animals express the inerrant word of God for all time? By no means. These were the forms in which it was necessary to clothe the divine law of sacrifice in its earlier stages of revelation. These partial forms were the object lessons by which the little children of the ancient world could be trained to understand the final law of sacrifice for men. On the same principle we would explain the law of circumcision, the law which prohibits the eating of swine and shellfish, the laws of ceremonial uncleanness and purification, the laws of mixtures and the exclusion of eunuchs, bastards, and descendants of certain nations from the holy precincts. These religious laws doubtless were of immense benefit to Israel in his religious development. But they do not reflect truly and accurately and inerrantly the mind of God as to the way in which He would be everlastingly worshipped. He taught them to worship Him in the forms of which they were capable, in order to train them for the use of the highest forms when the proper time should arrive. The institutions of Israel were appropriate for the Old Testament dispensation, not for the Christian age. They have their propriety as elementary forms, but they err from the ideal of religion as it lies eternally in the mind and will of God. Saint Paul calls them weak and beggarly rudiments,1 a shadow of the things to come.2 IV. GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT IN MORALITY We cannot defend the morals of the Old Testament at all points. It is not in accord with the morals of our day that a man who was a slaveholder, a polygamist, and who showed such little respect for truth as Abraham, should be called the friend of God. It is not to be reconciled with modern morality that a man who committed so much injustice and crime as David should be called the man after God's own heart. It would be impossible for modern writers to make such statements; and yet we should not judge too harshly. We should consider the men in the light of their times. Nowhere in the Old Testament are polygamy and slavery condemned. The time had not come in the history of the world when they could be condemned. Is God responsible for the "twin relics of barbarism" because He did not condemn them, but on the contrary recognized them and restrained them in the Old Testament? These laws could hardly be inerrant. They err from the divine ideal in their morals. But the errors in moral precept were such as were necessary in order to educate Israel for a nobler time when Israel, as well as the Christian Church, would abhor slavery and polygamy as sins and crimes. The patriarchs were not truthful: their age seems to have had little apprehension of the principles of truth;1 and yet Abraham was faithful to God, and so faithful under temptation and trial that he became the father of the faithful, and from that point of view the friend of God. David was a sinner; but he was a penitent sinner, and showed such a devout attachment to the worship of God that his sins, though many, were all forgiven him. And his life as a whole exhibits such generosity, courage, variety of human affection and benevolence, such heroism and patience in suffering, such self-restraint and meekness in prosperity, such nobility and grandeur of character, that we must admire him and love him as one of the best of men; and we are not surprised that the heart of God went out to him also. He must be regarded as a model of excellence when compared with other monarchs of his age. The commendation of Jael by the theophanic angel for the treacherous slaying of Sisera could not be condoned in our age, and it is not easy to understand how God could have commended it in any age. And yet it is only in accord with the spirit of revenge which breathes in the command to exterminate the Canaanites, which animates the imprecatory psalms, which is threaded into the story of Esther, and which stirred Nehemiah in his arbitrary government of Jerusalem. Jesus Christ, praying for His enemies, lifts us into a different ethical world from that familiar to us in the Old Testament. We cannot regard these things in the Old Testament as inerrant in the light of the moral character of Jesus Christ and the character of God as He reveals Him. And yet we may well understand 1 See p. 308. that the Old Testament times were not ripe for the higher revelation, and that God condescended to a partial revelation of His word and will, such as would guide His people in the right direction, with as steady and rapid a pace as they were capable of making. Jesus Christ teaches us the true principle by which we may judge the ethics of the Old Testament, when He repealed the Mosaic law of divorce, and said: "Moses for your hardness of heart suffered you to put away your wives but from the beginning it hath not been so."1 : In other words, the Mosaic law of divorce was not in accord with the original institution of marriage, or with the real mind and will of God. In that law God condescended for a season to the hardness of heart of His people, and exacted of them only that which they were able to perform. The law was imperfect, temporary, to be repealed forever by the Messiah. So through all the stages of divine revelation laws were given, which were but the scaffolding of the temple of holiness, which were to serve their purpose in the preparatory discipline, but were to disappear forever when they had accomplished their purpose. The codes of law of the Old Testament have all been cast down by the Christian Church as the scaffolding of the old dispensation, with the single exception of the Ten Words; and with reference to the fourth of these, the words. of Jesus are our guide : "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath. 2 For the eternal principles of morals we turn in the Old Testament rather to the psalmists, the sages, and the prophets; we think of the true citizens of Zion of the Psalter; of the guest in the temple of wisdom of the book of Proverbs; of the righteous sufferer of the Psalms of humiliation, and of the great prophet of the exile; of the saintly Job triumphantly challenging and destroying every slander of his pharisaic accusers, and vindicating his integrity in a magnificent unfolding of ethical experience,7 which has no equal save in the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus Christ. 1 Mt. 198. See pp. 440 seq. 5 Ps. 22, 69. 2 Mk. 227. 3 Ps. 15, 24. 4 Prov. 9. See pp. 422 seq. 6 V. GRADUALNESS OF BIBLICAL DOCTRINE When, now, we come to the doctrinal teachings of the Old Testament we find less difficulty. Some of the doctrines of the Old Testament are inadequate and provisional. All of them are partial and incomplete. 1. The doctrine of God in the Old Testament is magnificent. The individuality of God is emphasized in the personal name Yahweh, which probably means "the One ever with His people." 1 The doctrine of the living God is so strongly asserted that it is far in advance of the faith of the Christian Church at the present day, which has been misled by scholastic dogmaticians into abstract conceptions of God. The attributes are so richly unfolded and comprehensively stated that there is little to be added to them in the New Testament. The doctrine of creation is set forth in a great variety of beautiful poetical representations, which give in the aggregate a simpler and a fuller conception of creation than the ordinary doctrine of the theologians, who build on a prosaic and forced interpretation of the first and second chapters of Genesis. The doctrine of providence is illustrated in a wonderful variety of historical incidents, lyric prayers, thanksgivings and meditations, sentences of proverbial experience, and prophetic teaching. The God of the Old Testament is commonly conceived as king and lord; He was conceived as the father of nations and kings and His love as the love of Israel and the Davidic dynasty but the "our Father" of the common people was not known until Jesus Christ; the profound depths of the mercy of God in Jesus Christ was not yet manifest; the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was not yet ripe. There is an advance in God's revelation of Himself through the successive layers of the Old Testament writings which is like the march of an invincible king. It is true that there are at times representations of vindictiveness in God, a jealousy of other gods, a cruel disregard of 1 See Robinson, Gesenius' Heb. Lex., new edition by Brown, Driver, and Briggs, article. human suffering and human life, an occasional vacillation and change of purpose, the passion of anger and arbitrary preferences, which betray the inadequacy of ancient Israel to understand their God, and the errancy of their conceptions and representations. But we all know that the true God does not accord with these representations. We may call them anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms; but whatever we may name them they are errant representations. They do not, however, mar the grandeur of the true God as we see Him in the Old Testament. The truthfulness of the teaching of the doctrine of God is not destroyed by occasional inaccuracies of the teachers. 2. The doctrine of man in the Old Testament is a noble doctrine. The unity and brotherhood of the race in origin and in destiny is taught in the Old Testament as nowhere else. The origin and development of sin are traced with a vividness and an accuracy of delineation that find a response in the experiences of mankind. The ideal of righteousness as the original plan of God for man and the ultimate destiny for man is held up as a banner throughout the Old Testament. Surely these are true instructions; they are faithful, they are divine. There are doubtless dark strands of national prejudice, of pharisaical particularism, of faulty psychology, and of occasional exaggeration of the more external forms of ceremonial sin; but these do not mar, they rather serve to magnify the golden strands which constitute the major part of the cord that binds our race into an organism created and governed by a holy God in the interests of a perfect and glorified humanity. 3. The most characteristic doctrines of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament are the doctrines of redemption. These are so striking that they entitle us to regard Biblical History as essentially a history of redemption, and Biblical Literature as the literature of redemption.1 The redemption of the Bible embraces the whole man, body and soul, in this world and in the future state, the individual man and the race of man, the earth and the heavens. The biblical scheme of redemption is so vast, so comprehensive, so 1 See pp. 547 seq. |