History of the Old Covenant - 1859 Author:Johann Heinrich Kurtz Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: suggesting1 that the history of creation was revealed at that time for the purpose of becoming the basis and directory of this institution ? But whether this rev... more »elation had been made to Adam, who was still alive at that time, or to Seth or to any other of his cotemporaries, must remain undecided. § 3. PROPHETIC CHARACTER OF THE BIBLICAL ACCOUNT OF CREATION. We have seen that what had taken place before Adam obtained self-conscious existence, must have been divinely revealed either to him or to some one of his descendants. But in what manner was this communication made to man ? We conceive that the first narrator, whether Adam or one of his descendants, received it in a manner analogous to that in which prophets received their revelations. The peculiarity of prophetic vision consisted in this, that the Spirit of God, who knows neither past nor future, but to whom everything is eternally present—-partly and temporarily elevated the spirit of man—who, though bound to time and space, is breath of His breath (Gen. ii. 7) and His offspring (Acts xvii. 28)—above the limitations of time, and enabled him to share His power of beholding the past and tlie future as if it were present. In short, we hold that man learned the history of creation in the same manner in which later prophets learned the developments and events of periods removed from their own time, viz., in spiritual vision afforded through the agency of the Holy Spirit. This explanation has called forth considerable controversy chiefly at the hands of Hofmann, Delitzsch, Bickers, and Keil. To the opinion of the first of these writers on the subject under consideration, we have already referred; the others hold that God had imparted to the first man by personal and oral instruction—as a father to his child, or as a teache...« less