Commemoration of Remigius, Bishop of Rheims, Apostle of the Franks, 533 Commemoration of Thérèse of Lisieux, Carmelite Nun, Spiritual Writer, 1897 When Paul speaks [II Cor. 3] of our being ministers of the New Testament, he does not refer to books most of which were not yet written, but to the gospel, which he found in the Scripture he possessed. The Jews could only see "Old Testament" in Moses and the prophets, because they were blind. To the spiritual all Scripture is gospel, or New Testament (the Law being the schoolmaster, bringing us to Christ), but to the natural and self righteous, as we ought to know from experience and observation, all Scripture (gospels and epistles included) is Old Testament, or Covenant of Works.

Adolph Saphir

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Feast of James the Apostle In the absence of so many vital points -- the spiritual understanding of the Law, and the consciousness of sin, the unity and all-sufficiency of Scripture, and the expectation of the Messiah -- we cannot wonder that the idea of God, as it lived in faithful Israel of old, was also obscured. Instead of the living, loving, self-manifesting God of the Old Testament Israel now took hold of the abstract idea of the unity, or rather the unicity, of God, as if that were God. Before -- when they lived in communion with God, when God was known to them as a Person, speaking, acting, blessing, who had chosen them, who was educating them, and who was going to fulfill His promises -- they declared, in opposition to the idolatrous nations that surrounded them, that this God of Israel was one God, that there are not many gods; but when they lost communion with God, in order to show what distinguished them from the nations of the earth, and especially from Christians, they emphasized that God in Himself was only one Person, and not as He is revealed to us in the Scripture: Sender, Sent, and Spirit. It is the boast of the modern Jewish synagogue that their great mission is to testify to the world the unity of God. But it is a striking fact that the Gentile nations who have, since the dispersion of Israel, been converted from idolatry, have been influenced, not by the synagogue, but by the congregations of Jesus Christ, and were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost... It is one thing to believe in justification by faith, it is another thing to be justified by faith; and so it is one thing to believe in God, who is One, and it is another to believe in the numerical abstraction, in the mere idea of unicity.
Adolph Saphir
Christianity