History of the Old Covenant. By J. H. Kurtz [pp. 451-486]

Kurtz on the Old Covenant.
not be denied by any believer in revelation. But if it be
affirmed that these stand alone in their reference to him, they
present themselves in a strange isolation; and the question instantly arises, to which no satisfactory answer can be given,
By what right are these considered predictive of Christ, when
no allusion to him is found in all by which they are surrounded?
Are we at liberty to go through the history of Israel, and pick
out all that bears a real or seeming analogy to the history of
Christ, and discarding all the rest as irrelevant, erect out of
these random and violently sundered fragments a figure of him
that was to come? To whose mind can such a course of procedure carry conviction? or, in the interpretation of what book
except the Bible would such trifling be accepted as its just
sense? If the Bible be an intelligible book, with a fixed meaning of its own other than that which any interpreter may at
will fix upon it-if it be the product of a rational mind and
addressed to rational minds, all such capricious dealing with it
must be discarded. It is by such an arbitrary mode of not only
departing from all just principles, but of acting irrespective of
any settled principles whatever, that such incongruous and extravagant senses have been forced upon Scripture as have in
some quarters brought the very name of types into disrepute,
and made the whole idea of their existence an object of ridicule
and contempt.
The other argument, which we shall here mention as constraining to the belief that Christ is to be found elsewhere than
in the express Messianic predictions and the manifest types,
is drawn from the authority of the New Testament. The Holy
Spirit is surely the best expositor of his own mind. The Spirit,
which guided the apostles and evangelists, is the same that
spake through Moses and the prophets. He can tell us with
infallible authority, what was his meaning in any thing that he
inspired the holy men of old to say. Now we find the writers
of the New Testament quoting the language of the Old, or
alluding to it as applicable to Christ, declaring that it was ful filled in him, drawing from it inferences as to his character and
work, and that not only from its explicit predictions and types,
but equally from such parts as on the theory of those who find
Christ nowhere but in these, have no reference to him whatever.
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