THE RELIGION OF

CHAPTER I

AIM AND METHOD

ISRAEL

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.

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when he speaks of the "historico-genetic presentation of the religion contained in the Scriptures of the Old Testament." 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

as author, must be harmonious. And in place of the allegorical interpretation came a set of types according to which everything in the Old Testament was made to foreshadow Christ.

The endeavour to emphasise the doctrinal parts of Scripture had one curious result. It became the fashion for teachers of theology to collect proof-texts out of the whole Bible and publish them with comments for the use of students. Sebastian Schmidt, of Strassburg, one of the ablest scholars of the seventeenth century, gave a course of lectures on the dicta probantia, and afterward published them under the title Collegium Biblicum. The example was followed by others, and may have given rise to the idea that there was, after all, a difference between dogmatic and biblical theology. The rise of rationalism, however, was probably more potent in turning thought to the real nature of the biblical books. The clear formulation of the distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology seems to be due to Gabler, whose essay on this subject was published in 1787. Gabler rightly made biblical theology an historic rather than a philosophical study. A considerable part of the theological work of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, was devoted to the development of this thought; namely, that biblical theology belongs among the historical sciences.

The apprehension of the literature of the Hebrews as an historic source is what distinguishes our age from all that have preceded it. To the Jews the Bible was primarily a code of laws. The earnestness with which they have applied this code to their daily conduct is writ large on their whole later history. This point of view was to a certain extent overcome by the early Church under the leadership of the Apostle Paul. The Church, however, looked upon the documents of the Old Testament as so many predictions

1 De justo discrimine theologia biblica et dogmaticæ, regundisque recte utriusque finibus. I have not seen this essay, but it is cited by most of the writers on this subject.

of the salvation which was brought by Jesus Christ. This also was a one-sided view. Later, when stress was laid upon a correct philosophy of the universe, the Bible became the divinely inspired treatise on doctrine. The unnatural interpretations forced on the text by both these theories are well known. It is now clear that both theories did violence to the real nature of the Bible. What we now emphasise in describing this book is its character as religious literature; the Bible is the expression of the religious life of the Hebrew people. It is, therefore, a source of religious edification to the reader. This, to be sure, has always been known to devout souls. It was the merit of Pietism that it called men's attention afresh to this truth.

But the view of Pietism may easily lead to extravagancies. If these are to be guarded against they must be accompanied by an historical apprehension. As the Bible is something more than a collection of proof-texts for the dogmatician, so it is more than a series of comforting assurances for the believer. When by a correct exegesis we have discovered the meaning of the sentences which make up the book, we are still far from understanding the book. These sentences are somehow related to each other. They have an organic unity, or rather they express a single continuous life. We must therefore have some principle by which we can bring the isolated fragments into unity. This means that we must seek to discover the organic evolution of which they are the expression.

It follows logically that our science demands as a prerequisite what is known as the higher criticism. Criticism is simply examination of documents to determine their historical value. All our knowledge of antiquity comes to us in fragments. We have a bit of flint as evidence of what the oldest man was doing; we have a half-defaced inscription from which to discover the ideas which were current three thousand years ago; we have a pile of broken clay tablets from which to piece together the cosmology of the dwellers in the Euphrates Valley somewhere near the dawn