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| How the Gospels Cause the Other Books of Scripture Also to Be Gospel. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
8. How the Gospels
Cause the Other Books of Scripture Also to Be Gospel.
Now an objection might be raised to our first
definition, because it would embrace books which are not entitled
Gospels. For the law and the prophets also are to our eyes books
containing the promise of things which, from the benefit they will
confer on him, naturally rejoice the hearer as soon as he takes in the
message. To this it may be said that before the sojourn of
Christ, the law and the prophets, since He had not come who interpreted
the mysteries they contained, did not convey such a promise as belongs
to our definition of the Gospel; but the Saviour, when He sojourned
with men and caused the Gospel to appear in bodily form, by the Gospel
caused all things to appear as Gospel. Here I would not think it
beside the purpose to quote the example of Him who…a few
things…and yet all.4492
4492 Text defective
here. The words as they stand would yield the sense, “the
formula, little and yet all.” | For when he
had taken away the veil which was present in the law and the prophets,
and by His divinity had proved the sons of men that the Godhead was at
work, He opened the way for all those who desired it to be disciples of
His wisdom, and to understand what things were true and real in the law
of Moses, of which things those of old worshipped the type and the
shadow, and what things were real of the things narrated in the
histories which “happened to them in the way of
type,”4493 but these things
“were written for our sakes, upon whom the ends of the ages have
come.” With whomsoever, then, Christ has sojourned, he
worships God neither at Jerusalem nor on the mountain of the
Samaritans; he knows that God is a spirit, and worships Him
spiritually, in spirit and in truth; no longer by type does he worship
the Father and Maker of all. Before that Gospel, therefore, which
came into being by the sojourning of Christ, none of the older works
was a Gospel. But the Gospel, which is the new covenant, having
delivered us from the oldness of the letter, lights up for us, by the
light of knowledge,4494 the newness of the
spirit, a thing which never grows old, which has its home in the New
Testament, but is also present in all the Scriptures. It was
fitting, therefore, that that Gospel, which enables us to find the
Gospel present, even in the Old Testament, should itself receive, in a
special sense, the name of Gospel.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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