Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 53:212 (Oct 1896)
Article: A Question Of Interpretation
Author: James M. Stifler

BSac 53:212 (Oct 1896) p. 691

A Question Of Interpretation

Rev. J. M. Stifler

THE question is not about a single text nor a group of texts on a single subject. It is broad and underlies the whole Bible, a question that confronted Paul in every synagogue from Antioch to Rome: Does Christianity displace and take the place of Judaism? Was Judaism the egg from which the bird having been hatched, the shell has served its final purpose, and must now mingle with the soil and disappear? Or if this antithesis is too sharp, was Judaism the draft of the great temple of Christianity, so that the temple having now been erected, the draft serves only to explain and illustrate it? To one who reads the Epistle to the Ephesians, and especially the Epistle to the Galatians and the Epistle to the Hebrews, the affirmative would appear to be the only possible answer. The Epistle to the Hebrews seems to be decisive. “In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old, is ready to vanish away” (Heb. 8:13). The shell must perish after the bird is hatched. Again we read in Hebrews, “For the priesthood being changed,” changed from the order of Aaron to that of Melchisedec, “there is made of necessity a change also in the law” (Heb. 7:12). The outline draft in Moses may seem to illustrate and explain the new, but the new is said to supersede it. The Aaronic law was suited only to the Aaronic priesthood, and Jesus did not belong to that descent, but to a higher and better.

BSac 53:212 (Oct 1896) p. 692

But while Christianity sprang from Judaism, there are such radical differences between the two that there can hardly be said to be an evolution. They have the same God, the same means of approach to him, faith in the Messiah, and certainly in the first clays of the church the same Bible, though each party contended that the other misread the sacred rolls. But beyond this there were striking differences. Judaism was the religion of a nation. Christianity was the religion of all nations or rather of none. It made a new nation in which “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is no male and female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus’’ (Gal. 3:28). Nationality was vital in Judaism; it could not be tolerated in Christianity. In the former blood was everything; in the latter nothing.

Again, the constituents of Judaism were determined by birth. All who were born in the line of Isaac belonged to the kingdom. In Christianity the constituency is determined by a divine election. Judaism was an oak growing from the ground, thrusting out its limbs from the parent trun...