God revealed through him the revelation was but as means to this higher end?'[1]
(2) We shall, perhaps, discriminate more between the parts of the Old Testament, some of which will be chiefly valuable to us as bringing into view the gradualness of Israel's education, and as giving that fulness to our conceptions of Biblical truths which can only be got by knowing the history of their outward forms; others will have only that interest which attaches even to the minutest and obscurest details of the history of much-honoured friends or relatives; others, lastly, will rise, in virtue of their intrinsic majesty, to a position scarcely inferior to that of the finest parts of the New Testament itself.
(3) As a result of what has thus been gained, our idea of inspiration will become broader, deeper, and more true to facts.
(4) We shall have to consider our future attitude towards that Kenotic[2] view of the person of Christ which has been accepted in some form by such great exegetical theologians as Hofmann, Oehler, and Delitzsch. Although the Logos, by the very nature of the conception, must be omniscient, the incarnate Logos, we are told, pointed His disciples to a future time, in which they should do greater works than He Himself, and should open the doors to fresh departments of truth. The critical problems of the Old Testament did not then require to be settled by Him, because they had not yet come into existence. Had they emerged into view in our Lord's time, they would have given as great a shock to devout Jews as they have done to devout Christians; and(Phil. ii. 7). How far this [Greek: kenôsis] extended is a theological problem which in the sixteenth century, and again in our own, has exercised devout thinkers. For the modern form of the Kenotic view or doctrine the English reader will naturally go to Dorner's History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol. iii., in Clark's Library. Dorner's opposition to this view is a weighty but not, of course, a decisive fact. We must be loyal to the facts of Christ's humanity reported in the Gospels. The question as to the extent of the [Greek: kenôsis] is an open one.]
