The Blessing of Abraham

The God who called Abraham was “the God of heaven and the God of the earth” (Gen. xxiv. 3). It was the Creator of the heaven and the earth (Gen. i. 1), who chose the seed of Abraham to be to Him a peculiar people, that through them all nations might be blessed. The Blessing of Abraham assures us that the particularism of the Old Testament religion is not to be explained by the evolutionist’s theory of a gradual development of the god-idea in Israel through animism, polytheism, henotheism to the ethical monotheism of the Prophets and Apostles, but that the universalism of Isaiah and of Paul was clearly present in it from the beginning, not as a mere “surmise,” but as a sure promise which the eternal and unchanging God had made unto Abraham His friend, and which He fulfilled in the gift of His Son to be Savior of the World (Oswald T. Allis, “The Blessing of Abraham” in The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1927), 298).