SECTION III

the old testament

The picture which the scriptures of the Old Testament furnish of the Messiah, is drawn with great clearness and boldness. Though single features only are given in the several delineations, yet are these all founded on, and developed from the same general view. In the Old Testament scriptures Christ is the end of the divine promise, and the object of human desire. The older theology delighted to find Him in the more obscure passages of the Old Testament writings, e.g., in the plural form, ‘Let us make man’ (Gen 1:26), in the ‘sight of the Lord’ (Deu 4:37), in ‘the angel of the covenant’ (Mal 3:1), and similar passages. Modern rational theology, however, would scarcely any longer admit the existence of an expectation of a Messiah, and especially of a suffering Messiah, in the Old Testament, until suddenly the wind veered round to another quarter, and then it was said that Christ was in the Old Testament, but scarcely a shadow of Him in the New; that the Christian Church had derived the miraculous element contained in her representation of her founder from the Old Testament delineations of the Messiah. Thus were the stem and flower alternately denied, while the fact was lost sight of, that history is as little accustomed as nature to exhibit such monstrous instances of incompleteness. But when once a clear notion of the nature of the Christ of the Old Testament is arrived at, a real fulfilment of the expectation there held out will be demanded. The coming of Messiah is involved in that constant reaching forth to things to come, which is the very spirit of the Old Covenant. This covenant not merely exhibits the contrast between the divine and the human, but also that interaction of both, that approach, that mutual grasp, the consummation of which was to be their real union in the God-man. The patriarchal promise advances from the promise of the blessing to the promise of the individual who was to bring the blessing, the Prophet; while even the law, much as it appears to deal chiefly with the outward letter, is founded upon the idea of human nature as it ought to be, and therefore upon the God-man. Typicism sets forth, in shadowy form, not only the work of atonement, but also the Atoner Himself; the official anointing designates each aspect of Christ’s life, His prophetic, priestly, and kingly nature; and from the descriptions of the Messiah in the Old Testament, especially in the writings of the prophets, may be gathered a full delineation of Himself. The same spirit, e.g., which reproves the zealous Elijah (1Ki 19:10, &c.), appears in the declaration wherewith Christ rebukes the zealous disciples (Luk 9:55). When we find ideal traits of such peculiarity and delicacy, from the Old Testament, incarnate in the life of Christ, we can no longer feel surprised at the New Testament incarnation of the more general features of the Old Testament revelation. Christ’s birth by the Spirit, His holy life, gentleness, fearful conflict, bitter sufferings, death, victory, and glory; the reconciliation, renewal, and transformation of the world; these are those broad features of the Messiah, in which the New Testament is one with the Old, the fulfilment with the hope. Yes, we find in the prophets, as in all the sacred Scriptures, the blossoms of the real incarnation of God, afterwards to ripen into the perfect fruit. No impersonal Messiah, no merely general idea of the perfectibility of man, could follow the Isaiah of actual history. If we could imagine the New Testament lost for a time, a theological Cuvier would be able to infer its existence and general nature from the peculiarities of the Old. Such scientific diviners were the prophets. From the great ones of former times, from Abraham, Moses, and David, they could infer the coming glory of Christ. It is a contradictory and unhistorical procedure, arising from the want of a sense for the organic, both in nature and history, to make an unchristian Old Testament precede the Christianity of the New, or a mythological New Testament follow the christological Old Testament. An assumption of so monstrous a kind is in its very nature a mutilated romance, a necessary development from the pantheistic notion of the universe; while, on the other hand, the recognition of the organic connection between the Old and New Testaments, is the result of the recognition of an eternal, personal God, and consequently of Jehovah, the God presiding with consistent freedom over all history.

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Notes

1. It is only in their mutual connection that either the Old or the New Testament can be thoroughly understood. The Talmudist separates the New Testament from the Old, as a false excrescence, and idolizes the Old exclusively, teaching that it has always been in the bosom of God. Thus the living God, ever cherishing the Son in His inmost nature, becomes to him but a kind of grey-bearded rabbi, employed, in the eternity before the world, in drawing up the holy book, the Thorah. (Compare De Wette, Einl. in das Alte Testament, p. 19.) The antipodes of the Talmudists, in their view of the canon, are the ancient and modern Gnostics, who thought to purify and elevate the canon by separating the New Testament from the Old, and denying the identity of the God of the New with the Jehovah of the Old Testament. The ancient Gnostics could not appreciate the Old Testament, because they were infected with the dualistic view of the universe, which regarded matter as evil. In this respect, the pure ideality in which the Old Testament represents creation as the product of the Word of God, was abhorrent to them, as were also all its consequents, especially the real incarnation of the Son of God. It is by the same error that the modern Gnostics are led into misconceptions of the Old Testament. In the fact that they explain sin as a result of finity, and see in individual definiteness only the limitation of the spirit, we recognise the old dualism in its subtlest form and most virulent distinctness. The New Testament God, however, of whom they form conceptions in such contrast with the eternal Jehovah, is in reality the impersonal, evanescent phantom of religious sentimentality, cherishing within himself the evanescent universe, a counterpart to the rigid rabbi with his ever rigid Thorah in his bosom. According to the Talmudists, the Son of God is a perpetual law-book; according to the Gnostics, a continuous metamorphosis of the world. The latter are entirely ignorant of the simple law, that the God of revelation, for the very reason that He is ever the same, must assume a varying form in presence of the varying degrees in which the religious consciousness is developed. The same human father, of whom the boy of ten years old says, How unkind my father is! appears to the matured young man of twenty, a father who, even in his chastisements, was but maintaining the discipline of love. The more modern enemies of the Old Testament have especially set themselves against the circumstance of thunder being ascribed to Jehovah, overlooking the fact that thunder is always an actual fact; that it is quite natural to ascribe this phenomenon to the all-effecting God; and that, finally, it is only the difference between regarding thunder as sent by God with intentional reference to some event, or as sent by Him without such intentional reference.

2. Old Testament Christology has hitherto suffered from many deficiencies. The christological element has been chiefly or exclusively sought in significant particulars, instead of recognized in the entire development of Old Testament life. Secondly, the process of formation of the New Testament, or christological life in the Old Testament, its gradations, and, consequently, its organization, have not been duly estimated. And, thirdly, it has been specially forgotten that this process of formation is not a merely figurative one, exhibiting the dogmatic image of Christ, but, at the same time, a substantial one, consummated in the actual God-man. In the latter respect Christology has been much injured by Nestorian views, which have not duly estimated the manner in which the life of Christ Himself was gradually introduced by the consecrations of the lives of many, found in the line of the Old Testament genealogy of Mary. Misconceptions of the relation of the Old Testament to the New have been entertained in modern times, especially by Schleiermacher (see his Glaubenslehre, vol. ii. p. 346, and other places) and Hegel (see his Religions-Philosophie, vol. ii.)