(Isa 40), thereby reversing the state of exile. This returning “glory” will be seen by “all flesh” (40:5). This returning presence is clearly identical with the Servant of the Lord. He is God’s luminous glory in that he is a “light to the nations” (49:6). This description clearly parallels the universal manifestation of the kavod in 40:5. Furthermore he is described as the “arm of the Lord” (53:1, 63:12). He is also the “angel of the presence” sent to save (63:9).75
If Isaiah describes a new exodus, then there must logically also be a new Moses and a new Passover lamb. Just as Moses sprinkled Israel with the blood of the covenant (Exod 24:8), so the Servant will “sprinkle many nations” (Isa 52:15) and will not only establish a covenant, but himself will be a “covenant for the people” (42:6).76 In light of the fact that the redeeming promise of grace ends the exile, which has occurred because of sin, this covenant can be none other than the new covenant spoken of by Jeremiah that eliminates sin.77 God tells the prophet that the former covenant that he made with Israel after leading them out of Egypt was nonfunctional because of the unbelief and disobedience of the nation (Jer 31:31–32). Echoing Moses’s own prediction in Deuteronomy 30:6 (“And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”), Jeremiah states that YHWH will make a new covenant (v. 31): “I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (31:33) and “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (v. 34). Moses tried to place the law within the Israelites’ hearts (Deut 6:6), but he could only demand and coerce them into imprinting it on themselves in an outward way (6:8–9). In the same manner, Moses established sin offerings (Lev 4:1—5:13, 6:24–30, 8:14–17, 16:3–22) and guilt offerings (Lev 5:14—6:7, 7:1–6), which could not ultimately cleanse the conscience (Heb 10:4). The result of this unatoned for sin would be exile, as Moses himself predicts in Deuteronomy 27–32. The word and works of the Servant will accomplish the end of exile, and therefore finally eliminate sin.
Moreover, the nineteenth-century Lutheran Old Testament scholar Ernst Hengstenberg, points out that the Servant does not merely mediate the covenant like Moses, but in fact is the covenant himself.78 He can do this because he is the one who has become the new Passover lamb and true sin offering (Isa 53:5, vv. 7, 10).79 He will for the sake of his people be “distressed” with their “distress” (63:9) (or possibly one could translate this as “afflicted” with their “affliction”).80 The Servant proclaims this universal Jubilee (Isa 61:2), based on the new covenant’s forgiveness of sins (Jer 31:34) rooted in his own person and work.81 Moses attempted to redeem Israel by doing this (Exod 32:31–32), but was unable.
1. Unless indicated otherwise, all biblical citations are drawn from the English Standard Version (ESV) translation of the Bible.
2. See Gerhard, On the Nature, 43–84; Hoenecke, Evangelical Lutheran Dogmatics, 1:403–505; F. Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 1:193–265.
3. For the characterization of the writers of scripture as “Amanuenses” see Robert Preus, Inspiration of Scripture, 54; R. Preus, Post Reformation Lutheranism. This, it should be stressed (as Preus pointed out in his Inspiration of Scripture, 71–73), does not mean a theory of “dictation.”
4. FC Ep, Norm and Rule, par. 1; CT 777.
5. Luther writes: “All of Scripture is pure Christ” (AE 15:339).
6. See Barth, CD 3.1:76–94. Karl Barth’s term for a hazy area between myth and literal history.
7. LC 4; CT 747.
8. This seems to be the attitude of Paul Althaus. See Althaus, Das Sogenannte Kerygma. Also see the nineteenth–century version of this in Johannes von Hofmann, Biblische Hermeneutik.
9. Here we reject the critique of orthodoxy made in Prenter, Creation and Redemption, 87–92.
10. For an excellent exposition of what inerrancy means and what it does not mean, see R. Preus, “Notes on the Inerrancy,” 127–38. Preus notes that inerrancy as understood by the Lutheran scholastics does not mean crass literalism. Neither does it ignore historical context. What it does mean is that the Bible is truthful and trustworthy about what it teaches us.
11. This is why the hermeneutics of Lutheran orthodoxy insisted that the typological or “mystical sense” was actually part of the sensus literalis. See Dannhauer, Hernenevtica Sacra.
12. See von Harnack, Marcion.
13. ST 1a.1.1; BF 1:38. Aquinas writes:
Quia vero sensus litteralis est, quem auctor intendit: auctor autem sacrae Scripturae Deus est, qui omnia simul suo intellectu comprehendit: non est inconveniens, ut dicit Augustinus XII Confessionum, si etiam secundum litteralem sensum in una littera Scripturae plures sint sensus.
14. See Frei, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 18–37. Frei mainly deals with Calvin, but mentions Luther as well. His point is that the sensus literalis is the simple grammatical meaning of texts harmonized with the location the divine author has placed it within a sequence of events in the large context of the history of salvation. Hence, mystical and typological senses of the Bible are not conceptualized as being in conflict with historical ones. Also see a good description of pre-critical typological interpretation in Eckhardt, New Testament in His Blood, 13–16.
15. AE 33:28.
16. This was the approach of the first Lutherans and the first Lutheran book exclusively devoted to hermeneutics. See Illyricus, How to Understand.
17. Frei, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 66–104. Frei here describes the emergence of this sort of thinking.
18. Brenz, Personali Vnione Duarum; Chemnitz, Two Natures, 25, 217, 241–47. Also see Vainio, Justification and Participation, 136–40.
19. De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis.
20.
