Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 489

THE NEW TESTAMENT

Chap. II]

465

very reason that such a canonical authority could only be the outflow of the finally unanimous and ever spontaneous churches. A recognition which was by the distances between the farthest outlying churches in the West and in the East which experienced still more impediment from the absence of a regular communication and which, in the midst of the confusion brought about by persecution and by heterodoxy, could only And yet the result is that be established as by miracle. persecution had scarcely ceased, and the ecclesiastical bond been regulated, and heterodoxy been repressed, when on every hand you find the churches in the possession of a second Holy Scripture, and the authority of the New Testament standing in nothing behind that of the Old. This would be inexplicable, if the Old Testament had announced itself as exclusive and in itself complete, and had not, rather, itself called for a New Testament as its complement. The prophetic character of the Old Covenant the

recognition of

greatly impeded

;

;

Everything in the be nothing but anticipatory, and calls

bars out this exclusive point of view.

Old Testament will "age to come" (J^SH

for the all

who revered

lated a reality

its

In the estimation of

D71!?).

Old Scripture postushadow of which alone

authority, the entire

which was

to come, the

The glimmerings were One read the prologue The pedestal was finished

was given in the old dispensation. there, the light itself still tarried.

the

drama

for the

was

itself

was

to follow.

monument about

still

to be placed

;

to be erected, but the figure itself

upon

it.

There was a

the apodosis of fulfilment was yet to come.

protasis,

but

When

this

end, this complementing reality, came, the same problem

This apodosis, this plerosis, came not in one moment of time, immediately to be ended and closed by the parousia, but this manifestation was also to be perpetuated, as The same has been the case now nearly twenty centuries. necessity of the Scripture^ which existed for the manifestaarose as of old.

was here repeated. What took place only once, and was to project its energy for centuries together and to all the ends of the earth, must pass

tion of the prophetic dispensation,

-^

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