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The Unity of the New Testament The diversity does not end there; it extends to subject matter. When we study the contents of the various books, our first impression may well be that their writers are all discussing different
themes. To take one example; the dominant theme of the Synoptic Gospels is the kingdom (or reign) of God; of Paul's letters, communion 'in Christ' and of John's writings, 'life' or eternal life' (the terms being interchangeable).
True, the person of Jesus Christ is closely bound up with all three themes. But how? Have we not here three messages or 'gospels', not one? A little knowledge of the New Testament (as Bacon might have said) may incline a man to
this view; but a deeper study will bring his mind round to a conviction of its basic unity. For when, guided by modern scholars, we study the three themes just mentioned, we begin to see that when Jesus proclaimed, both by word and
by work, 'The reign of God has begun', viz. in his own person and ministry; and Paul wrote, "In Christ God was reconciling the world to Himself"; and John affirmed, 'The Word (or saving purpose) of God became flesh', i.e. expressed
itself in a human being, they were using different concepts to express their common conviction that in the coming of Christ and the kingdom God had spoken and acted decisively for the salvation, or rescue, of His people. In
short, beneath the plain diversity of the New Testament lies a fundamental unity of message: a unity that must have been felt by the men who gathered the twenty seven books into a canon. To take a musical analogy: if in the New
Testament there are many musicians – and there are at least a dozen – playing different instruments, one dominant theme sounds through all their music. What is it? It is 'the story of salvation' – the story of how 'in the
fullness of time' (i.e. the divinely – appointed time) God decisively intervened in human history in Jesus Christ, completed his saving purpose for his people by sending His Son, the Messiah, for their deliverance. This statement
needs some explanatory comments. To begin with, the message of the New Testament is precisely what we have called it – a story, the story of God's decisive intervention in human affairs in Jesus Christ. It is a story in form so
simple at\\that a child can grasp it, though its profound implications for man and the world and history must be worked out by theologians from Paul to John in the e first century to Barth and Bonhoeffer in this. It is a story that
needs for its expression the use of active verbs, such as 'God spoke' or 'sent' or 'gave'. It is a story which finds its classical expression in John 3:16: 'God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in
Him should not perish but have eternal life.' Next: this story is the consummation of God's purpose for His people. 'The New Testament,' said Augustine truly, 'lies hidden in the Old Testament; is made plain in the New.' We
cannot understand the New Testament rightly unless we see it as the fulfillment of a story which begins in the Old. The Bible is not only a collection of records tracing the development of religious ideas among Israelites, Jews and
Christians, but also and chiefly the story of God's saving purpose for His people, begun with their rescue from Egypt, continued in His later dealings with them recorded in history and prophecy, and consummated in the sending of
His Son the Messiah. In the words of Myers' poem 'St. Paul': God, who to glean the vineyard of His choosing, Sent them evangelists till day was done,
Bore with the churls, their wrath and their refusing, Gave at the last the glory of His Son. The parable of the Wicked Vinedressers (Mark 12:1-9) shows that the chief actor in the story saw it so – found
in the Old Testament not the prophets' thought of God but God's action in Israel by prophet, priest or king 0- and knew His own ministry to be the culminating act in God's invasion of His race. His apostles saw it in the same way,
for the first plank in their kerygma or 'proclamation', was the fulfillment of the Scriptures. It is the same God who speaks to us in both Old and New Testaments – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the Father of Christ – as
it is one purpose of God which being fulfilled in both Testaments. This truth finds its classical expression in the prologue to Hebrews: 'God having of old time spoken to our fathers by the prophets in many and various ways has in
these last days spoken to us by a Son' (Heb 1:1). This is why we cannot consent to 'scrap' the Old Testament. To throw away the Old Testament would be to throw a way the key to the New. The Old Testament promises and prefigures the
salvation fulfilled in Christ and the Church. Third: this story of salvation, through one and indivisible, can be resolved into three elements: a Saviour, a saved (and saving) people, and the work of salvation itself; or, if you
will, One Lord, One Church, One Salvation. These form three strands in a single cord – a trinity in unity – and that unity is the story of salvation. This triune story runs through the whole New Testament, and we must now spell it
out in a little detail. 1. One Lord Now take a step farther. This kerygma centred in Christ. ('We preach Christ,' said Paul.) And just as one kerygma sounds through the New Testamanet, so impliued in it is one common religious
attitude to Christ, one essential Christology, one basic estimate of his person. What is it? While holding fast his real humanity, the New Testament writers all sent him on that side of reality we call divine. Or, to put it more
simply, all say. 'Kyrios Jesus – Jesus is Lord.' The prayer of the mother church Maranatha – 'Our Lord, come' (preserved in 1 Corin 16:22) is proof that the primitive church did so. Though Paul uses many titles and categories to
express Christ's meaning for faith, he agrees with his fellow apostles ion the essentials: Jesus, he says, was true man, 'born of woman' and 'Jesus is Lord', a being to be named in the same breath with God. The writer of Hebrews
does not differ. No New Testament author dwells more movingly on the human Jesus 'who in the days of his earthly life offered up prayers and petitions, with loud cries and tears, to God' (5:7); yet none is surer that he is 'the
impress of God's essence' and 'the appointed heir of all things' (1:2). No less certain is Peter that, though Jesus had once been a man facing his accusers with a noble non-resistance (2:22), he is now Lord and Christ (2:13, 3:15),
a being to be named with God and the Holy Spirit (1:2). The seer of Revelation is concerned to depict 'Christ in glory', occupying the throne with God the Father. Yet this 'Christ in majesty' is the same Jesus, born of David's line
(5:5) who had gone to Golgotha for men's salvation and still bears the marks of His sacrifice (5:6,11, etc.). It is not otherwise with the four evangelists. For Mark, Jesus is at once a real man and the divine Son of God. For
Matthew, Jesus the Messianic Son of David, the preacher of the Sermon of the Mount, is 'Emmanuel – God with us' (1:23, 28:20). No reader of Luke can doubt that for him Jesus had once been a real man among men; yet just as surely he
regards Him as 'the Lord', a being divine in His origin and destiny (1:35; 24:44). Finally, if John (both in his Gospel and Letters) is at pains to stress the real humanity of Jesus, yet for him he is the
Word of the Father Now in flesh appearing.
a being who speaks in the accents of divinity ('I am what I am', 8:24,28,58; 13:19). One who
confronts men in the truth and power and love of the Eternal. To sum up. Despite great differences in thought, phrase and title among the New Testament writers, one essential Christology underpins the whole New Testament, perhaps
best summed up in the earliest Christian confession of faith, 'Jesus is Lord.' 'There is a unity in all these early Christian books' wrote James Denney, 'which is powerful enough to absorb and subdue their differences, and that
unity is to be found in a common religious relation to Christ, a common debt to Him, a common sense that everything in the relations of God and man must be and is determined by Him.' What is this but to say that all the New
Testament writers there is but one Lord, one only name given under heaven whereby men may be saved? For them Jesus was not merely 'the man for others' as he is for some today (though of course He was incontestably that); He was
'Jesus Christ our Lord', the only Son of God. 2. One church A saviour and a message of a salvation necessarily imply a
saved people. However differently evangelists and apostles express themselves, one essential doctrine of the church as the new people of God pervades the New Testament. The roots of this doctrine go back to the Old Testament and
the conception of Israel (or, as in the prophets, 'the faithful remnant') as the qehal Yahweh (LXX: ekklesia Kyriou) the people of God. God's holy community. What we have in the new Testament is the church's claim to be the new
people of God, created through Christ, and called to do what old Israel had failed to do – to be 'a light to lighten the Gentiles'. We begin with Jesus and His disciple-band. Study what Jesus says about the advent of the kingdom
(or rule) of God; his conception f himself as Messiah, or bringer of the kingdom; his words about himself as the shepherd and his disciples as God's little flock'; and it is clear that the end Jesus had in view was he gathering of
a new Israel, a new people of God, a new church. First: the coming of the reign, or rule, of God, which was the burden of Jesus' preaching, implies a people living under that rule. So in parable after parable – the Mustard Seed,
the Drag Net, the Wheat and the Tares, the Great Supper – Jesus shows that His purpose is to form a new community. If He calls men to follow Him, He is gathering the nucleus of this people of God. Second: this is confirmed by
Jesus' conception of His Messiahship. He interpreted it in terms of Daniel's Son of Man and Isaiah's Servant of the Lord. Both are 'societary' figures. Each implies a community. When Jesus called Himself 'the Son of Man' (and it
was His favourite title), He saw Himself as the head of a special people, 'the saints if the Most High'. Third: when Jesus described Himself as doing a shepherd's work and His disciple-band as a 'flock', OT passages like Ezek 34
and Micah 5:4 show that He was using pastoral language to describe His Messianic task of gathering God's people. This is the theory, or theology, of the matter. If now we observe what Jesus actually does, we see Him clothing His
purpose with reality, translating it into fact. We may put the issue in one sentence. When Jesus called twelve disciples (a number pregnant with symbolism), when he gave them a new 'law' for a living (as in His great Sermon), when
He sent the disciples forth on their mission to proclaim the advent of God's rule and to gather believers, and when on His last night with them, He instituted a new 'covenant' – all these facts show Him fulfilling His God-given
task of creating a new Israel, the true people of God, to replace the old Israel which had proved disobedient to God's will for it. But Jesus also knew – had he not learned it in communion with His Father and in His study of the
Scripture? – that 'the planted seed of the kingdom must be watered by the bloody sweat of His passion', that only His own obedience unto death and His victory over death, could the 'little flock' become the great one God intended.
Only so could He gather together (as He says in John's Gospel) 'the scattered children of God', 'not of this fold', so that His Father's purpose would be fully realized, and there would be 'one flock, one shepherd' (John 10:16).
So Jesus goes to the Cross that, by the sacrifice of His life and by His triumph over death, He may establish the new 'covenant' and make the new people of God a reality. Had he not said, 'I will destroy this temple made with hands
and in three days build another made without hands' (John 2:19)? This is not only a prophecy of His personal triumph over death; it is a prophecy of a new church. Beyond death He looks to the time when there will be a new shrine
'made without hands' for the worship of the little flock now become a great one, On the day of Pentecost that ekklesia comes truly into being; and the new Israel, now empowered by the Spirit, begins its great career in the world.
So we turn to the apostles and the church, Inevitably in the years just after that Pentecost, the young church did not at once fully realize its nature and destiny. Yet even in what Luke says about its beginnings, we can discern
its glimmering sense of four things. It is the true people of God. It owes its allegiance to Christ. It is empowered by the Spirit. Ad it is called to mission. This last point Stephen sees more clearly than the rest, and pays for
his vision with his life. Now pass down three decades to the fifties' of the first century AD. The third decade is that in which Paul wrote his letters, and in them we see the first great Christian theologian spelling out the
nature and role of the church with a vision which out passes even Stephen's. As the ekklesia of God, it is 'a third race' along side Jews and Gentiles (1 Corin 12:3). Its common allegiance finds expression in 'Jesus is Lord' (1
Corin 12:3; Rom 10:9, Phil 2:11). It knows itself to be the 'fellowship of the Spirit', the fellowship created and energized by God's Spirit (2 Corin 13:14; Phil 2:1). And its outreach, as Paul sees, is meant by God to be truly
'ecumenical'. Similarly, in the early 'sixties' Peter (with the help of Silvanus) depicts the church as the true people of God (1 Peter 2:4-9), reverencing Christ as Lord (3:15), hallowed by the Spirit (1:2), and called to 'tell
out the triumphs of him who has called them out of darkness into his marvelous light' (2:9). When Auctor (the writer of Hebrews) writes to the Christians in Rome, he is equally persuaded that the church is the true people of God
(Heb 2:12, 4:9), that its allegiance is to Christ His Son (3:1; 4:14), that the power at work in it is the Holy Spirit (2:6, 6:4). But it is the mission of the church which he thinks his readers have forgotten. Instead of
'shrinking back' under cover of the old securities, they are called to go out, adventuring, out into the wide pagan world, under the leadership of the unchanging Christ. If we now turn to John and Eph (say about 80-90) we
see that John has the same conviction about the nature and destiny of the church. The church is the true Israel, as the parable of the vine and its branches shows (John 15:1). (The vine was a favourite symbol for Israel as God's
people.) If 'Jesus is the Son of God' rather than 'Jesus is Lord' seems to express His Credo (1 John 4:15; 5:5), he has no doubt where his allegiance lies. In this ekklesia the Holy Spirit bestowed by the risen Jesus (John 20:22),
indwells Christ's followers, acting as remembrancer, witness-bearer, and advocate (see the five 'Paraclete' sayings in John 14-16). And its mission is to be universal; for Jesus is uplifted on the cross in order to 'draw all men to
Himself' (Jon 12:32); he has 'other sheep not of this fold' (i.e. Jewry, John 10:16), and His death is not for the nation alone but for the ingathering of the 'scattered children of God' (John 11:52). Finally, even through the
visions of John of Patmos we may discover his view of the church's nature and role. His words about the rue of the saints (Rev 1:6, 5:9), based as they are on Dan 7, are his way of declaring the church to be the true people of God.
The church's allegiance is to be seen in his metaphor of the church as the Bride of Christ (22:17), and heard in the hymns of adoration addressed to the regnant Lamb. Nor is the work of the Holy Spirit forgotten. By that Spirit's
inspiration John sees his visions (1:10; 21:10) and the presence of the Spirit in the church is attested by the invitation. 'The Spirit and the Bride say, Come' (22:17). How wide is the church's outreach? To it belong men of 'every
tribe and tongue and people and nation', as the Song of the Lamb is sung by 'ten thousand times ten thousands of thousands' (5:9, 11). 3. One salvation The problem here is the sin of man and God's solution to it. If we compare the teaching of Jesus with Paul's, we find that, though their
language greatly differs – Jesus' teaching being tenderly human, Paul's often scholastic – the Lord and His apostle agree that in God's sight all me are sinners, who cannot save themselves. So also, in their various ways, Peter,
Joh, Auctor, and the seer of Patmos agree that the cause of man's spiritual malaise is the sin which disrupts his fellowship with God. It is axiomatic for Peter that 'all we like sheep have gone astray' (1 Peter 2:25) and that it
was for 'unrighteous' that Christ dies (3:18). For John, Christ is the 'Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world' (John 1:29), and he says bluntly, 'If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves' (1 John 1:18). Like
Jesus (Mark 7:14-23), Auctor knows that what defiles a man comes from within, and that it is for a conscience stained with sin that a remedy must be found (Heb 9:9,14). 'To him who loves us and has loosed us from our sins by his
blood be the glory,' cries John of Patmos (Rev 1:5), acknowledging that 'loosing; from his sins is man's deepest need. But if human sin poses the problem to be solved if man is to attain true blessedness, the New Testament
writers concur that the solution is to be found in Christ and his Cross. True, they have their own distinctive angles on what we call 'the atonement'; yet all agree that in Christ crucified and risen is to be found God's remedy for
sin. Deeper than all their differences we can trace a unity of approach to the Cross and Him who 'hath given us rest by His sorrow and life by His death'. Right from the beginning – witness 1 Cor 15:3 (where Paul quotes
'tradition' he had received) – it was a part of the Christian Credo that 'Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures'. That is to say, His death was vicarious, related to human sin, and fulfilled the Scriptures (which
must surely be a reference to Isa 53). Further, the apostolic writers hold that the atonement originated in God's gracious will, that, as it means was a Cross-death, so its aim was restored fellowship with God. When they come to
describe what Christ did on the Cross, they say that His act was not only vicarious but representative (Jesus being who He was, the Son of Man, the Servant of the Lord, our great high priest, etc.) and that it was a sacrifice( all
refer to 'the blood of Christ', i.e. His life sacrificially released by death for the benefit of others). And they agree that the spiritual end of the atonement was the reconciliation of sinful man to God – whether, with Paul, they
call it 'peace with God', or with Peter and Auctor, 'access' to God, or with John, 'eternal life' i.e. life lived in fellowship with God. To say that there is one single uniform doctrine of the atonement in all the New Testament
writers would be untrue. What is true is that 'through the New Testament runs one mighty thought: Christ died for our sins: He bore what we should have borne: He did for us what we could never have done for ourselves: He did for
God that which was God's good pleasure.' One word more. Though the atonement is presented in the New Testament as 'a finished work' – something done once for all – it is not something done outside of man. Man has to make its
benefits his own. It is not complete till man makes his response to that "love so amazing, so divine" manifested in the Cross. This he does in three ways: first, by faith, when he commits himself to Christ for God and eternity;
second, in the Holy Communion, when, still by faith, he appropriates the virtue of Christ's passion symbolized by the broken bread and the outpoured wine; and third, by sacrificial living, when remembering what Christ has done for
him, he gives himself in sacrificial love to others. This, then, is the triune story of salvation of which the New Testament is the abiding record. This is 'the Word from the Beyond for our human predicament', which gives the New
Testament a unique place in the religious literature of the world. And this story of salvation, old but ever new as the Holy Spirit makes it so, is the basis of all sound Christian doctrine, the inspiration of all true Christian
living, and the foundation of which rests any true belief in the life everlasting. A.M. Hunter
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