[65] _Christianity in the Apostolic Age._ [66] _The Apostolic Age._ VII.--NEW TESTAMENT THEOLOGY Of all the contributions to the study of the Scriptures with which research, scholarship and thought have enriched our age, none are more fruitful than those which belong to the province of Biblical Theology. Strange as it may appear, while the Bible has been the final authority appealed to in the teaching of dogmatic Theology all down the ages, Biblical Theology is a new science, undreamed of by all but comparatively recent scholars. The old method was to start with a proposition, a thesis, a dogma, and then hunt through the Bible for proof texts. This was the method of the one supremely great work in Systematic Theology which Protestantism has produced--Calvin's _Institutes_. The great reformer first states his dogma and then proceeds to marshal texts in proof of it, following this process by a refutation of objections and an explaining away of apparently adverse texts. You can prove anything in that way. This vicious method accounts for the fact that all the wildest heresies and extravagances of fanaticism, as well as all the great mutually opposed systems of Divinity that have appeared in Christendom, have been able to appeal triumphantly to Scripture in proof of their contentions. Such a confusion of results should have been accepted as the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the method. But now the new process of the study of Biblical Theology follows a more modest but more scientific method. It does not start with any dogma which it seeks to prove; it even dispenses with the "working hypothesis" which science admits to be legitimate. It is wholly inductive. Its aim is simply to discover what the Scriptures teach, no matter whether this should turn out to be favorable to preconceived notions or the reverse. In pursuit of this object it seeks to divest the mind of a mass of irrelevant and distracting notions, the accumulation of ages of Christian thinking and controversy, and work its way back to the times in which the several books were written, viewing them in the atmosphere of their origin. It approaches each book rather from what went before than from what came after, seeing that a thing is usually conditioned by its antecedents, but never by its sequels. Then it segregates the writings of each school or class of teachers, and further the specific teaching of each writer. Lastly, it endeavors to discover the teaching of each book in its entirety and also in its individuality. These points were touched upon in the opening of this section of the Introduction; they need to be treated rather more explicitly before we close because they enter into the more valuable characteristics of the Expositor's Bible.