THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SALVATION PART I THE BIBLICAL BASIS OF THE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I THE SACRIFICIAL SYSTEM THE historical study of Christian doctrine should begin in the Old Testament. There we must seek the germs of which that teaching is the full development. Accordingly, in undertaking an investigation of the Christian doctrine of salvation, it is necessary, first of all, to glance back at the Jewish religion and seek for the points of contact between it and its fulfilment in the gospel. The New Testament constantly assumes a genetic connection between Judaism and Christianity. Its writers unfold their teachings in terms more or less distinctly Jewish and with frequent reference to the Old Testament thought-world. For our present purpose, two inquiries respecting the Old Testament are especially pertinent. The first concerns the religious import of the priestly, or sacrificial system; the second relates to the prophetic conception of the nature and conditions of salvation. Legalism and prophetism are the two most prominent features of the Jewish religion. They existed side by side and acted and reacted upon each other. In important respects they were rival forces. Both have had their effect in the genesis and development of Christian doctrine. To a consideration of the religious import of these two forces the present chapter and the following one will be devoted. It should, however, be made distinctly clear in advance, that the historic connection between the Old and the New Testaments to which I have referred, does not warrant the conclusion that Old Testament ideas, as such, are directly normative for Christian belief. The New Testament does not sustain any such supposition. Christianity is the fulfilment, not the republication, of Judaism. The more systematic writers of the New Testament, such as the apostle Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, insist upon the rudimentary character of the Old Covenant, in consequence of which its teaching and practices fall below the Christian plane of moral and spiritual truth. To Christian thought Judaism represents an earlier stage of revelation. It is preparatory and provisional, and therefore imperfect. It furnished, indeed, the historical basis of Christianity, but the two are not identical, nor is the former an adequate test and measure of the latter. In important particulars they are even radically different. For the apostle Paul the law and the gospel are sharply contrasted terms, and our Lord diverges widely from certain Old Testament maxims and practices in applying his principle of fulfilment. What, then, is the Christian theologian to seek in the Old Testament? I answer that he is to seek the histori cal presuppositions of Christian doctrine. Old Testament conceptions will always be suggestive and historically instructive for the study of Christian teaching, but a direct source of such teaching they cannot be.1 Christianity rises high above that national and ritualistic religion on whose soil it took its rise. In a study like the present, 1 "The real use of the record of the earliest stages of revelation is not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical worth of the perfect scheme of divine grace which can only be attained by tracing its growth." -W. ROBERTSON SMITH, The Prophets of Israel, p. 6. |