Page:Messianic Prophecies - Delitzsch - 1880.djvu/20

4 the Old Testament prophecy. John Albert Bengel (d. 1752) and Christian Augustus Crusius (d. 1775) began to modify the stiff idea of inspiration, since they regarded the prophets not only as passive, but also at the same time as active instruments, and placed their range of view under the law of perspective. With Cocceius (d. 1669) began the method of treating the Old Testament in periods. But they were not able to divide this history into periods according to its internal development, in which chance and plan, freedom and necessity interpenetrate. When then rationalism degraded Jesus to a teacher of religion and morals, the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament became almost entirely without an object, until the gradual unfolding of the idea of the Messiah was recognized in them, and, as there was a return from a merely nominal Christianity to that of the apostles, the gradual subjective preparation of the essential salvation was perceived. This revolution was established by Hengstenberg's (d. 1869) Christologie des A. T. (in three volumes, Berlin 1829—1835, second edition 1854—1857), which formed a new epoch in the treatment of the subject, followed in a spirit of freer criticism by Tholuck's (d. 1877) work: Die Propheten und ihre Weissagungen, Gotha 1860, and the articles Messias and Weissagung by Oehler (d. 1872) in the first edition of Herzog's Real–Encyklopädie, vols. IX Stuttgart 1858, and XVII Gotha 1863. Hofmann's (d. 1877) work, entitled Weissagung und Erfüllung, in two parts, Nördlingen 1841—1844, is far more systematic. The Old Testament history is here reconstructed as an organic whole, developed in word and deed until the time of Christ, with which the history of the fulfilment, as the other half, reaching to the end of the present dispensation, is joined together. Many views of truth which have come into the modern scriptural theology, have sprung from this original work, whose main fault is the straining of the type at expense of the prophecy. Bertheau's lengthy article, Die alttestamentliche Weissagung von Israel's Reichsherrlichkeit in seinem Lande in the fourth volume of the Jahrbücher für deutsche Theologie, Gotha 1859, is intended to distinguish between that which is particularly national and that which is truly divine respecting the glory of Israel's kingdom in their own land. Riehm's valuable work, which is from a more decidedly supernaturalistic standpoint, Die Messianische Weissagung, Gotha 1875, is written from a similar point of view, but in its antijudaistic tendency it has almost returned to the antiquated mode of spiritualising Scripture. The rationalistic