Chapter 2

ON MOSAIC THEOLOGY. The church founded and established in the calling of Abraham — What the visibility of the church is, and from where it arises — The state of the church after the calling of Abraham up to the legislation — The primeval language preserved — The descendants of Abraham not exempt from the stain of sojourning in Egypt — The Sinaitic legislation; or the beginning of Mosaic theology — The first state of the church under positive law — Theology handed down in scattered form, gathered into one body; committed to writing; the doctrine of the church made complete — The certainty, authority, and evidence of the divine word committed to writing — The twofold consideration of Mosaic theology — In what sense it is evangelical, in what sense legal — The fable of the Jews concerning the oral law refuted — The threefold foundation of present-day Judaism.

I. After God had preserved His church through so many ages amid great dangers, and often even on the very brink of destruction — irradiating here and there, wherever among the nations He willed, whomever He willed with the light of heavenly truth — it pleased Him at last, in the solemn calling of Abraham described above, to establish and fix it, as it were wandering and unstable; and to render it more visible and conspicuous through a complete separation from the world, which was now plainly and openly under the power of Satan, and through the institution of new rites. For the visibility, as they say, of the church is not to be estimated by the number of its professors. For since the assembly of God's people on earth, which is the church, is accustomed to be called visible on account of that piety which is the distinguishing mark of the righteous and the unrighteous, it can happen — indeed it very often does happen — that in the greatest crowd of professors, the church is nearly hidden and cannot be clearly discerned, because that piety from which alone it is conspicuous is neglected. But the church is visible for no other reason than because some assembly is the church. Although, therefore, in the calling of Abraham the church was reduced to nearly one family, yet since it was enriched and enlarged by spiritual light and by new institutions of divine worship which made its separation from the rest of the world notable, from that time it shone forth more illustrious, more visible, and more glorious than ever before.

II. Now that revelation which was made to Abraham and was the foundation of the new church we have briefly narrated above, according to the plan of our work. We have also shown that the theology resting upon it served as the rule or canon of obedience acceptable to God, of faith, and of worship, for nearly all the pious, for four hundred and thirty years. The things that happened by divine providence to this new race of theologians, that is, to the Abrahamic church, throughout several centuries are set forth most plainly in the books of Genesis and Exodus. They were continually stirred and stimulated by new revelations to render due obedience to God, to celebrate His worship diligently, and to trust in His promises. They were exposed by God's definite counsel to various afflictions and persecutions — exercised by them more than broken or crushed — and in all their straits and dangers they obtained unspeakable testimonies of divine favor and care. It is recorded in the Scriptures that Abraham, that great father of the church and of the family, communicated to his posterity the promises he had received, the knowledge of God's will with which he was instructed, and all the rites of worship — both those involving circumcision and those recently prescribed to him — (Genesis 18:18, 19). And all these things were observed according to each person's measure by all those who descended in natural order from that son of his to whom the promises pertained, or who, by God's will and counsel, joined themselves to them, until there came

that appointed time in which all things were to be renewed and reduced to a new form of external worship.

III. We have shown that the language used by Abraham was that of the first men, and that it was at length called Hebrew from Heber. His posterity, traversing many regions of the east where other dialects — especially Syriac — were in use, preserved it pure and undefiled. This is apparent from the distinction which Scripture notes between the speech of Laban the Syrian and that of Jacob (Genesis 31:47): "Laban called" (the heap of stones) by an Aramaic name, "and Jacob called it" by a Hebrew name. The common interpreter adds, "Each according to the propriety of his own language." But since Laban was descended from Heber, it seems probable that he had not entirely forgotten his language; he used the Syriac, however, as by then more familiar to him. Even in Egypt, where they served a hard bondage for approximately two hundred years, the native purity of the language was preserved. The same cannot be said of the worship of the true God. For the Holy Spirit testifies that the entire church fell away to some degree in Egypt from the principles and standard of this Abrahamic theology. The prophet Ezekiel teaches that both women, Oholah and Oholibah — that is, Israel and Judah — in other words, the whole race of Abraham's descendants, committed adulteries in Egypt (ch. 23:2, 3), and that they brought those adulteries out with them (v. 8); hence God complains that that people did not forsake the idols of Egypt, in the twentieth chapter of the same prophet (v. 8). Similarly, Joshua expressly affirms that the fathers of the wilderness people worshiped foreign gods not only beyond the river but also in Egypt (ch. 24:14). Some are of the opinion that this was the reason why, when Satan boasted of having traversed and subjected the whole earth to himself, God had only Job to set against him (Job 1:8; 2:3). How far this defection of Abraham's descendants advanced, and with what idols or what foreign worship they defiled themselves, is entirely uncertain. Whether they admitted the superstition of Apis we shall see later. After that time they are reported to have been ever more addicted to idolatry — not only in the wilderness, a stupendous example of the vanity and blindness of the human mind, but all the way to the Babylonian captivity, by which God purposed to root out that plague entirely from the church. But these matters belong to the apostasy of the Mosaic church.

IV. When, therefore, the time had come in which God was pleased to put, as it were, the finishing hand to theology as it was to be taught and administered through mere men, with Moses acting as mediator and intermediary, He summoned this chosen people, separated from all other mortals, into the most desolate solitudes of Arabia; and there He instructed them in the most wise and holy laws, in innumerable sacred rites, and in His entire will, with an immense enlargement of theological light. Now no state of the church under positive law, or pure institution, had preceded these times. From the creation of the world up to this point, each family — whether separately or in conjunction with others — had devoted itself to the instituted worship of God as right reason judged that this ought to be done according to the circumstances of things. Nor did the Israelites themselves act otherwise while they remained in Egypt. They all indeed worshiped the same God according to the dictates of the same theology; but that they should do this united by the bond of some ecclesiastical assembly — this the law of nature, which alone they used in all matters not specially revealed, did not prescribe. But since it was necessary, for a conspicuous type or pattern of the spiritual glory that was one day to be brought to light through the promised seed, that God should gather all that people into one visible assembly, which would be a more solemn seat of His worship, He did so. And this was accomplished in that most celebrated legislation at Sinai. To pursue the particulars of individual revelations, or to narrate the institutions of worship, would be foreign to our purpose. For one who is investigating the progress of theology in general, it will be sufficient to note a few things by which it was first enlarged at this time.

V. First, therefore, that heavenly doctrine, or knowledge of God, which had been revealed from the foundation of the world in manifold and various ways and on various occasions, was as it were compacted into one general and stable rule of worship and obedience, and in a new form delivered to the whole church. Then, since this doctrine had up to this point been preserved only through oral tradition — by which it had been partly lost entirely, and partly rendered useless through a mixture of various superstitions and false opinions — it was now, by God's special command and His ineffable care and mercy toward the church, committed to the faithful monuments of writing. Thus theology was snatched from the custody of mortals and no longer exposed to their boldness, blindness, or negligence. Therefore, whatever happened to the theologians themselves, theology from that day forward remained pure without the slightest blemish or corruption. Furthermore, to the body of prior revelations and institutions, once collected and arranged into laws, new revelations were added besides, which rendered the rule of worshiping God and living to Him so perfect in that manner that the church had no need of any new institution or new doctrine, until He should come "in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge were to dwell."

VI. Now these revelations of the divine mind committed to writing bear witness to their Author with no less evidence, and persuade men that they are from God, than each revelation made immediately to someone made him certain that he had received it from God. When it pleased God to breathe immediately upon any of mortals by His Spirit, or to make them partakers of divine revelations — as we have shown He dealt with Adam, Noah, and Abraham — it is established that they were all most certain concerning the will of God and that God was speaking to them. But there was a peculiar divine certainty and persuasion attained by those to whom those persons communicated, by God's command, those inspirations or revelations. For one who wished to have certainty concerning that divine and supernatural revelation which had not been granted to him immediately by God needed to rest upon a twofold foundation: namely, the ministry of the one to whom God communicated it immediately, and the affinity of the revealed matter itself with the divine nature, which would plainly show that something divine inhered in it. But in a far different manner does divine persuasion of heavenly truth insinuate itself into the human mind when someone hears God speaking immediately. Most God-fearing men, before His word was committed to writing, had no other confirmation of the doctrines divinely revealed to them than the things themselves impressed upon their minds through the ministry of a few. But now that the mind of God has been inscribed in writing, every mortal to whom the Scripture has come has God speaking to him no less immediately than if he heard God speaking with a living voice — just as Adam declared that he had heard the voice of the Lord. For just as no voice can strike the ears of men except through the air in which it is formed, yet for that reason it cannot be denied that that voice is immediately from God, if indeed it truly is God's voice; so although the voice of God is conveyed through writing, and God uses that medium by which He addresses men, there is no reason on that account why He should be said to address them any less immediately. But this is said to happen immediately with reference to that ministry of men of which we made mention earlier. There remains in the written divine word that divine quality which, accompanying immediate revelations, gave to those to whom they were made the most firm and altogether infallible persuasion of heavenly truth. What certitude the oracles of God granted immediately were wont to produce may be illustrated by the example of Abraham himself. There was nothing in right reason — with this one principle excepted, that God is to be obeyed absolutely in all things — that would not be opposed to the command that Abraham had received in that most celebrated test concerning the sacrifice of his son. Yet the oracle had so certainly, indubitably, and infallibly made manifest that God Himself had spoken to him, that with all doubt and disputation excluded, he immediately girded himself to carry out the divine command. Nor is the matter otherwise in the written word. God, its Author, so lucidly reveals Himself in it and so clearly asserts His authority that the human mind, resting on no other testimony, is bound to render religious submission to it in all things — which we have demonstrated more fully in a separate treatise.

VII. It is evident that this theology, revealed and confirmed in that celebrated legislation and committed to books, can be considered in more than one way. For if we attend to the doctrine itself, its scope, and its primary intent, it savors of nothing at all except the manifest elucidation of the first evangelical promise. The greater part of the institutions, and nearly all the rites of sacrifices, refer to, indicate, and declare the promised Mediator, His entire mediatorial work, together with the eternal redemption to be one day acquired by His blood. The mode of teaching is called legal; for since all the institutions of worship that it establishes and presents were carnal — instituted by the sole and most free good pleasure of God for a fixed appointed time only, and imposed upon the Israelite people — they could by their own force in no way affect those divine and sacred realities which they foreshadowed and displayed in type. Those, therefore, who were instructed in this theology, although they were bound by the will of the Lawgiver to bear the yoke of external rites, nevertheless both understood and apprehended by faith the promises of eternal life to be exhibited through the Messiah in the flesh, and all spiritual blessings lying hidden under the shadows of the legal ceremonies. For Christ Himself affirms that Moses and the prophets, His interpreters, bore witness to Him and to His mediatorial work. The Apostles also, proclaiming the death and resurrection of Christ Himself and from these eternal life, asserted that they had taught nothing other than what was written in Moses and the prophets. Concerning the corruption of this theology and the universal apostasy of the theologians, we must treat at greater length afterward; it will be sufficient for now to note that those who are presently apostates are held in the grip of a threefold most pernicious error. For first, they pretend that God delivered, beyond and besides that theology committed to writing of which we have briefly treated, some other oral, cryptic, and mystical teaching containing the exposition of that written one, and many other things of uncertain character added to it. And this fable, to which Scripture itself everywhere cries out in protest, is the foundation of present-day Judaism. The tradition of this oral law — that is, how it was transmitted — is narrated in a work whose authors show at the beginning that they were living around the year of Christ 1128, since they indicate that 1053 years had elapsed from the destruction of the second temple to that present time when they undertook the work. "Joshua the son of Nun, peace be upon him," it says, "received from him" (namely, from Moses) "both the written law and the oral law. It is established that Moses our teacher sat judging all Israel from morning until evening, and the law that was written did not cover every one of the cases that newly arise. Afterward, however, he set over them tribunes, centurions, officers of fifty, and officers of ten, and said to them, Hear your brothers and judge them justly; and he also said of himself, And I commanded you at that time. This commandment was nothing other than that law which he had in his mouth. Concerning the duty of slaughtering and its ceremonies it is written, What he has commanded you, you shall offer and eat; teaching that there were certain precepts concerning slaughter which were not written in the law. Furthermore, Joshua delivered this law to the elders when he departed to the life of the age to come; the elders who extended their days after Joshua delivered it to the prophets, and one prophet to another through the generations, up to Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi; the prophets delivered it to the men of the great synagogue, who are: Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel the son of Jeconiah king of Judah; and those who came with Zerubbabel: Joshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum, and Baanah. These are the heads of the great synagogue." That Rabbi Judah, who lived two hundred years after the destruction of the second temple, afterward committed this oral law to writing is narrated at length by R.M.B.M. in the preface to Seder Zeraim, which the distinguished Pococke edited in Arabic and Latin together with other short works of the same Maimonides. This law grew first into the Mishnayot, then into both Talmuds, with the responses and explanations of the sages added from that time forward. They repeat the same refrain in Pirke Avot, chapter one, and indeed everywhere without exception. In expounding these things, Galatinus is wholly occupied in the first book of De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis, who is found to have plowed with the heifer of Martin Raymond. The consideration of what the Talmudic Jews have to this point fabricated around this law through the preservation of traditions will meet us in another place. Then the Jews suppose that that legal mode of teaching and all the rites of carnal worship must be eternal and altogether immutable — an error which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews opposes, whom we shall elsewhere show to have been Paul. Moreover, they conjecture that through the observance of those rites and ordinances, together with that obedience which they are able to render to the moral law by their own powers, they will be justified and accepted before God. Concerning these matters, however, when we arrive at the narration of the Jewish apostasy, we must, as we have said, treat them at greater length.