible in their simplicity and in their concrete form as they are given in the Scriptures themselves, but such doctrines as may be fairly derived from the biblical material by the logi

1 Zeitschrift f. Theologie und Kirche, 1893, s. 126 seq.

2 Ueber Aufg. und Methode der sogenannten N. T. Theologie, 1897, s. 80.

cal process, or can be gained by setting the Bible in the midst of philosophy and Church tradition. We cannot deny to this department the propriety of using the name "Biblical Dogmatics." For where a dogmatic system derives its chief or only material from the Scriptures, there is force in its claim to be Biblical Theology. We do not, therefore, use the term "Biblical Theology" as applied to our discipline with the implication that a dogmatic system derived from the Bible is nonbiblical or not sufficiently biblical, but as a term which has come to be applied to the discipline which we are now distinguishing from Biblical Dogmatics. Biblical Theology, in the sense of our discipline, and as distinguished from Biblical Dogmatics, cannot take a step beyond the Bible itself, or, indeed, beyond the particular writing or author under consideration at the time. Biblical Theology has to do only with the sacred author's conceptions, and has nothing whatever to do with the legitimate logical consequences of these conceptions. It is not to be assumed that either the author or his generation argued out the consequences of their statements, still less discerned them by intuition; although, on the other hand, we must always recognize that the religion and, indeed, the entire theology of a period or an author may be far wider and more comprehensive than the record or records that have been left of it; and that, in all cases, Biblical Theology will give us the minimum rather than the maximum of the theology of a period or author. But, on the other hand, we must also estimate the fact that this minimum is the inspired authority to which alone we can appeal. The only consequences with which Biblical Theology has to do are those historical ones that later biblical writers gained in their advanced knowledge of divine revelation, those conclusions that are true historically whatever our subjective conclusions may be as to the legitimate logical results of their statements. And even here the interpretation and use of later writers are not to be assigned to the authors themselves or the theology of their times. The term "Biblical Dogmatics" should be applied to that part of Dogmatics which rests upon the Bible and derives its material from the Bible by the legitimate use of its principles. Dog

matics as a theological discipline is far wider than the biblical material that is employed by the dogmatician. The biblical material should be the normal and regulative material, but the dogmatician will make use of the deductions from the Bible and from other authorities that the Church has made in the history of doctrine, and incorporated in her creeds, or preserved in the doctrinal treatises of the theologians. He will also make use of right reason, and of philosophy, and science, and the religious consciousness as manifest in the history of the Church and in the Christian life of the day. It is all-important that the various sources should be carefully discriminated, and the biblical material set apart by itself in Biblical Dogmatics, lest, in the commingling of material, that should be regarded as biblical which is non-biblical, or extra-biblical, or contra-biblical, as has so often happened in the working of ecclesiastical tradition. And, even then, when Biblical Dogmatics has been distinguished in Systematic Theology, it should be held apart from Biblical Theology; for Biblical Dogmatics is the point of contact of Systematic Theology with Exegetical Theology; and Biblical Theology is the point of contact of Exegetical Theology with Systematic Theology, each belonging to its own distinctive branch of theology, with its characteristic methods and principles. That system of theology which would anxiously confine itself to supposed biblical material, to the neglect of the material presented by philosophy, science, literature, art, comparative religion, the history of doctrine, the symbols, the liturgies, and the life of the Church, and the pious religious consciousness of the individual or of Christian society, must be extremely defective and unscientific, and cannot make up for its defects by an appeal to the Scriptures and a claim to be biblical. None of the great systematic theologians, from the most ancient times, have ever proposed any such course. It has been the resort of the feebler Pietists in Germany, and of the narrower Evangelicalism of Great Britain and America, doomed to defeat and destruction, for working in such contracted lines. The errors involved in this exclusive dependence on biblical material have now been made so evident that none can reasonably dispute them. It is now perfectly clear

that the New Testament is predominantly Pauline, and we must recognize a large and strong tradition, based on the teaching of Jesus and of the Twelve, which has no adequate representation in the New Testament proportionate to the teaching of Saint Paul. Only in this way can the Christianity of the second century be historically explained.1

Biblical Theology cannot be a substitute for Systematic Theology. Systematic Theology is more comprehensive than Biblical Theology. Biblical Theology is important in order to the distinction that should be made, in the first place, between the biblical sources and all other sources of theology, and then, in the second place, to distinguish between Biblical Theology as presented in the Holy Scriptures themselves, and Biblical Dogmatics which makes deductions and applications of the biblical material.

3. But Biblical Theology is wider than the doctrines of the Bible. It includes Ethics also. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that no one has thus far attempted to publish a Biblical Ethics, and that the ethical element has little, if any, consideration in the most of the Biblical Theologies which have thus far been published. So far as it appears it is interwoven with the doctrines of faith, and has no separate existence, and no consideration is given to the ethical point of view. The only way in which the Ethics of the Bible can be given proper recognition is in the recognition of it as a separate department, just as it is recognized in the discipline of Dogmatics. Not until this has been done and the ethics of Holy Scripture has been thoroughly considered in its historical development and in its unity and variety, will the question of the relation of the Gospel to the Law, and of the New Testament to the Old Testament, be satisfactorily answered. It is at the bottom an ethical question rather than a question of faith.

4. The school of Baur, and even Weiss and Van Oosterzee, would stop with biblical doctrines of faith and Biblical Ethics. But Schmid, Schultz, and Oehler are correct in taking Biblical Theology to include religion as well as doctrines and morals;

1 See p. 503.