An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
We have spoken thus far as if the whole biblical-critical problem had
been that of the New Testament. In reality the same impulses which had
opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon
the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the
Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the
force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that,
almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the
obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the
evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had
happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the
rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the
Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book
wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel
had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old
covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament became a Christian
book. Not merely were the Christian facts prophesied in the Old
Testament, but its doctrines also were implied. Almost down to modern
times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove
doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are
cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we
have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic
Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.
The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the
one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder
scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic
authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic
scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of
inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth
views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a
revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of
considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which
would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which
would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth
of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the
religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the
true relation of Judaism to Christianity.