that is, those historic persons, facts, and relations which embody religious, dogmatical, and ethical ideas. This discrimination is important in Systematic Theology, but it is indispensable in Biblical Theology where everything is still in the concrete. Thus a fundamental question in the theology of the New Testament is, what to do with the life of Jesus. The life of Jesus is, as Schmid shows, the fruitful source of His doctrine, and a theology which does not estimate it lacks foundation and vital power. The life of Jesus may indeed be regarded from two distinct points of view, as a biographical, or as a doctrinal and religious, subject. The birth of Jesus may be regarded as a pure historical fact or as an incarnation. His suffering and death may be historical subjects, or as teaching the doctrine of the atonement. His life may afford biographical matter, or be considered as religious, doctrinal, and ethical, in that His life was a new religious force, a redemptive influence, and an ethical example. Biblical Theology will have to consider, therefore, what the life of Jesus presents for its various departments. And so the great fact of Pentecost, the Christophanies to Peter, Paul, and John, and the apostolic council at Jerusalem must all be brought into consideration. And in the Old Testament we have to consider the various covenants and the religious institutions and laws that were grouped about them. Without religion, with its persons, events, and institutions, Biblical Theology would lose its foundations, and without ethical results it would fail of its rich fruitage. It is therefore a wholesome movement of the more recent Ritschlians to emphasize the religious and vital element in early Christianity. It can become unwholesome only so far as they unduly magnify this element over against the other equally important elements.

5. The discipline of Biblical Theology presents the theology of the Bible in its historical formation. This does not imply that it limits itself to the consideration of the various particular conceptions of the various authors, writings, and periods, as Weiss, and even Oehler, maintain, but that, with Schmid, Messner, Van Oosterzee after Neander, it seeks the unity in the variety, ascertains the roots of the divergencies, traces them each in their separate historical development, shows them co

operating in the formation of one organic system. For Biblical Theology would not present a mere conglomerate of heterogeneous material in a bundle of miscellaneous Hebrew literature, but would ascertain whether there is not some principle of organization; and it finds that principle in a supernatural divine revelation and communication of redemption in the successive covenants of grace, extending through many centuries, operating through many minds, and in a great variety of literary styles, employing all the faculties of man and all the types of human nature, in order to the accomplishment of one massive, all-embracing, and everlasting Divine Word, adapted to every age, every nation, every type of character, every temperament of mankind; the whole world.

V. THE PLACE OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

Biblical Theology belongs to the department of the Study of Holy Scripture as a higher exegesis, completing the exegetical process, and presenting the essential material and principles of the other departments of theology.

The boundaries between Exegetical and Historical Theology are not so sharply defined as those between either of them and Dogmatic Theology. All Historical Theology has to deal with sources, and in this respect must consider them in their variety and unity as well as their development; and hence many theologians combine Exegetical Theology and Historical Theology under one head-Historical Theology. It is important, however, to draw the distinction, for this reason. The sources of Biblical Theology are in different relation from the sources of a history of doctrine, inasmuch as they constitute a body of divine revelation, and are in this respect to be kept distinct from all other sources, even cotemporary and of the same nation. They have an absolute authority which no other sources can have. The stress is to be laid less upon their historical development than upon them as an organic body of revelation; and this stress upon their importance as sources, not only for historical development, but also for dogmatic reconstruction and practical application, requires that the spe

cial study of them should be exalted to a separate discipline and a distinct branch of theology.

In the biblical discipline, Biblical Theology occupies the highest place, is the latest and crowning achievement. It is a higher exegesis, completing the exegetical process. All other branches of the study of Holy Scripture are presupposed by it. Biblical Literature must first be studied as sacred literature. All questions of date of writing, integrity, construction, style, and authorship must be determined by the principles of the Higher Criticism. Biblical Canonics determines the extent and authority of the various writings that are to be regarded as composing the sacred Canon, and discriminates them from all other writings by the criticism of the believing spirit enlightened and guided by the Holy Spirit in the Church. Biblical Textual Criticism ascertains the true text of the writings in the study of manuscripts, versions, and citations, and seeks to present it in its pure primitive forms. Biblical Hermeneutics lays down the rules of Biblical Interpretation, and Biblical Exegesis applies these rules to the various particular passages of the Sacred Scriptures. Biblical Theology accepts all these rules and applications. It is not its office to go into the detailed examination of the verse and the section, but it must accept the results of a thorough exegesis and criticism in order to advance thereon and thereby to its own proper work of higher exegesis; namely, rising from the comparison of verse with verse, and paragraph with paragraph, where simple exegesis is employed, to the still more difficult and instructive comparison of writing with writing, author with author, period with period, until by generalization and synthesis the theology of the Bible is attained as an organic whole.

Biblical Theology is thus the culmination of Exegetical Theology, and must be in an important relation to all other branches of theology. For Historical Theology it presents the great principles of the various periods of history, the fundamental and controlling tendencies, which, springing from human nature and operating in all the religions of the world, find their proper expression and satisfaction in the normal development of Divine Revelation, but which, breaking loose from these salutary bonds,

become perverted and distorted into abnormal forms, producing false and heretical principles and radical errors. And so in the biblical unity of these tendencies Biblical Theology presents the ideal unity for the Church and the Christian in all times of the world's history. For Dogmatic Theology, Biblical Theology affords the holy material to be used in Biblical Apologetics, Dogmatics, and Ethics, the fundamental and controlling material out of which that systematic structure must be built which will express the intellectual and moral needs of the particular age, fortify the Church for offence and defence in the struggles with the anti-Christian world, and give unity to its life, its efforts, and its dogmas in all ages. For Practical Theology it presents the various types of religious experience and of doctrinal and ethical ideas, which must be skilfully applied to the corresponding differences of type which exist in all times, in all churches, in all lands, and, indeed, in all religions and races of mankind. Biblical Theology is, indeed, the Irenic force which will do much to harmonize the antagonistic forces and various departments of theology, and bring about that toleration within the Church which is the greatest requisite of our times.

VI. METHOD OF BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

The method employed by Biblical Theology is a blending of the genetic and the inductive methods. The method of Biblical Theology arises out of the nature of the discipline and its place in Theological Encyclopædia. As it must show the theology of the Bible in its historic formation, ascertain its genesis, the laws of its development from germinal principles, the order of its progress in every individual writer, and from writer to writer and age to age in the successive periods and in the whole Bible, it must employ the genetic method. It is this genesis which is becoming more and more important in our discipline, and is indeed the chief point of discussion in our day. Can all be explained by a natural genesis, or must an extraordinary divine influence be called in? The various rationalistic efforts to explain the genesis of the biblical types of doctrine in their variety and their combination in a unity in the

Scriptures are extremely unsatisfactory and unscientific. With all the resemblances to other religions, the Biblical Religion is so different that its differences must be explained, and these can only be explained by the claims of the sacred writers themselves, that God Himself in various forms of Theophany and Christophany revealed Himself to initiate and to guide the religion of the Bible in its various movements and stages. Mosaism centres about the great Theophany of Horeb, as Christianity centres about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the problem of Biblical Theology, as it has traced the Theology of the Jewish Christian type to the Theophany of Pentecost, and of the Pauline type to the Christophany on the way to Damascus, so to trace the Johannine type and the various Old Testament types to corresponding supernatural initiation. The Johannine type may be traced to the Christophanies of Patmos. The Old Testament is full of Theophanies which originate particular Covenants and initiate all the great movements in the history of Israel.1

As it has to exhibit the unity in the variety of the various conceptions and statements of the writings and authors of every different type, style, and character, and by comparison generalize to its results, Biblical Theology must employ the inductive method and the synthetical process. This inductive method is the true method of Exegetical Theology. The details of exegesis have been greatly enriched by this method during the present century, especially by the labours of German divines, and in most recent times by numerous labourers in Great Britain and America. But the majority of the labourers in Biblical Theology have devoted their strength to the working out of the historical principle of our discipline. Within the various types and special doctrines a large amount of higher exegesis has been accomplished in recent years. The highest exegesis in the comparison of types and their arrangement in an organic system, with a unity and determining principle out of which all originate and to which they return their fruitage, remains comparatively undeveloped. Indeed the study of the

1 See pp. 542 seq.