much political as personal. Is it altogether impossible that He whose teachings have upturned empires and founded new civilizations should have been altogether unsuspicious of the social and political forces that lay within his words?
The obstacles to an appreciation of such a possibility are mainly two:
(1) Since the the Reformation the theological and exegetical study of the New Testament has been largely dominated by an individualistic philosophy. The chief aim of theology has been the discovery of an explanation of the "salvation" of each individual believer. A new man and not a new society has been the objective point of most preaching. If sometimes the theologian has been forced into a belief in the solidarity of the race, it has really been that he might have a major premise on which to base his restricted conclusion as to the fate of the individual. Such a point of view, was inevitable. No man can escape the Zeitgeist. But in thus rightly insisting upon the need of saving faith on the part of every man, oirr religious teachers have to a considerable degree overlooked the essential sociability of human nature, and unconsciously have developed exegetical presumptions that have biased interpretation. Scriptural teachings have been applied to men as if they were insulated entities, and to society as if it were but an aggregation of easily separated wholes.
The results of such presuppositions are no less unfortunate than inevitable. They have affected not merely the conception of the position of the church in the world, but they have also narrowed Christian truth to a field in which Jesus never meant it to remain, and to which the early Christians did not limit it. Perhaps today's thought is swinging to the other extreme, but at the worst, modern conceptions of man and society are calculated to offset the unmodified individualism of the past. Whether for weal or woe, the underlying premises of the social sciences that isolation is abnormality and that society is itself an object of study promise some day to prove as revolutionary in biblical interpretation as was the new conception of the worth of the individ-
