The Idea of God |
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From "A Guide to Understanding the Bible" by Harry Emerson Fosdick
(The following is the entire text of Chapter 1 of a book by Harry Emerson Fosdick, tracing the emergence of the idea of God from the pages of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Fosdick was one of the pre-eminent preachers and theologians of the twentieth century and perhaps the most popular representative of liberal or progressive Christianity. His ideas and his leadership were decisive in the conflict between fundamentalism and moderism in the first half of the century. Readers will note that Fosdick asserted that the concept of God found in the Bible is not static or absolute, but rather an evolving one that progresses over time from the primitive monotheism of the earliest patriarchs toward the more refined notions of the prophets and the New Testament.)
Nowhere do the early documents of the Bible more obviously carry us
back to the ideas of primitive religion than in dealing with the concept
of God. The first chapter of Genesis reveals a confident monotheism, but
that represents centuries of developing life and thought from the time the
Hebrews were introduced at Sinai to their god, Yahweh. At the beginning,
the distinctive deity of the Hebrews was a tribal divinity to whom the
clans of Joseph first gave their allegiance at the time of the Exodus from
Egypt. That previously the Israelites had not known their god, Yahweh, by
his name is explicitly stated in the Bible: "God spake unto Moses, and
said unto him, I am Yahweh: and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and
unto Jacob, as El Shaddai; but by my name Yahweh I was not known to
them." (Exodus 6:2-3 [marginal reading]. The meaning of El
Shaddai is dubious, and "God Almighty" a very questionable rendering.)
This passage appears in the late Priestly Document and all the more
because of that the probabilities favor its truth. Without a solid basis
in historic fact, such a delayed beginning of Yahweh’s worship would not
have been invented by succeeding generations. The natural tendency of
loyal devotees would be to carry back the name of their god to their most
ancient patriarchal legends and to confirm his worship with the sanctions
of antiquity. So, one story in Genesis, referring to the days of Seth, son
of Adam, says, "Then began men to call upon the name of Yahweh." (Genesis
4:26)
The statement in Exodus is more convincing than this contradictory
account in Genesis, not only because of intrinsic probability but because
the evidence available in the Bible clearly indicates that it was in
connection with the Exodus from Egypt that Yahweh first became god of the
tribes of Israel. Although, centuries afterward, the name Yahweh was
commonly put upon the lips of ancestral heroes and patriarchs and was used
even in the narrative of man’s creation in Eden, the bona fide historic
fact was too firmly set to be eliminated -- at the Exodus, for the first
time, Yahweh and Israel had met and sworn mutual allegiance. The
Ephraimite Document of narratives, for example, carefully avoids the name
Yahweh in all the early stories until the Exodus is reached and then warns
the people to "put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the
River [Euphrates], and in Egypt; and serve ye Yahweh.’’ (Joshua 24:14.).
Commonly also in the prophets, the beginning of Yahweh’s relationship with
Israel is associated with the Exodus, as when Hosea twice represents the
deity as saying, "I am Yahweh thy God from the land of Egypt," (Hosea
12:19; 13:4) or Jeremiah places Yahweh’s espousal of his people in the
Mosaic period, (Jeremiah 2:1-2.) or Ezekiel represents God as calling
Moses’ generation "the day when I chose Israel." (Ezekiel 20:5.)
According to the available evidence, Moses first came upon Yahweh at
"the mountain of God," (Exodus 3:1 ff.) called both Sinai and Horeb.
(Horeb and Sinai are presumably different names for the same mountain
variously located. Horeb may be the more primitive. See W. J.
Phythian-Adams: The Call of Israel, pp. 131-133.) Like Zeus upon
Olympus and many another primitive deity, Yahweh, at the first, was a
mountain god. Indeed, he was so confined to his habitat that, when the
tribesmen under Moses left Sinai the problem of believing in Yahweh’s
continuing presence with them was serious. According to the oldest
traditions they did not suppose Yahweh himself would go with them -- he
was attached to his mountain home. Three times it is explicitly stated
that not he but his angel was to accompany them on the journey to Canaan.
(Exodus 23:20-23; 32:34; 33:1-3.)
For centuries this special attachment of Yahweh to his wilderness
mountain remained vivid in the imagination of his devotees. When Deborah
won a victory far north in Palestine, she still pictured Yahweh as coming
in thunderous power from Sinai to his people’s help. (Judges 5:4-5) When
Elijah, dismayed by the apostasy of Israel, wished to stand in the very
presence of his deity, he fled to "Horeb the mount of God." (I Kings
19:8.) Deuteronomy and Habakkuk, in the seventh century B.C., still kept
in their symbolism the old picture of Yahweh coming from Sinai;
(Deuteronomy 33:2; Habakkuk 3:3.) and a post-Exilic psalmist thought of
God and Sinai together. (Psalm 68:7-8.)
As for the train of events which led to the momentous introduction of
Israel to Yahweh at the "mountain of God," the probabilities are strong.
Moses, fleeing from Egypt to the wilderness, joined himself to the
Kenites, a Midianite tribe of nomads living in the desert about Sinai.
Into this tribe Moses married. His father-in-law was its religious head,
"the priest of Midian," (Exodus 3:1.) and Moses, associating himself with
his wife’s clan, became a devotee of Yahweh, the Kenite god. In such an
incident as is presented in Exodus 18:1-12, revealing the pride of Jethro,
priest of Yahweh, in the conquests of his tribal deity, this "Kenite
hypothesis" seems to fit the facts.
Far down the course of Hebrew history, the Kenites continued to appear
as uncompromising devotees of Yahweh. They associated themselves with the
tribes of Israel and, settling in southern Canaan, continued there on the
edge of the wilderness a semi-nomadic life. (Judges 1:16.) Jael, a Kenite
woman and a worshiper of Yahweh, smote Sisera; (Judges 5:24-27.) the son
of Rechab, a Kenite, supported Jehu in the bloody revolt of Yahweh’s
devotees against the apostasies of Ahab; (II Kings 10: 15-18[cf. I
Chronicles 2: 55.]) and even in Jeremiah’s time, the Rechabites, driven
from their ancient nomadic ways by guerilla warfare, could in Jerusalem be
used to shame the Hebrews by their uncompromising devotion to the laws of
their fathers. (Jeremiah, chapt. 35.)
This Kenite hypothesis may be modified in detail as new evidence
becomes available, (see Theophile James Meek: Hebrew Origins, pp.
86 ff.) but its core of truth seems solid and dependable. Interpreted in
terms of it, the scene at Sinai gains substance and clarity. Moses,
himself a convert to the worship of Yahweh, led his fellow tribesmen from
their bondage and at the "mountain of God" converted them to the same
allegiance. There Yahweh and the tribes from Egypt were wedded with mutual
exchange of vows. The tribal deity of the Kenites took a new people as his
own and a confederation of clans that never before had served Yahweh swore
fealty to him as their divinity.
To be sure, Yahweh was not a new god; at least the Kenites had been
acquainted with him; the Judean Document, which scholars call "J," in its
final form holds that the fathers had known him, and he may have been a
deity of the tribe of Judah. (Exodus 3:16-18.) Even a more ancient and
extensive history may have been his. "We find," says Lods, "in cuneiform
documents of the pre-Mosaic age, a great number of personal names
compounded with the syllables ya,yau, yami (or yawe), and
even jahveh." (Adolphe Lods: Israel from its Beginnings to the
Middle of the Eighth Century, translated by S. H. Hooke, p. 320.)
Some, therefore, think that this god to whom Moses introduced the tribes
from Egypt while new to them as their tribal deity, was not a stranger in
the traditions of their race. This, however, does not affect the crucial
fact, from which the subsequent development of Israel’s religion proceeds,
that the distinctive faith of the Hebrews began with the covenant between
them and a deity new to their allegiance. Moreover, this relationship was
not determined by mere chance of locality in accordance with which a
static people naturally served the god of their territory, but was an
alliance voluntarily assumed by migrating tribes. Yahweh was conceived as
graciously choosing a new people and the people were conceived as
deliberately accepting a new god.
Thus to emphasize the fresh start initiated by the creative influence
of Moses need not involve forgetfulness of the ancestral background.
Religion among the Semites had had a rich history before Moses, and he and
his people were the inheritors of a long and significant tradition. Doubt
of Abraham’s personal existence, for example, once prevalent, is
surrendering to an increasing confidence in the Biblical accounts of his
migration from "Ur of the Chaldees." (See Stephen L, Caiger: Bible and
Spade, pp. 30 ff.) New in name, therefore, Yahweh may have been old in
meaning, and into Moses’ creative faith doubtless went long accumulating
ideas and attitudes from his ancestral heritage. Substantial truth may lie
in the Scripture’s verbal anachronism which represents Yahweh as saying:
"I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the
God of Jacob." (Exodus 3:6, 15, 16; 4:5.)
II
Some of the major characteristics of Yahweh, the mountain god of Sinai,
stand out plainly in the narrative.
1. He was a storm god, associated with violent exhibitions of nature’s
power. According to the written tradition, the first experiences that the
liberated clans from Egypt had with him at Sinai were accompanied by
thunderings and lightnings and the mountain’s smoking -- "the smoke
thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked
greatly." (Exodus 19:18; 20:18.) This suggests a volcano, and Sinai may
have been that or legend may have exaggerated such storms of thunder and
lightning as still occur about the huge granite massif of the traditional
Sinai, with mist pouring up like smoke from its flanks.
At any rate, as is true among all early peoples, from the beginning
till far down the course of Hebrew thought, thunder and lightning were
regarded as special exhibitions of superhuman power.
They that strive with Yahweh shall be broken to pieces
Against them
will he thunder in heaven (I Samuel 2:10) --
so sang the devotees of Sinai’s god long after they were in Pales-
tine, and in specific cases they attributed victory to the interposition
of his thunderbolts -- "Yahweh thundered with a great thunder on that day
upon the Philistines, and discomfited them." (I Samuel 7:10.) When Yahweh
came from Sinai to Deborah’s help, he was pictured riding the storm,
(Judges 5:4.) and even a psalmist saw the help of the Lord when he
"thundered in the heavens," hurled "hailstones and coals of fire" and,
like arrows, sent out his "lightnings manifold." (Psalm 18:13-14)
It is impossible to tell when the idea that in thunder "the Most High
uttered his voice" and in lightning shot his arrows (Ibid.) ceased
being literal and became symbolic. The story of Elijah’s sacrifice on
Carmel with Yahweh sending down his lightning to burn the altar and its
offering (I Kings 18:38.) is literal enough. Certainly at the first, the
deity of Sinai was a god of storm.
2. Even more significantly, he was a god of war, battling for his
people and leading them to victory. The ascription in the so-called Song
of Moses,
Yahweh is a man of war:
Yahweh is his name, (Exodus 15:3.)
is typical of the earliest traditions. Concerning the triumph of Joshua
on the day when "the sun stood still," we read, "Yahweh fought for
Israel"; (Joshua 10:13-14.) David defied Goliath, crying, "I come to thee
in the name of Yahweh of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel"; (I
Samuel 17:45.) and even a psalmist wrote,
He teacheth my hands to war;
So that mine arms do bend a bow of
brass. (Psalm 18:34.)
Indeed, one compiler quotes from a book no longer extant, "the book of
the Wars of Yahweh.’’ (Numbers 21:14.)
Any god, vitally believed in at any time, is conceived as the backer of
man’s necessary enterprises. So the early Hebrews, whose most constant
activity, next to sustaining life by labor, was war, needed a "Lord of
hosts," a superhuman leader of armies, and Yahweh met that need. When camp
was broken and the Ark was lifted, they cried, "Rise up, O Yahweh, and let
thine enemies be scattered." (Numbers 10:35.) When the captured Ark was
carried into the Philistine towns, the Israelite chronicler delighted to
picture the Philistines’ fear as they cried: "God is come into the
camp.... Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the hand of these mighty
gods?" (I Samuel 4:7-8.) This interpretation of Yahweh’s most sacred
palladium, the Ark, was of one piece with the people’s interpretation of
Yahweh’s most necessary function as their fighting chief. As another has
put it, the Ark was "at one and the same time the primitive sanctuary and
the battle standard." (H. Wheeler Robinson: The Religious Ideas of the
Old Testament, p. 56.)
A storm god, dwelling on a mountain, whose major activity was war --
such was the beginning of the development of the Jewish-Christian idea of
God.
3. Involved in such a beginning is the further fact that Yahweh was a
tribal god. That he loved Israel and graciously entered into covenant with
his chosen people, far from implying love and grace in other
relationships, involved vehement hatred of Israel’s enemies.
An integral part of Yahweh’s covenant with Israel was his declaration,
"I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine
adversaries." (Exodus 23:22.) Indeed, Yahweh was represented as outdoing
Israel in sustained and lethal hatred against non-Israelites, as, for
example, the Canaanites -- "It was of Yahweh to harden their hearts, to
come against Israel in battle, that he might utterly destroy them, that
they might have no favor, but that he might destroy them." (Joshua 11:20.)
This capacity in Yahweh for prolonged and violent hatred of Israel’s foes
is set down in the record with unashamed emphasis, whether in the
traditions of the wilderness, where "Yahweh will have war with Amalek from
generation to generation," (Exodus 17:16) or in the early days of the
kingdom in Palestine, when Yahweh commanded Saul to "go and smite Amalek,
and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both
man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’’ (I
Samuel 15:33.)
This god of war, with his relentless hatred of his people’s enemies,
was even supposed to be pleased by the sacrifice of prisoners taken in
battle. In the history of primitive religions this form of human sacrifice
is familiar. "It was also the custom from very early times," says Lods,
"to slay adults, especially prisoners of war and criminals, with rites
more or less resembling those of sacrifice. Among the pagan Arabs,
captives were slain under every form of sacrifice.... Long after the
slaughter of prisoners had become a purely secular act in Arabia, the term hadij, sacrificed, still denoted the slain captive. Similarly, the
Carthaginians, after the defeat of Agathocles in 307 B.C., slew the
prisoners of rank ‘before the altar, in front of the sacred tent.’"
(Adolph Lods: Israel From its Beginning to the Middle of the
Eighth Century, translated by S. H. Hooke, p.287) The wonder is not
that this practise obtained but that it is so seldom evident in the Hebrew
records that it existed, however, is plain from an indubitable instance
when Samuel, angry at the reservation of the Amalekite king from the
general massacre, "hewed Agag in pieces before Yahweh in Gilgal." (I
Samuel 15:33.)
In many passages, moreover, this same usage is indicated, when the
meaning of the English Version’s words ‘utterly destroy’ is correctly
given in the margin as ‘devote.’ That is, when "they smote the Canaanites
that inhabited Zephath, and utterly destroyed it," (Judges 1: 17.) what
they really did was to ‘devote’ it to Yahweh. So Mesha, King of Moab,
completely wrecking a town and killing its male inhabitants, said, "I slew
all the men of the city for a spectacle to Chemosh" (The Mesha Stone II,
11-12, See Lods: op. cit., p. 288.) -- the Moabite god. Under this
innocent translation in our English Versions, therefore, where ‘utterly
destroy’ is substituted for ‘devote,’ there lies an idea of deity
rejoicing in the human sacrifice of his people’s foes. As the story in
Numbers 21:1-3 reveals, one way to secure Yahweh’s help in battle, so
Israel believed, was to promise him the complete ‘devotion, of all
captured property and persons. So jealous was the god thought to be of
this ‘devoted’loot that when, as at Jericho, tabooed property was
secreted, his wrath was ruinous, (Joshua, chap. 7) or when, as late as the
ninth century, Ahab spared the life of the captured king of Syria, Yahweh
was pictured as saying, "Because thou hast let go out of thy hand the man
whom I had devoted to destruction, therefore thy life shall go for his
life.’’ (I Kings 20:42.)
The long-drawn-out story of the Jewish-Christian endeavor to outgrow
nationalism in theology as well as in practise began in this belligerent
and ruthless tribalism of Israel’s primitive war god.
4. Involved in this early idea of Yahweh was, of course,
anthropomorphism. At first he was pictured with frank physical realism. It
is difficult to determine when the ascription to him of hands, feet, face,
eyes, ears, and nose, passes over into symbolism, but such expressions
have behind them, as the records show, a thoroughly anthropomorphic idea
of deity. He walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day and
talked familiarly with Adam; (Genesis chap. 3.) he ate and conversed with
Abraham; (Genesis 18:1 ff.) he wrestled with Jacob so that the patriarch
said, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." (Genesis
32: 24-30.)
The origins of the sacrificial system in Israel, as elsewhere, imply
this physical realism in the thought of deity. Back of more sophisticated
meanings, which later were seen in the temple sacrifices, and more
rarefied interpretations of the effect of ritual offerings on Yahweh, was
the idea of the communal meal where deity and people shared the same feast
and the god of the tribe enjoyed with his devotees their sacrificial food.
This is explicitly stated and indirectly implied in many passages of the
Old Testament. The fat and blood of the sacrifices were reserved for
Yahweh; they were his portion of the feast. At first they were rubbed upon
the sacred stone or altar; later, when offerings of fat were made by fire,
Yahweh partook of them only through the sense of smell -- "the priest
shall burn them upon the altar: it is the food of the offering made by
fire, for a sweet savor; all the fat is Yahweh’s.’’ (Leviticus 3:16.) The
age-long persistence of outward forms of animal sacrifice along with
profound changes in the interpretation of their meaning presents one of
the commonest phenomena of religious history -- preservation of custom
accompanied by alteration of theory. At the origin of food offerings to
the god was the primitive idea that the god shared the enjoyment of
them.
This physical participation of Yahweh in the sacrifices was plainly
implied in the prophetic reaction against such anthropomorphism. No
explanation of the specific points selected by the prophets for attack
seems probable except that those points constituted a continuing danger to
the spiritual idea of the divine nature. When, therefore, Isaiah’s Yahweh
scorned "the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts,’’ (Isaiah
1:11.) or the psalmist’s Yahweh cried,
Will I eat the flesh of bulls,
Or drink the blood of goats? (Psalm
50:13.)
we have not only an emphatic insistence that God is not the kind of
being who partakes of physical food, but also a clear indication that the
popular view, against which this protest was being made, held the
contrary.
Moreover, the sublimation of actual eating and drinking into smelling
the offerings was probably an endeavor to rarefy the more gross conception
of the god, and it revealed in the background the primitive ideas it
sought to overpass. The Deluge Tablet of Babylonia says concerning the
sacrifice after the Flood:
The gods smelled the odor,
The gods smelled the sweet odor.
The
gods gathered like flies around the sacrificer. (As quoted by Morris
Jastrow; Hebrew and Babylon Traditions, p. 332.)
The Hebrew rendition of the same story chastens the details but retains
the anthropomorphism -- "Yahweh smelled the sweet savor." (Genesis 8:21.)
From being food for Yahweh’s eating, sacrifice thus became what
Deuteronomy called "incense in thy nostrils,"Deuteronomy and so literally
was this conceived that against it also the prophets launched their
protest. Isaiah’s Yahweh cried, "Incense is an abomination unto me,"
(Isaiah 1:13.) and Amos’ Yahweh declared, "I will not smell a savor in
your solemn assemblies." (Amos 5:21 (marginal translation).
The early narratives concerning the Sinaitic deity to whom Moses
introduced Israel are outspoken in their anthropomorphism. Apart from
details which are probably symbolic, such as Yahweh’s writing the original
tables of the law with his own finger, (Exodus 31:18 Cf. The Rosetta
Stone, where hierglyphics are called "the writing of divine words, written
by the god Thoth himself.")
we have a physical vision of Yahweh by Moses, which must have
originated in a primitive story of a man seeing his god. "Yahweh said,
Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon the rock: and it
shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a
cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand until I have passed
by: and I will take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back; but my face
shall not be seen." (Exodus 33:21-23)
One of the notable achievements of later Judaism was the abolition of
idolatry -- the complete suppression of all pictorial and plastic
representations of Yahweh and all images of man or beast associated with
his worship. This, however, was not the primitive beginning. Even the
later rewriting of the records, pushing back the command against images
into the law of Moses and denying in every way the allowance of idols, did
not destroy the plain evidence of Yahweh’s physical representation in the
early days. Micah, the Ephraimite, had an image of Yahweh; (Judges 17:3-4)
Gideon made one out of captured gold; (Judges 8:24-27) the teraphim were
household gods, human enough in appearance to supply David with a
substitute when he fled from his foes; (I Samuel 19:12-16[cf. Genesis
31:17-35])and, indeed, so customary were "graven images" that while early
protests were made, as in the law of Exodus, "Thou shalt make thee no
molten gods," (Exodus 34:17.) and in the story of the golden calf, (Exodus
32:1 ff.) probably dating from the time of Jeroboam’s apostasy, the first
prophet plainly to take his stand against them was Hosea, in the eighth
century. (Hosea 11:2; 8:4-6. See Asolphe Lods: "Images and Idols, Hebrew
and Canaanite," III, 2, in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics,
edited by J. Hastings.)
The inevitable companion of anthropomorphism was anthropopathism,
ascribing human emotions to the god. Hatred, jealousy, vindictiveness,
disappointment at unforeseen events, regret for mistaken decisions -- the
common characteristic attitudes of man at his worst, as well as at his
best, were attributed to the god. At the beginning, therefore, the god of
the Bible was a person, physically embodied although superhumanly
powerful, who could conceivably be seen, who in the earliest strata of the
Scripture walked, talked, wrestled, dined, and smelled, and who shared
with man a wide gamut of good and bad emotions.
III
One of the most important occasions of change in Israel’s idea of
Yahweh came when this primitive mountain god became the territorial deity
of the land of Canaan. As time went on, Yahweh was detached in the
imagination of his people from his exclusive residence on Sinai, and he
became acclimated in Canaan as lord of the land. In this process,
according to the finished tradition, the Ark -- a sacred coffer whose
attendance with the wandering tribes was understood to involve either the
real or deputed presence of Yahweh -- played a significant part. While, at
the first, it was his angel rather than himself who went with the migrant
clans, the shading between Yahweh and his angel in the early documents is
so vague that in the same story both forms of representation may be used.
(Genesis 16:7-14; 21:17-19.) So, as the Biblical records present the
picture, Yahweh, whether in his proper person or by deputy in an angelic
representative, traveled with his nomadic devotees, and of his abiding
presence the Ark was the visible symbol and vehicle. Where the Ark was, he
was; when the Ark was not carried into an important enterprise, his
guidance and power were absent. (Numbers 14:41-45.)
This identification of the Ark with the special presence of Yahweh is
repeatedly shown in the narratives, until, as the most sacred palladium of
the nation, it was placed in the Holy of Holies of Solomon’s temple. When
David was bringing it up to his capital, he and the people played and
danced "before Yahweh" (II Samuel 6:2-5, 12-15.) and when on the first
stage of its journey a helpful man tried to steady the sacred fetish as it
jounced over the rough road, he fell dead because, so they thought,
"Yahweh had broken forth upon Uzzah." (II Samuel 6:6-8.) Whatever may have
been the historic facts about the Ark in the wilderness, (See Louis
Wallis: God and the Social Process, pp. 107-109; Elmer A. Leslie: Old
Testament Religion in the light of its Canaanite Background, pp.
121ff.) the written tradition in the end pictured God as traveling with
his people in this sacred chest, and while Sinai for centuries was thought
of as his special home, the Ark, whether as history or legend, may well
have been a bridge by which in popular imagination Yahweh passed over into
Canaan. There, at any rate, he was acclimated and naturalized until
Palestine became what Hosea called it, "Yahweh’s land." (Hosea 9:3)
This process carried with it at least two attendant results.
1. Becoming the god of Israel’s land, Yahweh was limited in his
sovereignty to the territory of his people. At this stage, not only were
tribal deities confined in their goodwill to their own clans but, as well,
they were generally imagined as confined in their presence and power to
their own lands. The Philistine cities were hardly twenty-five miles from
Bethlehem but, when David by Saul’s jealousy was forced to take refuge
there, he complained, "They have driven me out this day that I should not
cleave unto the inheritance of Yahweh, saying, Go, serve other gods." (I
Samuel 26:19.) This idea of Yahweh’s available presence as limited to his
territory, so that only a few miles away one must worship other deities,
constituted the background from which larger ideas of God emerged, and far
down in Israel’s history its sway was felt. Even a late and nobly
international tract, the Book of Jonah recalls it, picturing Jonah as
taking ship to another country that he might flee "from the presence of
Yahweh." (Jonah 1:3,10.) In many ways, direct and indirect, this
limitation of the Hebrew god to his own geographical demesne is revealed
in the early documents of the Bible, as, for example, when Naaman, the
Syrian, healed by Elisha, carried "two mules’ burden of earth" from
Israel’s land back to Damascus, that he might have, even in a foreign
country, some of Yahweh’s soil on which, standing, he could worship the
god of Israel. (II Kings 5:17.)
This attachment of a god to his territory obviously involved the
recognition of other gods as real and powerful in their own lands. So
Jephthah, claiming for Israel what Israel’s god had given her, granted to
Moab the right to "possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee."
(Judges 11:23-24.) The Hebrew records even attribute the retreat of an
Israelitish army, which had been successfully invading Moab, to the "great
wrath against Israel" that the Moabites aroused, presumably in their god
Chemosh, by the human sacrifice of their own crown prince. (II Kings
3:26-27.)
When, therefore, by choice or necessity one was in other lands one
would naturally worship other gods, as David in Philistia felt coerced to
do. Even a post-Exilic book, Ruth, pictures its heroine as changing gods
when she passed from Moab to Bethlehem, although the two were scarcely
thirty miles apart and could be plainly seen, one from the other, across
the Jordan gorge "Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I
will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." (Ruth
1:16.) As late as Jeremiah’s time, exile from the Holy Land was popularly
interpreted as forcing the worship of strange deities -- "Therefore will I
cast you forth out of this land into the land that ye have not known,
neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and
night." (Jeremiah 16:13.)
As this necessity was laid on Israelites in foreign territories, so, in
reverse, foreigners in Palestine fared ill if they failed to worship
Yahweh. When the Northern Kingdom fell, in 72I B.C., and the Assyrian
monarch settled strangers in Samaria, it was in vain that they brought
their own gods with them. "Yahweh sent lions among them," and it was only
when a Hebrew priest was furnished to "teach them the law of the god of
the land. . . how they should fear Yahweh," that they felt safe. (II Kings
17:24-33.)
This extension of the idea of Yahweh, until, no longer merely or mainly
a storm god dwelling on Sinai and furnishing leadership in war, he became
the god of the land of Canaan, was one of the first long steps out into
new conceptions of deity.
2. Yahweh, becoming the territorial god of Canaan, became of necessity
an agricultural deity. This he never had been in the wilderness, where
agriculture and its accompanying needs, habits, and ideas did not exist.
To pass, as the Hebrews did, from nomadic wanderings to a settled
residence, from the exclusive tending of herds to the culture of crops,
from tents to villages and walled towns, involved a profound change in the
life and thought of the people, and, not least of all, in their religion.
This process, the military part of which has been artificially
foreshortened in the Biblical story of the conquest of Canaan, was really
long- drawn-out and gradual. For generations the Israelites clung, as it
were, by their eyebrows to a small section of the hill country of Ephraim
amid bitter enemies -- Ammonites and Moabites, to the east; the
Philistines invading the seacoast lands to the west; the Amorites still
possessing a score of strong towns and the farm lands around them.
At first the inveterate prejudice of the nomad against the
agriculturist held its ground. Of this stage the legend of Cain and Abel
is representative, in which Yahweh is pictured as welcoming the offerings
of the herdsman, Abel, and refusing the offerings of the farmer, Cain.
(Genesis 4:2-5.) But, after all, the Israelites and the Amorites were
cousins; they came alike of Semitic stock; their traditions were rooted in
a common soil; the commercial civilization of the Amorites was far more
rich, varied, and advanced than that of the rough and virile adventurers
under Joshua and his successors, so that, as generations passed, with the
two peoples living side by side and the more robust and energetic
Israelites gaining increased ascendency, an inevitable process of
syncretism went on and the two cultures blended.
The Canaanitish baals were gods of agriculture. As the conquering clans
of Israel had needed their god chiefly as the "Lord of hosts," so the
Canaanites needed their gods to give rain and bestow fertility. Each
locality had its baal or baals, and the
"high places," where these ancient deities were worshiped, still have
their lineal descendants in Palestine, often doubtless identically
situated, in the local shrines of Mohammedan and Christian saints. The
Israelites did not so much choose between Yahweh and the baals as blend
the worship of Yahweh with the customs of the high places until Yahweh
himself became a baal. So, long afterward, Hosea in the name of Yahweh
protested: "Thou . . . shalt call me no more Baali.’’ (Hosea 2:16.) This
process of syncretism was doubtless greatly encouraged when David, in
order to conquer the Philistines, substituted alliance with the Amorites
for the traditional hostility against them and so built a kingdom which
included Yahweh-worshipers and baal-worshipers together. Long before that,
however, the baals, as historically established gods of the land, had
exercised a profound influence on Hebrew ideas of Yahweh and on methods of
worshiping him.
At first Yahweh and the baals were so different in function that
coördinate loyalty to both was possible. The local baals were the sources
of agricultural plenty -- so wide areas of the people still believed when
in the eighth century Hosea thundered against the idea (Hosea 2:5-13.) --
while Yahweh was the god of nomadic life and the leader of his clans in
battle. This distinction can be pressed too far but it was real. An
Israelite, therefore, might retain genuine loyalty to his tribal god,
turning to him when his needs were military, and still make sacrifices to
the local baal when he wanted rain. This initial division of function,
however, could not last; syncretism was inevitable; alike in idea and
custom, Yahweh borrowed from the baals and the baals, presumably, from
Yahweh. So, in the end, while the Ark may have been the special palladium
of the people and the initial pledge of Yahweh’s presence, he was so far
from being confined to it that he was available throughout his land in the
high places where his people worshiped. Indeed, a justification of this
was read back into tradition and put upon the lips of Yahweh in his
conversation with Moses on Mount Sinai: "In every place where I cause my
name to be remembered I will come unto thee and I will bless thee."
(Exodus 20:24.) (marginal translation).
As soon as this idea of the approachability of Yahweh at the local
shrines was well established, the blending of Yahweh and the baals was
certain to proceed apace. The powerful hold of Yahweh on the grateful
memory and devotion of Israel is, indeed, made evident by the fact that
they did not surrender him to the Canaanitish gods of the land, but kept
him, added to him the functions, powers, and ceremonies of the baals,
until the prophets rose in a desperate and magnificent attempt to conserve
the good and eradicate the evil of this perilous syncretism.
Such a process as this is a commonplace in the history of religion.
When Christianity moved into northern Europe, the old shrines of the
pre-Christian deities, instead of being abolished, were often taken over
and absorbed. Where some heathen god had been adored, now the Virgin or a
saint was worshiped, and as had happened in Rome itself when the
Saturnalia was transformed into the Christmas festival, old customs were
given new meanings. "In like manner," says Kautzsch, "among the Arabs,
long after the victory of Islam, the local cult of the pre-Islamic gods
persisted, partly in the popular usages (forbidden by Islam), partly in
some usages incorporated with Islam itself.’’ (E. Kautzsch: "Religion of
Israel," III, iii, 2, in Hastiness’ Dictionary of the Bible, Extra
Vol., p. 645.) If this happened in the face of a victory as complete as
Islam’s over Arabia, how much more would such syncretism take place when,
as in Israel’s case in Palestine, the Canaanites could not be utterly
conquered but, sustained and empowered, so current beliefs would suggest,
by their native gods, lived on with the Israelites!
One effect of this syncretism was greatly to enlarge and diversify the
functions of Yahweh until, to the faithful Israelite, he became the source
of agricultural plenty. Thence arose the agricultural festivals, such as
the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of
Weeks, the Feast of Harvest, whose origin was read back into the Mosaic
Law but whose existence could have had no meaning until the Israelites
were in Canaan. In the end a prophet could ascribe to Yahweh the
revelation of all man’s knowledge concerning the technique of farming.
(Isaiah 28:23-29.)
Nevertheless, the cost of such syncretism was heavy. Yahweh had always
been conceived as powerful and ruthless in war -- even brutal from the
standpoint of later ideals -- but he had been virile, austere, and chaste.
If he had the faults of a war god he also had the virtues -- he was hard
and disciplined, an inflexible sponsor of rigorous self-control and of the
social solidarity of the nomads. The gods of agriculture, however, have
uniformly been licentious. There never failed to exist in Israel a
protestant party, holding to the primitive austerity of Yahweh’s worship
and resisting the encroachments of the new pollutions -- the Rechabites,
for example, who would not even dwell in houses or touch wine. (Jeremiah
35:1-10) Moreover, the Israelites on the ridge of Ephraim evidently
maintained in their kinship groups many basic nomadic ideas of social
justice sponsored by Yahweh and were consciously and even violently at
variance with the inequities of Amorite commercialism sponsored by the
baals. Nevertheless, when two cultures live so closely together, mutual
contagion across all barriers is inevitable and Israel was profoundly
affected by ideas and customs associated with the baals.
The Hebrews, for example, took over the imitative magic in accordance
with which the sexual act, performed at the shrine of the god, was
supposed to encourage the soil’s fertility. So prostitution and sodomy
crept into the worship of Yahweh and were found even in the central temple
at Jerusalem as late as the reform of Josiah in the seventh century. (II
Kings 23:7; Hosea 4:13-14.) Here, too, grew up the worship of Yahweh under
the likeness of bulls, such as Jeroboam set up at Dan and Bethel. (I Kings
12:26-29.) The story of Aaron and the golden calf (Exodus 32:1 ff.) in all
probability was written in this later age to help withstand the polluting
identification of Yahweh’s worship with the adoration of bulls.
It is not possible to trace to their origins the many factors which
made up Israel’s popular religion. The Yahweh tradition was only one
strand in a tangled complex where old Semitic inheritances, animistic
survivals, and syncretic appropriations were confusedly mingled. Israel’s
religion was not an individualistic faith but a social culture which
affected every hour of every day and penetrated conduct at every point. In
it were included curious taboos, (E.g., Exodus 23:19; Leviticus 22:28.)
primitive cults such as serpent worship, (II Kings 18:4.) the use of
ordeal in judicial cases, (Numbers 5: 11-31.) the power of the curse,
(Numbers 22:6.) the employment of magic in battle; (Exodus 17:8-13.) and
as for sacred stones, trees, waters, caves, the early records are full of
them. Such common factors in primitive religion doubtless came out of
Israel’s background but Canaan supplied endless opportunity for their
application. The Hebrews took over the sacred places, constructed
patriarchal legends concerning them, absorbed their customary rituals, and
wove them into the complex fabric of Yahweh’s faith and worship. And, as
the prophets later saw, all this presented two focal points of peril to
the best traditions that had come from the desert: it substituted for the
old austerity the alluring licentiousness of baal worship, and it
sanctioned the commercial inequalities and tyrannies, which the baals of
sophisticated Canaan sponsored against the ancient ideas of social
solidarity, equality, and justice for which Yahweh stood.
IV
No historic imagination can adequately canvass the varied causes and
occasions which led to the gradual enlargement and elevation of the Hebrew
idea of deity, but some of the process is visible.
1. Yahweh became god of the sky. (E.g., Psalm 2:4; 11:4; 103:19 II
Chronicles 6:18.) The very fact that he was a mountain god controlling
thunder and lightning would associate him with the sky, and while we are
dealing with legend in Jacob’s vision of the celestial ladder with Yahweh
above it, (Genesis 28:12-13.) and in the story of the tower of Babel,
where Yahweh jealously protects from men’s invasion his heavenly dwelling,
(Genesis 11:1-9.) such representations reveal the extension of Yahweh’s
sovereignty, far above solitary mountain or earthly territory, to the
sky.
This idea, at the beginning, doubtless coexisted with earlier and more
mundane conceptions; it was thought by a few before it was held by many;
it was conceived by many before it became practically operative in their
daily religion. At last, however, it occupied the minds and imaginations
of the people and tended inevitably toward universalism. A god who, as the
Eighteenth Psalm put it, "bowed the heavens" (Psalm 18:9.) was escaping
from the limited ideas by which his earlier followers had conceived
him.
Indeed, the word Elohim, the ordinary Hebrew name for God, belonging as
it does to a large family of Semitic words which spring from the same
stem, is thought by some to have denoted originally a sky god. So
inevitably is universal dominion suggested by such a concept of deity that
some even suspect a kind of primitive Semitic monotheism as a background
against which the mass of lesser gods arose. (See Stephen Herbert Langdon:
Semitic Mythology, p.93.) In the Bible itself, however, no evidence
exists of such original monotheism, nor is any contribution made toward
explaining the detailed data of Scripture by supposing it. Moreover, the
word Elohim is of dubious origin and meaning; quite probably it denotes
not the sky in particular but strength in general; variously translated in
our English Versions, it is used in the Bible of household gods, (Judges
17:5; Genesis 31:19, 32.) of supernatural spirits, (I Samuel 28:13.) even
of earthly judges, (Psalm 82:1.) and to build on its higher developments a
doctrine of original monotheism is not convincing. Rather, the
universality of the "God of heaven" was a long postponed conviction in
Israel’s thinking. (On fallacy of pre-Mosaic monotheism see Adolphe
Lods: Israel from its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eight
Century, translated by S.H. Hooke, pp. 253-257; Theophile James Meek:
Hebrew Origins, pp. 180 ff.)
2. Along with this elevation of the thought of Yahweh as god of the sky
went the even more practical idea that, however geographically bounded he
might be within his people’s land, he still could display his power
outside it. On the basis of Israel’s own traditions, both historic and
legendary, he long since had operated over all the known world. Had he not
given an illustrious exhibition of his power in favor of his people in
Egypt? As the written stories of the patriarchs stand in the "J" Document,
had he not called Abraham in "Ur of the Chaldees" and dealt intimately
with the patriarchs all the way from the Euphrates to the Nile? An earthly
king may have his own limited territory and still be able to strike far
beyond its boundaries to protect his subjects and assert his majesty. So
Yahweh, while the god of the Holy Land, was conceived as possessing ever
extended powers, and while this could be roughly harmonized with belief in
many gods, it broke through the strictness of the earlier territorial
ideas and opened the way to expectations of Yahweh’s effective action,
anywhere, at any time, as he might please.
3. After kingship was established in Judah and Ephraim, such enlarged
ideas were given visible form and practical effect by alliances between
princely houses. One of the first results of international royal marriages
is to be seen in statements like this: "Then did Solomon build a high
place for Chemosh the abomina- tion of Moab, in the mount that is before
Jerusalem, and for Molech the abomination of the children of Ammon. And so
did he for all his foreign wives, who burnt incense and sacrificed unto
their gods.’’ (I Kings 11: 7-8.) The theological inference implied in such
interterritorial worship is clear: gods can be served outside their own
domains; they are more or less interlocking in their directorates; if
Chemosh, who had been the fierce enemy of Yahweh and his people, can be
worshiped on the Mount of Olives, presumably Yahweh can be worshiped in
Moab. To be sure, such inferences were not generally drawn. The practise
of inter-territorial worship, exhibited by Solomon in Judah or by the
house of Omri in Ephraim, far from being used as a proposition from which
to draw theological deductions, was abhorred by the vigorous devotees of
Yahweh as sacrilege and apostasy. Nevertheless, the practise was there:
gods were becoming intermingled across all boundaries; a change in lands
did not, at least for royal folk, necessitate a change m deities.
Many more influences, doubtless, than the Biblical records reveal or
our insight can recapture played thus on the enlarging conception of
Yahweh. Obviously, however, as god of the sky, able to display his power
across the known world and conceivably to be worshiped outside his own
land, he was on the way toward universal sovereignty. Still he was far
from it. At that stage a pious Hebrew was no monotheist. He might be a
henotheist -- worshiping one god himself while not doubting the existence
of others. Monolatry he might practise but monotheism he had not yet
grasped.
Far more important than the influences which we have named in deepening
the idea of Yahweh’s character was the social conflict involved when the
nomadic ethics of Israel faced the commercial civilization of the
Amorites. The baals were gods not simply of agriculture but of the
economic and social relationships which had developed in the comparatively
sophisticated, stratified, commercialized town life of the Amorites. The
struggle on the crest of Ephraim’s hills, where the Israelites
precariously held their ground, was not between two sets of religious
ideas in the abstract, but between two economic and social cultures, one
sponsored by the baals, the other by Yahweh. On the one side was a
stratified society, with a few rich and many poor, with private property
in land and water, with money, trade, and credit and the inequalities and
tyrannies incident to a commercialized regime - - all this under the ægis
of the baals. On the other side was a tribal brotherhood of nomads where,
amid the penury of the wilderness, all must be for each and each for all,
where land and water were never private but always communal, where none
was very rich or very poor, where every one was known to all and the
exigencies of desert life forced a rough but sturdy justice. So Doughty
speaks of the nomad tribes as "commonwealths of brethren" and says that
"in the opinion of the next governed countries, the Arabs of the
wilderness are the justest of mortals.’’ (Charles M. Doughty: Travels
in Arabia Deserta [3d ed., 1925], Vol. I, pp. 345,249.) Of this social
solidarity and fraternal fair play among the Israelite tribes Yahweh was
the divine patron. A great tradition lies behind the statement in the
later law, `’Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am Yahweh."
(Leviticus 19:18.) The crux of the struggle, therefore, between the Hebrew
invaders and the Amorites was indeed between their gods, but between their
gods as sanctifying two deeply antagonistic economic and social
systems.
The translation of economic class struggle into terms of religious
conflict is a familiar phenomenon in history. So Mr. George Henry Soule
says of the Puritan revolution in the sixteenth century: "The conflict of
religious ideas was indeed important, but it was important not so much
because of the abstract significance of these ideas as because they
represented the mechanism of attack and defense between economic and
social classes who were struggling for power." (The Coming American
Revolution, p. 23.) Similarly no one can understand the long conflict
between the baals and Yahweh, with its story of attraction and repulsion,
assimilation and revulsion, culminating in the prophetic determination,
from Elijah on, to tear Yahweh’s worship free from baal entanglements,
unless one sees, underneath, the fierce hostility between two economic and
social cultures. The Amorite lords and nobles -- called baalim like their
gods -- hated and feared the equalitarian ideas and practises of the
nomads, and the Israelites with similar revulsion despised the
city-dominated social order with its private ownership of land and water
and its bitter inequalities of station.
This conflict, which existed from the first and which accounts for much
of the unappeasable hostility, became explicit in the ninth century in a
titanic figure, Elijah. (I Kings, chaps. 17-19.) Under the royal patronage
of Queen Jezebel, Melkart, Baal of Tyre, rose to such prominence and power
that the party of Yahweh were in despair and Elijah towered up in protest.
The greatest prophetic figure between Moses and Amos, his significance lay
in his intense devotion to Yahweh as the god of the old, fair folk-ways of
Israel. He himself came from Gilead, east of Jordan, and therefore close
to desert life. He found, so we are given to understand, seven thousand in
Israel who had not bowed the knee to Baal, (I Kings 19:18.) a strong party
of Yahweh’s devotees, who had refused to be assimilated. They represented
the old ideals; they were often, it may be, of semi-nomadic habits; they
were reactionaries against the new customs and especially the new luxury
and inequality represented by the nobles and the court. Their social
protest took form and gained point when a foreign baal, Melkart, was
introduced by Jezebel of Tyre. Here was a visible symbol of the social
system which they hated.
By this time the local baals had been largely absorbed, their
agricultural functions had been taken over into a syncretic blend, and
Elijah raised no protest against the worship of Yahweh at the high places,
such as Carmel. The conflict which he led broke out over a foreign baal,
supported by royal authority and symbolizing the entire system of alien
customs, selfish luxury, and iniquitous commercialism that threatened not
alone Yahweh’s worship but Yahweh’s social justice.
The importance of the economic factor in this protest is apparent in
Elijah’s sponsorship of Naboth against Ahab. (I Kings, chap. 21.) The
motive power of Elijah lay in the indissoluble blend of his religion with
social justice. He stood in vehement opposition to the modern customs,
which presumably included the luxurious court, the collapse of old
simplicities, the conscription of farmers and shepherds into military
service, mounting taxation, the decay of old nomadic ideals of
brotherhood. ‘Yahweh against baal’ was identical in his mind not so much
with a theological discussion as with a social revolt. Yahweh stood for
justice and brotherhood, against luxury for the few and want for the many,
and especially against the iniquitous accretion of oppressive power by
which a family heritage like Naboth’s could be seized by the king even at
the cost of murder. Here we run upon the most significant of all factors
in the development of Israel’s idea of God, and the ultimate outcome, long
afterward, was not simply monotheism but ethical monotheism.
That this prophetic idea of Yahweh’s character and of his demand for
personal and social righteousness was a development and was not to be
found in full flower in the original Sinaitic deity as the later legends
pictured him, is clear. Yahweh, the mountain storm god, was not ethical in
any such sense as was Yahweh, ‘Lord’ of the prophets. To be sure, a deeply
ethical element existed in the religion of Yahweh from the start, for it
was based on the mutually exchanged vows of a voluntary covenant. Yahweh,
at first, was, like Chemosh, a mountain god, but a significant fact
distinguished them. Chemosh was a natural god to Moab -- the lord and
owner of Moabite territory and therefore the inevitable god of any folk
who lived there. Yahweh, however, by free selection had of his own grace
chosen a people who were strangers to him and they in turn had chosen a
god whom hitherto they had not known. It was a religion by marriage rather
than by birth, by grace rather than by geography, and, in so far, it was
from the beginning moral, involving duties voluntarily assumed.
To this basic covenantal relationship the prophets constantly appealed;
into its mutual obligations they poured ever new meanings; and at the
center of its tradition they had the solid virtues of nomadic life where
human ties are close, interdependent and cooperative, where men exist as
brothers on a fairly equalitarian level and with a strong democratic sense
of personal right. Elijah, therefore, is notably important as a creative
influence in the developing idea both of Yahweh’s sole supremacy over
Israel and of his profoundly ethical character.
VI
In theology Elijah represented monolatry -- believing other gods to be
existent but recognizing Yahweh as the one and only god for Israel.
Monolatry, however, to a vigorous and growing faith is monotheism in the
bud, and the gradual flowering out of Israel’s idea of God was evident in
the eighth-century prophets. Still to Hosea and Amos, Canaan was
especially Yahweh’s land and other lands were ‘’unclean.’’ (Amos 7:17;
Hosea 9:3.) Within Canaan Yahweh was to be worshiped at the high places;
not until generations later was prophetic protest made against this custom
and an idea of God developed that required one central and exclusive
shrine. Still the ceremonial and ethical conflict was on between Yahweh
and the baals -- a certain irreducible hostility along with an inevitable
syncretism. So Hosea insisted on crediting to Yahweh the agricultural
functions which once belonged to the baals, while at the same time he
protested against the licentious worship that the baals had sponsored.
(Hosea 2:8-9; 4:12-14.) Out from this old background, however, the first
writing prophets can be seen moving, by a road familiar in the history of
religion, toward monotheism.
The theistic question was asked then in a way far different from ours:
it did not concern primarily the origin and maintenance of the universe.
The Hebrews had scientific curiosity and, as the first chapter of Genesis
reveals, ascribed to their God the creation of the world. Even Amos called
Yahweh "him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion." (Amos 5:8.) In the
earlier prophets, however, this emphasis was rare. The vivid and imperious
question then was: Among the gods of the nations, which god is most real
and powerful? Sennacherib’s message to the besieged people of Jerusalem
touched their theology where it really was when he said: "Beware lest
Hezekiah persuade you, saying, Yahweh will deliver us. Hath any of the
gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand of the king of
Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? where are the gods of
Sepharvaim? and have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are they
among all the gods of these countries, that have delivered their country
out of my hand, that Yahweh should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?"
(Isaiah 36:18-20.) In answering this question about relative power among
the deities, the early writing prophets moved out into practical
monotheism, for they ascribed to Yahweh the successes and disasters even
of their foes, and thought of him as in commanding control of all
mankind.
So Isaiah’s Yahweh addressed the world’s most powerful king: "Ho
Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine
indignation!’, (Isaiah 10:5.) and, according to Amos, Yahweh
directed the migrations not only of Israel from Egypt, but of the
Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir. (Amos 9:7.) A god whose
sovereignty thus includes all men and nations is a god whose rivals will
soon cease to seem real.
Moreover, in the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries, along
with this emergence of practical monotheism went an even more astonishing
development of moral ideas. Here we are faced with a contribution to human
thought easier to admire than to explain. With all available theological
and sociological factor in our hands, we still are thrown back in wonder
upon the "abysmal depths of personality" in the great prophets. The lowest
point in conceiving the moral character of Yahweh is probably to be found
in a strange encysted bit of folklore in the Book of Exodus. There Yahweh
is pictured as bloodthirstily wanting to kill Moses at a wayside lodging
place, for no apparent reason at all, and is dissuaded by Zipporahts swift
circumcision of Moses’ child, at the sight of which the god "let him
alone.’’ (Exodus 4:24-26.) The difference between this primitive folklore
and the moral dignity and quality of God in the greatest of the pre-Exilic
prophets, from Hosea to Jeremiah, represents one of the most significant
revelations in human history.
To be sure, the prophets lost their battle; they did not succeed m
preserving the social Justice of the early nomadic brotherhood. As
tyrannical kingship had taken the place of paternal chieftainship and a
stratified society based on slave labor had crowded out earlier equality,
so the social organization of Israel continued to take form from the
patterns of the day. The very sophistications and inequities against which
the partisans of Yahweh had vehemently contended became acclimated in
Israel. "They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them
away: and they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage
"(Micah 2:2.) so to the end of the story the prophets fought a losing
battle.
Nevertheless they won a war. They successfully prevented the
identification of Yahweh with the social and economic inequities of his
people. Far from allowing the Hebrew god to become mere sponsor of the
Hebrew status quo they associated him with an ethical standard
which judged and condemned it. That they were able to do this because the
nomadic traditions of their race had come into violent conflict with a
more sophisticated civilization, so that, in the name of conservatism,
they could appeal to old folk-ways against the new commercialism, does not
detract from their credit. They never succeeded in making the old
folk-ways regnant in the new civilization but they did succeed, as no
other religious teachers of antiquity ever succeeded, in elevating their
god above both the nationalistic policies and the economic customs of
their people. Yahweh, in their thought, became not merely a nationalistic
deity or a divine patron of an existent order, but a moral judge who would
throw into the discard even his chosen people if they violated his ethical
standards.
In this lies one of the main elements of uniqueness in the Old
Testament’s developing idea of God. The temptation of all believers in any
kind of god is to use him as the sanctifier of the status quo.
Tribal and nationalistic deities in particular have commonly been
associated with the dominant customs and the ruling class, have been
regarded as committed to the support of national policies, have become
often gods of the powerful rather than of the weak, of the rich rather
than of the impoverished, of the existent system rather than of social
reformation. Thus was Yahweh conceived in Israel by many a king and
priest, by many a member of the land-owning, slave-owning, creditor class,
and doubtless also by wide areas of popular opinion. He was thought of as
unqualifiedly committed to Israel’s support, no matter what Israel might
do, and as sanctioning the social system customary at the time. The
prophets, however, won a victory of permanent consequence over that idea.
Yahweh, as the Old Testament in the end presents him, is
supernationalistic, the judge of nations, unqualifiedly committed to
social righteousness and to those who practise it. He is for the weak
against the oppressive strong, for the poor against the selfish rich. He
is thus a standard of social change, not a sanctifier of existent
circumstance. He is a disturbing moral judge of men and nations, not a
comfortable divine sponsor of their customs. And he is of this quality
because he comes to us not by way of king and priest, but through
insurgent prophets identifying him with an unattained social ideal.
One of the noblest figures in this great succession was Hosea. He, too,
like Amos before him, pronounced an austere judgment of doom on his
apostate people, (Hosea 4:1ff.) but, in a way none before him had ever
achieved, he went beyond the idea of God as judge to the idea of God as
savior. Himself the victim of domestic tragedy, he loved his wife even in
her faithlessness. His rage and shame at his wife’s betrayal of him, his
grief and anguish, and his unconquerable love for her despite her sin,
seemed to him an experience like that of God himself, dealing with
faithless Israel. In undiscourageable compassion he loved his false wife,
"even as Yahweh loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other
gods." (Hosea 3:1.) Far from identifying God, therefore, with the dominant
customs of contemporary Israel or stopping with the divine condemnation of
them, Hosea saw God with passionate earnestness refusing to give up his
people and determined to save them from their evil:
How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
how shall I cast thee off,
Israel?
How shall I make thee as Admah?
how shall I set thee as
Zeboim?
My heart is turned within Me,
My compassions are kindled
together.
I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger,
I will
not return to destroy Ephraim:
For I am God, and not man,
the Holy
One in thy midst, and not mortal. (Hosea 11: 8-9 as translated by Julius
A. Bewer: The Literature of the Old Testament in its Historical
Development, p. 96.)
Of such insurgent prophecy up to the Exile Jeremiah was the
consummation. In him practical monotheism, supernationalistic and
thoroughly ethical, was achieved. In his eyes nothing happened anywhere
without Yahweh. He is even credited with writing: "Am I a God at hand,
saith Yahweh, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret
places so that I shall not see him? saith Yahweh. Do not I fill heaven and
earth? saith Yahweh." (Jeremiah 23:23-24.) The prophetic movement, as
expressed in Deuteronomy, lifted the idea of Israel’s god to such a point
of solitary uniqueness that it is difficult, if not impossible, to
distinguish the conception from theoretical monotheism. "Yahweh he is God
in heaven above and upon the earth beneath: there is none else"
(Deuteronomy 4:35, 39.) -- this phrasing in Deuteronomy may mean simply
that Yahweh is incomparable, but the difference between that and his sole
existence is manifestly growing diaphanous. As for Jeremiah, he plainly
universalized and spiritualized Yahweh and so identified him with
righteousness that, in the prophet’s eyes, to be unrighteous was in itself
to "serve other gods." (Jeremiah 11:10; 16:11-13; 25:6.)
VII
Nevertheless, a long and tragic road lay ahead of the Hebrews before
ethical monotheism became the common property of their people. The very
difficulties confronting the prophetic party in teaching monotheism reveal
the background of thought and imagination whose history we have been
tracing. For example, they could not persuade their people that Yahweh was
one God while he was being worshiped at many local shrines. Granted that
Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah conceived Yahweh as managing the movements of
world empires, still the ordinary Hebrew was far from having one god.
Deity was dispersed in many sanctuaries -- the Yahweh of this place and
the Yahweh of that. If one starts with clear belief in the divine unity
and omnipresence, one may safely worship in many places, as we do, without
losing the sense of God’s oneness; but when the presuppositions of thought
and imagination are polytheistic, as with the early Hebrews, many shrines
keep alive and vivid the tradition of many gods.
The prophetic movement represented in Deuteronomy, therefore, wishing
to make real to the people the doctrine, "Hear, O Israel: Yahweh our God
is one Yahweh,’’ (Deuteronomy 6:4.) adopted as its program the suppression
of the local shrines and the establishment of an exclusive, centralized
worship in the temple at Jerusalem. This program was brought into
practical effect in the Josian reform, (II Kings 23:1-25.) and the
theological position which that reform attacked was stated by Jeremiah,
whose ministry was then beginning: "According to the number of thy cities
are thy gods, O Judah." (Jeremiah 2:28.)
This centralization of worship in one exclusive temple, which looked at
from our standpoint might seem reactionary, was in fact a necessary step
toward unifying the idea of Yahweh. The Hebrews never had one god in the
full sense of that term until they had one central place of worship. Here
the prophets were surprisingly effective in their approach to a difficult
theological problem; they rightly estimated the importance of imagination
to religion.
Whereas Elijah, therefore, had been in despair because the local altars
of Yahweh were being cast down, the prophetic party some two centuries
later were in despair because they were not cast down. So Deuteronomy,
proclaiming the doctrine of Yahweh’s unity, proclaimed as an indispensable
accompaniment the law of one sanctuary. (Deuteronomy 12:1-18; 16:5-6,
etc.)
Despite lapses from the idea and infidelities to its practise, the more
or less successful centralizing of Yahweh’s worship in Jerusalem was a
forward step. With Yahweh adored in an exclusive temple while his
sovereignty extended over all the earth, many in Judah doubtless felt, to
a degree not true before, the divine unity. The danger, however, involved
in this method of unifying the idea of deity came on apace in the speedy
and Complete destruction of the temple by the Babylonians and the exile of
the Jews in Mesopotamia. The question raised by that disaster was not only
practical but acutely theological: What, now, had become of their god ?
With the destruction of the Northern Kingdom in 72I B.C., Yahweh’s holy
land had been restricted to Judah; with the exclusive unification of
Yahweh’s worship in Jerusalem the oneness of their god had been clearly
symbolized. Now, however, this trellis on which the imagination of his
unity had twined was utterly abolished. The Forty-second Psalm is a
first-hand document filled with the poignant anguish not only of practical
misery but of religious despair occasioned by the Exile:
As with a sword in my bones, mine adversaries reproach me,
While
they continually say unto me, Where is thy God? (Psalm 42:10.)
In history there are few instances of the transmutation of tragedy into
gain so impressive as the achievement of the later prophets, using the
disaster of Zion’s ruin and the temple’s destruction to spiritualize and
universalize the idea of God. To this end Jeremiah already had blazed the
trail. This prince of prophets? combining in himself the sensitiveness of
a poet, the clear vision of a statesman, and the stuff of which martyrs
are made, had foreseen, long before it happened, Zion’s downfall and the
people’s exile. He had, therefore, faced in advance the problem of his
religion minus land and temple, altar and cultus, and had adjusted himself
to that revolutionary situation. He had achieved for himself and
vicariously for his people an idea of God and a faith in him so profoundly
personal that it could operate wherever persons were, and so spiritual
that, when deprived of land, temple, and altar, it could rise to new
heights and possess itself of new horizons. When, therefore, in Babylonia
the Jews were dismayed by the question, "Where is now thy God?" Jeremiah
wrote them a letter, one of the most notable documents in our religious
tradition, in which he declared the universal availability of Yahweh, to
be sought and found in personal prayer, anywhere, at any time. With city
and temple, altar and sacrifice gone, still Jeremiah wrote in the name of
Yahweh: "Ye shall call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I
will hearken unto you. And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall
search for me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:12-13.)
The full flower of the monotheistic development in the Old Testament,
therefore, came from the Exile and from the influences which that
disastrous experience released. Strangely symbolic though Ezekiel’s
pictures of deity are, one perceives in them an awed endeavor to express
an ineffable vision of the unity, transcendence, spirituality, and
universal availability of the one God, and in more intimate and
sympathetic moods he represented Yahweh as saying: "Whereas I have
scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them a sanctuary for
a little while in the countries where they are come.’’ (Ezekiel 11:16.) It
is, however, to the Great Isaiah of the Exile that we must look for the
most explicit statements of thoroughgoing monotheism. "Deutero-Isaiah,"
says H. W. Robinson, "drops the keystone of the monotheistic arch into its
place." (H. Wheeler Robinson: The Religious Ideas of the Old
Testament, p.60.)
One pictures him in Babylonia, facing a crucial situation in the
religion of his people. On the one side was the utter ruin of the old,
sustaining sacred places and customs with which their faith in God had
been identified, and on the other side was the competition of the
brilliant gods of Babylon, who, according to ancient theory, had proved
their reality and power by the ascendency of their people. In this
situation the prophet’s strategy was not defensive but offensive. He
asserted the absolute sovereignty of Yahweh, his sole existence and the
nothingness of all other deities, with an explicit, sustained,
uncompromising monotheism never hitherto found among the Hebrews. Yahweh,
as the Great Isaiah understood him, could say, "Before me there was no God
formed, neither shall there be after me"; (Isaiah 43:10.) "I am the first,
and I am the last; and besides me there is no God"; (Isaiah 44:6.) "My
hand hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spread
out the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand up together"; (Isaiah
48:13.) and, as for other gods, they are "of nothing" and their "work is
of nought." (Isaiah 41:24.) Whether in his positive assertion of the one
universal God, as in the fortieth chapter, or in his scorn of all
competitors, whom he placed in the category of worthless idols, as in the
forty fourth chapter, he "held his monotheism with all his mind,"
as Sir George Adam Smith said, and treated the gods of the nations
"as things, in whose existence no reasonable person can possibly
believe." (The Book of Isaiah, Vol. II, p.40.)
The full significance of this is clear only as we visualize the prophet
proclaiming the unity, eternity, and omnipotence, not of the deity of an
ascendent and victorious people, but of a humiliated, decimated, and
exiled nation, "despised, and rejected of men." Out of the depths of
abysmal national ruin rose this full-orbed confidence in the sole
existence and absolute power of the nation’s God. It is this fact, among
others, which gave to Jewish monotheism a character of its own. Monotheism
was not new in the world. The Hebrews were not the first to reach it. By
way of the cult of the sun god, for example, Egyptians long antedated
Hebrews in ascribing to one deity sovereignty over the whole world. Even
the Egyptian sun god at first was territorial; the sun hymn of the Pyramid
Texts represents him as standing guard on Egypt’s frontiers; but in the
sixteenth century B.C. Thutmose III conquered the known world and became
"the first character of universal aspects in human history." The
theological consequence was immense, for the sun god also became
universal. Said Thutmose, "He seeth the whole earth hourly." In a word, as
Dr. James H. Breasted puts it, "Monotheism was but imperialism in
religion" (See James H. Breasted: The Dawn of Conscience, chap.
15.) -- a fact reflected two centuries after Thutmose in an ascription to
the sun, "Sole lord, taking captive all lands every day." This Egyptian
monotheism long antedated the monotheism of the Hebrew prophets, and it is
incredible that with Palestine often under Egyptian suzerainty it should
not have affected the theological thinking of the Hebrews. (Ibid.,
chap. 17.) The quality of the Hebrew result, however, was very different
from the Egyptian, and the reason, in part, lies in the fact that the
full-orbed monotheism of the Hebrews was not "imperialism in religion" but
the very reverse; it was the upthrust of a heartbroken and defeated
people, defying plausibilities and, in the face of the seemingly
triumphant idols of imperialistic Babylon, claiming sole existence,
absolute sovereignty, and righteous character for their God. Monotheism as
religious imperialism is a familiar and easily understandable phenomenon,
but, so far as I know, the monotheism of the Old Testament, the defiant
faith of a humiliated and crushed people in the sole reality and sovereign
omnipotence of their God, is alike in its quality and consequence
unique.
Such monotheism, astonishing though it is, sprang logically from the
insurgent stand of the pre-Exilic prophets. They had identified their God
with righteousness. Righteousness, however in its principles and demands,
is not local but universal. It is no respecter of persons or nations. It
lays its obligations impartially on all alike. By way of the universality
of righteousness, therefore, the prophets had come to the universality of
God, until against all competitors they believed in the sole existence of
the one Deity, who stood for justice and would protect no nation that
violated justice. When, therefore, the tragedy of the Exile came,
insurgent prophecy faced not its refutation but its vindication. The
prophetic school, at its best, went on proclaiming the supreme devotion of
Yahweh to righteousness, above even his devotion to his chosen people. In
the eyes of this prophetic school, the Exile was not an evidence of
Yahweh’s defeat but an expression of his just indignation against Israel’s
sin. As Dr. George Foot Moore puts it: "It was not the Babylonians in the
might of their gods who had triumphed over Judah and its impotent god; it
was Jehovah himself who had launched Nebuchadnezzar and his hosts against
the doomed city to execute his judgment on religious treason.’’
(Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, Vol. I, p.
222.) So the Exile produced new dimensions in the Hebrew conception of
God.
VIII
Among the Hebrews the achievement of faith in one God was thus
supremely a moral victory. The alternative to it was not theoretical
atheism but belief in the reality and power of the gods of victorious
Babylon. The dominant motive which led to it was neither curiosity about
the creation of the world nor philosophic interest, as in Greece, about
the divine immateriality and interior unity, but faith that the social
justice for which Yahweh stood would conquer. The chief obstacle to it was
not doubt springing from "science" but doubt springing from the inveterate
association of nationalistic hatreds with tribal gods. The major result of
it was not so much a unifying philosophy of the physical cosmos as a new,
revolutionary, international outlook on human life.
This is most clearly revealed in the great passages on the Servant of
Yahweh now incorporated in the Book of Isaiah. (Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-6;
50:4-9; 52:13; 53:12.) Whoever wrote these passages won an amazing
victory, not simply for the idea of one God against many, although
absolute monotheism is unmistakably proclaimed; nor simply for the idea
that the one God is Israel’s Yahweh, although under the circumstances of
the Exile that is astonishing; but, even more, for the idea that this one
God cares for all mankind and mercifully purposes the salvation of the
whole world. This is monotheism taken morally in earnest, and it is the
glory of the Old Testament at its best. Of the Servant of Yahweh it is
written, "He will bring forth justice to the Gentiles" (Isaiah 42:1.) and
"He will not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set justice in the
earth; and the isles shall wait for his law"; (Isaiah 42:4.) and Yahweh
himself says, "It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel: I
will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my
salvation unto the end of the earth." (Isaiah 49:6.) This is universalism
in the thought of God allied with universalism in the thought of man. It
is a new outreach of mind achieved only by an extraordinary expansion of
moral vision and sympathy.
It would be too much to expect, however, that so great an adventure of
mind and conscience as was involved in such an outlook would be shared by
the nation as a whole. The practical exigencies which faced the Jews,
first in Babylon and then during the wretched years when the restored
community in Jerusalem struggled precariously for its existence, militated
against any such lofty universalism. Looking at events in retrospect, we
can see that the temple’s destruction and the Exile were, humanly
speaking, necessary for the spiritualizing and universalizing of Israel’s
faith in God. So Sir George Adam Smith says:
It was well that this temple should enjoy its singular rights for only
thirty years and then be destroyed. For a monotheism, however lofty, which
depended upon the existence of any shrine . . . was not a purely spiritual
faith. . . . The city and temple, therefore, went up in flames that Israel
might learn that God is a Spirit, and dwelleth not in a house made with
hands. (The Book of Isaiah [revised ed., 1927] Vol.II, pp.
44,45.)
The exiled Hebrews, however, desired nothing quite so much as the
rebuilding of that destroyed city and temple; their persistent ambition
centered in the restoration of the very shrine whose ruin had done so much
to refine and elevate their faith.
Ezekiel’s ideal, as from the Exile he dreamed the future, was a church
state on Zion, centered in the temple, governed by the priests of Yahweh,
and distinguished by carefully defined ceremonial peculiarities. The same
Exile, which released Israel’s faith from old dependences and helped to
universalize it, also forced upon the Jews, in self-defense, the stressing
of particularisms that would prevent their assimilation into Babylon’s
life. It was in the Exile that the "Holiness Code" of Leviticus
(Leviticus, chaps. 17-26.) was written, emphasizing purity from the
contamination of surrounding paganism. It was in the Exile that the story
of creation was brought to its climax in the admonition to keep the
Sabbath, made sacred from the world’s foundation. (Genesis 2:1-3.) It was
in the Exile that the laws were rewritten and codified stressing Jewish
differentials. The returning Jews, therefore, came back to Zion in no
spirit of universalism. They had been compelled to magnify their
particularisms if Babylon was not to absorb them, and they had done this
with such notable success that then, as now, they maintained their
unconquerable distinctness. Moreover, the new community on Zion was able
to maintain itself only by vehement exclusiveness, so that in the end the
survival of Israel would hardly have been possible without fierce
nationalism, uncompromising racial prejudice, and bigoted devotion to
religious peculiarities. If before the Exile the temple was holy, it was
thrice holy and exclusive afterward, and all the national, racial, and
religious differences that law and ritual could create and enforce were,
more than ever before in Hebrew history, meticulously respected.
At the Old Testament’s end, therefore, we face contradictions,
everywhere to be found in living religions, between the great insights of
the prophets and the common faith and practise of the people. Even the
Isaiah of the Exile, despite his vision of a worldwide salvation, was a
vehement nationalist when he thought of that salvation’s medium; even he
had proclaimed to his people that the world’s kings and queens should "bow
down to thee with their faces to the earth, and lick the dust of thy
feet." (Isaiah 49:23.) Post-Exilic Judaism, therefore, far from being
unanimous, presents in its theology a profound variance -- monotheism,
taken morally in earnest, mingled with old ideas involved in tribal
deities, racial prejudices, religious bigotries, and national hatreds.
In the Old Testament this variance is clearly reflected. On the one
side is the Book of Esther, revealing "the fiery heart of Jewish
nationalism in the third century B.c.," and on the other the Books of Ruth
and Jonah with their appeals against racial prejudice and international
hostility. On the one side is a god before whom men cry:
O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed,
Happy shall he be,
that rewardeth thee
As thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be,
that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
Against the rock, (Psalm
137:8-9.)
and on the other side is God, saying, "In that day shall Israel be the
third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth;
for that Yahweh of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my
people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance."
(Isaiah 19:24-25.) On the one side is Yahweh the lawgiver, requiring
indiscriminately both moral conduct and ritual correctness, and accepting
sacrifice only at one temple, and on the other side is the Yahweh to whom
a psalmist sings,
Thou delightest not in sacrifice; else would I give it:
Thou hast no
pleasure in burnt-offering. (Psalm 51:16.)
In a word, history had brought Judaism face to face with an unavoidable
antinomy -- a God at once national and universal, deity of a special
people and yet God of the universe, lord of a particular temple and yet
everywhere accessible to prayer, pledged to the ultimate victory of his
purged and redeemed people and yet the savior of all mankind. This
antinomy the Old Testament never satisfactorily resolved, save in the
"poems of the Servant of Yahweh," and that solution was not accepted.
Rather, Zechariah’s attitude is typical. "Yahweh shall be King over all
the earth: in that day shall Yahweh be one, and his name one" (Zechariah
14:9.) such is the universal outlook of his monotheism. But all this will
come about with Jerusalem for its center, and with no prerogative of
Judaism surrendered, when
"many nations shall join themselves to Yahweh." (Zechariah 2:10-13.)
Indeed, "whoso of all the families of the earth goeth not up unto
Jerusalem to worship the King, Yahweh of hosts, upon them shall there be
no rain." (Zechariah 14:17.) A just appraisal of the Old Testament,
however, must put its emphasis on the great insights of the prophets. The
future belonged and still belongs to them. The lesser ideas were the old,
inherited jungle of primitive religion; the great prophets were the
road-builders laying down a highway through the jungle and out of it. From
a local, tribal god they found their way through to the sovereign Creator
of the universe, in whose hands were the reins of all history, and from
whose control no star and no nation could escape. From being a hard hater,
their God became, in their imagination and belief, a merciful lover of his
people, the depth of whose sacrificial compassions it strained their
language to fathom: "In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the
angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed
them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.’’ (Isaiah
63:9; cf. Hosea 11:8-9.) A mountain god of war and storm they left behind,
to believe at last in a universal Spirit, everywhere available to the
seeking soul, the one God of all mankind, who asks for his service only
justice, mercy, and humility, and from whose presence there is no
escape:
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from
thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I
make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of
the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even
there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me. (Psalm
139:7-10.)
IX
It is not easy for a Christian to be objective and just in describing
the difference between the ideas of God in the Old Testament and those in
the New. The Christian reader feels a contrast but to locate its source
and describe its nature is so difficult that many popular attempts have
been and are demonstrably unfair. Yet injustice to the Old Testament at
this point is also ingratitude. The great prophetic tradition had gone so
far in the apprehension of God before Christianity began that the first
prerequisite for a true estimate of the New Testament is grateful
appreciation of the Old.
The fact, for example, that the idea of God in the Old Testament never
entirely escaped the bondage of nationalism can easily be overstressed and
misunderstood. God was always so exclusively Israel’s deity, it has been
said, that while Israel was to be his missionary and martyr nation to save
the world, still Israel was always the chosen people not only in point of
service but in point of privilege and prestige. The universalism of the
Old Testament, it is claimed, did not go beyond the prayer of a nation,
regarding itself as the divine favorite:
God be merciful unto us, and bless us,
And cause his face to shine
upon us;
That thy way may be known upon earth,
Thy salvation among
all nations. (Psalm 67:1-2.)
Not only is this true but from the standpoint of history it was
unavoidable, and so far as comparison with the New Testament is concerned
it is, at its best, similar to the attitude of Christians with reference
to the church. Israel did regard herself as the peculiar trustee of a
unique faith and conceived the protection of that faith from contamination
and the propagation of it to the world as her duty, and so, thinking of
her religion as a greenhouse in which to grow priceless things for later
transplanting to the larger field of the world, she endured indescribable
suffering on behalf of her heritage. That this attitude often involved
constricting prejudices and bigotries is clear, but in its highest forms
it is comparable with the loyalty of New Testament Christians, at their
best, to the church as the object of God’s special care and the chosen
agency for the world’s redemption.
It has also been commonly said that God, in the Old Testament, is
primarily interested in the nation as a whole and not in persons one by
one, so that he is a racial and national deity and not the God of personal
religion. So far as the earlier portions of the Old Testament are
concerned, this is true, but the much more considerable truth is that,
starting with tribal religion, as all early peoples did, the Jews through
their prophetic souls made one of the greatest contributions ever made in
the spiritual history of man, by blazing the trail out from religion as
merely a national cult to religion as also a profound, inward, personal
experience. In great appeals such as the one beginning, "Ho, every one
that thirsteth, come ye to the waters," (Isaiah 55:1.) or in revealing
statements of the divine abode as being "with him also that is of a
contrite and humble spirit," (Isaiah 57:15.) there is no mistaking the
personal nature of the experience intended. As for Jeremiah, this is his
unique distinction, making him, as Wellhausen said,
"the father of true prayer," (J. Wellhausen: Israelitische und
Jüdische Geschichte [3rd ed.], p. 144.) and elevating him to be the
supreme exemplar of personal faith before the coming of Jesus. When he
pictures God as saying, "I will put my law in their inward parts, and in
their heart will I write it,’’ (Jeremiah 31:33.) he is obviously thinking
of transformed individuals as the basis of a transformed nation.
Even more commonly it has been said that God in the Old Testament is a
king while in the New Testament he is a father, or, in other language,
that justice is his attribute in the one and love in the other. This,
however, is to fly in the face of the evidence and to set up a false
antithesis. Montefiore says truly: "‘Our Father and King’ remains for all
Jews a most familiar invocation of God." (C. G. Montefiore: Some
Elements of the Religious Teaching of Jesus According to the Synoptic
Gospels, p. 91.) To be sure, in the Old Testament the divine
fatherhood is almost always used with reference to the nation rather than
to the individual, (Deuteronomy 32:6; Isaiah 63:16; 64:8; Hosea 11:1-3;
Jeremiah 3:4, 19.) but this is not exclusively so.
A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows,
Is God in
his holy habitation (Psalm 68:5.)
is personal.
Like as a father pitieth his children,
So Yahweh pitieth them that
fear him (Psalm 103:13.)
is personal. As for Jewish thought between the Testaments, this
intimate, individual, fatherly love of God is so clear and so beautifully
expressed that the idea involved is indistinguishable from similar
passages in the New Testament. So in Ecclesiasticus stands the prayer’ "O
Lord, Father and Master of my life…" (Ecclesiasticus 23:1.) and the Book
of Jubilees, written in Palestine in the second century B.c., says:
"Their souls will cleave to Me and to all My commandments, and they will
fulfil My commandments, and I shall be their Father and they will be My
children. And they will all be called children of the living God, and
every angel and every spirit will know, yea, they will know that these are
My children, and that I am their Father in uprightness and righteousness,
and that I love them." (The Book of Jubilees, or The Little
Genesis, 1:24-25, translated by R.H. Charles, p. 7.)
X
Nevertheless, when one passes from the Old Testament into the New, one
does move into the presence of fresh ideas about God and experiences with
him. A major factor in producing this change in spiritual climate and
scenery was the expulsion of the Christian movement from the synagogue.
Just as Wesleyanism started as a phase of Anglicanism and remained so
until it was coerced into separatism by the Church of England itself, so
the first Christians were simply Jews who had found the Messiah and who
intended remaining as the true Judaism within the larger matrix of the
national faith. When they were driven out from synagogue and temple, they
faced a disruption in their religious thought and practise comparable with
the shock of the Exile to the Jews over six centuries before. That is,
they lost the old trellis on which their faith had twined. The temple was
no longer theirs; they were denied the sacrifices; they were outlawed from
both cult and legal system; they were expelled from the synagogue and
regarded as aliens by the Jewish community. The theological effect of all
this was immense. What had happened partially when the physical temple had
been destroyed and the nation exiled in Babylon now happened thoroughly.
Yahweh lost his coercive entanglements with national loyalty and racial
cult, and in a new liberation, unimaginable had not the expulsion of
Christianity from Judaism taken place, he became a universal God, with no
local temple or chosen people to limit him, and with worshipers of all
tongues and nations on equal terms -- neither Jew nor Greek, neither
Scythian, barbarian, bond nor free, but one man in Christ.
The New Testament as a whole comes to us out of this completed
separation of church from synagogue, with Christianity rapidly becoming
more Gentile than Jewish. Paul had done his work and the church was an
inter-racial, international brotherhood. The God of the New Testament,
therefore, is universal, not only in the sense of being cosmic, but in the
deeper and more difficult sense of being God of all mankind alike and "no
respecter of persons.’’ (Acts 10:34.)
The direct effect of this in freeing monotheism from the Old
Testament’s constricting particularisms was great, but perhaps even more
important was its indirect effect: it opened the idea of God in Christian
minds to the influence of all the theologies of the Greco-Roman world.
Long before Christ, the Jews in Alexandria had felt the nobility of
Plato’s theistic philosophy and had labored to blend their religious
traditions with the best thought of Greece. To men like Philo, a
contemporary of Jesus Platonic philosophy was at one with Old Testament
doctrine, and this difficult syncretism was achieved by so allegorizing
even the "Books of Moses" as to find Platonic ideas there. Such acceptance
of Hellenistic thought, however, while typical of Alexandrian Judaism, had
little, if any, influence in Palestine and, although mildly evident in the
Apocrypha, it did not affect the Hebrew Old Testament. Only after the Old
Testament canon was complete and in 70 A.D. the temple was destroyed by
the Romans, was Jewish thought, as a whole, finally cast out of its local
matrix, and even then the legal system, with its particularistic minutiæ,
was the more insisted on because the sacrificial cult was gone.
The thought of the New Testament, however, had no such protection
against the influential philosophies of the Greco-Roman world. To be sure,
the Old Testament was at first the only Christian Bible, and Christian
doctrine was validated by appeal to the sacred Book. Alexandrian Judaism,
however, long since had shown that the Old Testament could be interpreted
by allegory so as to abstract from it any philosophy one pleased. In the
Christian thinking of the first century, therefore, the liberation of
church from synagogue inaugurated a new era; the apologetic necessity of
being persuasive to Gentiles overbore the tendency to be content with
Hebraisms; and even in the New Testament, predominantly Jewish though it
is in its backgrounds, one sees the beginning of that larger mental
hospitality which led at last to the overwhelming influence of Greek
thought on Christian theology.
In the opening verses of the Fourth Gospel, for example, we are in the
presence of the Logos -- the outgoing of eternal God in the creation of
his world and the salvation of his people. Stoics and Neo-Platonists alike
had their doctrine of the Logos -- the creative effluence of the
transcendent God, forever going forth into his world and, above all,
lighting "every man.’’ (John 1:19.)The essential doctrine of the first few
verses of the Fourth Gospel would not have been unfamiliar to educated
people in Ephesus; only at the identification of the Logos with Jesus
would difficulty have arisen.
When it is said, therefore, as it commonly is said, that the New
Testament simply takes over the Old Testament’s theocratic idea of God,
wide areas of fact are forgotten. The God of the New Testament is the
eternal Spirit, God of no special nation and of no chosen race, accessible
everywhere to every soul without requirement of special ritual or
legalistic act, who, being spirit, can be worshiped only in spirit, who,
being love, dwells wherever love dwells, and who supremely has shined in
the face of Jesus Christ.
XI
In achieving this result, while the separation of church and synagogue
furnished the necessary setting, the personality of Jesus was the major
creative force. It was he who mainly made the difference between the ideas
of God in the two Testaments. Strangely enough, he did this without saying
anything new about God or even trying to. He used no new words concerning
deity. He was in the lineal succession of the great prophets -- Hosea,
Jeremiah, the Isaiah of the Exile. What they had tried to do in their
times and fashions he tried to do in his -- take monotheism morally in
earnest. Where they stopped he began, taking over from them the most
expanded and ethically cogent ideas of God to which they had attained and
so identifying himself with the great tradition of his people. As with the
prophets, so with him, the major motive in all thinking about God was not
cosmic curiosity but moral seriousness.
The common statement, therefore, that Jesus took over unchanged the
Jewish idea of God needs at least an initial qualification. Which Jewish
idea of God did he take over? His ministry was a concentrate protest
against ideas and practises that had sprung from the lower levels of
Hebrew tradition. His God was the God of the supreme prophetic passages --
spiritual and universal, caring for all mankind across all boundaries of
race and nation, near at hand to the humble and the contrite, a God of
grace and forgiveness as well as of justice and retribution, redemptively
merciful to sinners, demanding not ritualistic conformity but moral
genuineness within and brotherly conduct without. Here, as everywhere in
dealing with his people’s heritage, Jesus practised selective attention.
He picked the diamonds from the slag. Far from being negligible, such
selective attention has often been one of the most creative processes in
human thinking. It can so alter the entire composition of a religion or a
philosophy, can so reorient and redistribute man’s thinking, as to
achieve, without the contribution of a single brand-new element, a
startlingly new result.
To say, therefore, that Jesus took the Jewish idea of God at its best
but had no new idea of his own presents a false antithesis. The truth is
that by taking the Jewish idea of God at its best and by
treating this idea with thoroughgoing moral seriousness, sloughing off
hostile adhesions and limitations, Jesus achieved a consequence so new as
to be revolutionary.
In this achievement two factors are prominent. The first is Jesus’
insight into the moral meanings of monotheism. His struggle was not to
sustain faith in one God against either polytheism or atheism, but to
persuade people who already believed in God to think and live as though
they did. It was because of his morally majestic idea of God that the
trivial legalisms of the Pharisees seemed intolerable. It was because he
took the universal sovereignty of God in moral earnest that racial
exclusiveness directed, for example, against Samaritans, seemed to him
inde- fensible. He even conceived God as judging men only by tests of
philanthropy, (Matthew 25:34-36.) and thus universalized God’s
requirements so that, regardless of race or nation, they could be met by a
good life anywhere. The full extent of the revolution involved in this
ethical monotheism of Jesus was not at first evident even to his most
ardent disciples. On the basis of certain passages, notably the one
concerning the Syrophœnician woman, (Mark 7:24-30. See, e.g., Charles
Guignebert:Jesus, translated by S.H. Hooker, p. 317.) some have
judged that it may not have been fully evident to Jesus himself. His
enemies, however, sensed in his emphasis the potential ruin of their
racial and religious particularisms. They were right about that. The New
Testament’s later development of an international and inter-racial faith
was the logical conclusion of Jesus’ way of thinking about God, and so
notable was this contribution that he has been credited with being the
first one in history to take monotheism with thoroughgoing moral
earnestness.
The second factor prominent in this achievement was the intense reality
of God in the personal experience of Jesus. Words about God are, after
all, only verbal counters, and in themselves alone are inadequate as tests
of the religious experience they are used to reveal. Two persons calling
God Father may express by that name widely divergent meanings. It is
beside the point, therefore, simply to catalogue the words of Jesus about
God or to count the times he used a special name. To be sure, he did not
discover de novo the fatherhood of God. Only in Matthew’s
Gospel is the word Father, as applied to God, his distinctive and constant
usage, and he is never represented as speaking of ‘love’ as a divine
attribute. This verbal test, however, does not reach bottom. The effect
which Jesus produced upon his disciples reveals a personality to whom God
was overpoweringly real in spiritual experience. Austere as well as
paternal, authoritative and kingly as well as merciful and gracious,
terrific in judgment against selfishness, cruelty, and sham as well as
forgiving to outcasts and prodigals, Jesus’ God was revealed not so much
in the words he used about him as in the life he lived with him. This life
was of such a quality that those who knew Jesus best sought from him the
secrets of prayer, (Luke 11:1.) and those who came after him called God by
a new name, "God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." (Colossians
1:3.)
So Dr. Buckham states the case:
It is not the priority of Jesus’ teaching of Fatherhood that makes it
so significant, but its intense realism. Priority counts for little in
such a matter as this, compared to a living and confident realization and
the power to convey this realization to others. It was in this that Jesus
was creatively original. Upon his lips Abba meant more than any
name for God ever meant before. So purely and ardently did it issue from
the depths of his own experience as to communicate itself to his disciples
and through them to others in such vivid reality as to make a new and
transforming epoch in the life of the human spirit. This is originality.
By this token Divine Fatherhood may be rightly regarded as a discovery,
and Jesus as the discoverer. (John Wright Buckham: The Humanity of God;
An Interpretation of the Divine Fatherhood, p. 45.)
XII
It is difficult to be accurately certain of Jesus’ private ideas, as
distinguished from the impressions of them reported by his disciples, just
as it is difficult to be accurately certain of Socrates’ own thoughts,
disentangled from their rendition by Plato and Xenophon. Despite many
questions in detail, however, such contributions as we have ascribed to
him -- selective attention in dealing with his religious heritage,
profound insight into the moral meanings of monotheism, and contagious
reality in his experience of God as a towering and penetrating fact --
seem assured. The newness of the Christian idea of God, however, went
deeper still.
On this point the early Christians have a peculiar right to be heard.
In the first instance they themselves were Jews, devoutly familiar with
the Old Testament’s ideas of God. So reverently did they regard their
ancestral faith that, the Jewish Scripture being at first their only
Bible, their new experiences and hopes were seen as the fulfilment of its
prophecies. "Whatsoever things were written aforetime," said Paul, "were
written for our learning." (Romans 15:4.) Nevertheless, the newness of
their faith, as followers of Christ, seemed to them unmistakable. They
recorded the first impression of Jesus’ preaching in terms of astonished
exclamation -- "What is this? a new teaching!" (Mark 1:27.) From
recollections of Jesus’ own words describing his gospel as new wine, not
to be put into old bottles, and new cloth, not to be sewed as a patch on
old garments, (Matthew 9:16-17.) the conviction runs through the New
Testament that, in the faith which it records, a fresh, original creative
invasion of the world by the living God had taken place. The gospel is a
new covenant; (I Corinthians 11:25; II Corinthians 3:6; Hebrews 8:13;
9:15; 12:24.)one who accepts it becomes a new man; (Ephesians 2:15; 4:24;
Colossians 3:10.) the Christian’s access to God is a new and living way,
(Hebrews 10:20.) related to the old order as reality is to dim
foreshadowing; newness of life (Romans 6:4.) comes to those who are united
with Christ, and, indeed, "if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature:
the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new." (II
Corinthians 5:17.)
It stands to reason that this consciousness of creative originality in
their faith could not have belonged to the early Christians apart from a
fresh conception of God and experience of him. Nor does the New Testament
leave in doubt the nature of this innovation in the Christian thought of
deity -- "It is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness,
who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ." (II Corinthians 4:6.) That is to say,
the God of the early Christians was not so much the deity Jesus taught as the deity they believed him to be. He came from the
divine realm, belonged to it, in his own person revealed it, and so
brought to man a fresh and saving manifestation of God’s nature and
purpose. Paul preached "the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the
image of God’’; (II Corinthians 4:4.) John presented the Christ who could
say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." (John 14:9.)
To be sure, this association of Jesus with the divine realm exists in
the New Testament in various gradations and is set not in one pattern of
thought, but in diverse categories familiar in the ancient world. Nowhere
in dealing with the faith of New Testament believers is the modernizing of
early Christian thought more false and dangerous. They were thinking of
Jesus not in our categories but in theirs. In the belief of the first
Jewish Christians, Jesus was the Messiah -- that is, the Christ --
divinely anointed for his supreme and saving mission. This Jewish category
of Messiahship was not primarily metaphysical; it did not so much concern
the essential nature of the divine missioner as his vocation; it could be
applied on different levels -- to one conceived as a "son of David"
specially anointed to fulfil the divine purpose, or to one conceived as a
preexistent being, come at last to earth to achieve God’s will. By means
of this category, Jesus, at the first, was associated with the divine
realm.
When, however, the gospel was carried from the Jewish to the Gentile
world, the idea of Messiahship lost its cogency. The Gentiles did not
traditionally know its meaning. ‘Christ,’ as a descriptive title,
containing in itself a confession of faith in the divine mission of Jesus,
was not easily intelligible to Greek and Roman Christians. So it came to
be no longer a title and a creed combined, but only a proper name, and
‘Jesus, the Christ’ became ‘Jesus Christ.’ In Paul’s Epistles especially,
another name for Jesus tends to supplant ‘Messiah.’ He is ‘the Lord.’ This
title, too, associated him with the divine realm but it came from other
backgrounds and suggested other connotations than ‘Christ.’ ‘Lord’ was
habitually used in the Greek sacramental cults as the title of the god,
the cult’s supernatural head, with whom the devotees were joined through
their initiatory rites. Writes Professor Lake:
A ‘Lord’ had a supernatural nature, which may or may not be described
as divinity in proportion as Greek or Jewish forms of thought are being
observed. To the Jew ‘God’ means the Creator, an omnipotent being beside
whom there is no other. To the Greek ‘God’ is a generic title of a whole
class of supernatural beings who are neither creators of the world, nor
omnipotent, nor omniscient.... In this sense, the lords of the various
cults were all gods and it would be natural enough for the Greeks to
interpret thus the statement that Jesus was the Lord. (Kirsopp Sake and
Silva Lake: An Introduction to the New Testament, p.
238.)
To be sure, when the Jewish name of God, Yahweh, was rendered into
Greek, the same word, ‘Lord,’ was used. So a fruitful source of confusion
existed in the nomenclature of the early church, and probably there is no
solution of the controversial problem as to the precise meaning in Paul’s
mind when he called Jesus ‘Lord.’ That he himself felt the problem, as he
carried out into the world of Greek cults this presentation of Jesus,
seems plainly indicated in his saying, "For though there be that are
called gods, whether in heaven or on earth; as there are gods many, and
lords many; yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all
things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all
things, and we through him." (Corinthians 8:5-6.) At any rate, it is clear
that in categories of understanding familiar to the non-Jewish mind ‘the
Lord Jesus Christ’ was preached to the Gentiles as belonging to the
superhuman world.
This development reached its climax in the interpretation of Jesus as
the Logos, the eternal Word of God. The use of this term in the prologue
of the Fourth Gospel is familiar, but the basic idea behind the term is
present elsewhere in the New Testament where the term itself is not used.
Indeed, the idea had already passed over from Gentile to Jewish thought in
works such as the Book of Wisdom, called in our Apocrypha "The Wisdom of
Solomon," where Wisdom is presented as the vice-gerent of God -- "She
pervadeth and penetrateth all things," "a breath of the power of God," "a
clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty," "an effulgence from
everlasting light," "an unspotted mirror of the working of God," and "an
image of his goodness." (The Wisdom of Solomon 7:22-30.) Here was a
prevalent medium of thought ready for Christian use in the interpretation
of Jesus and by means of it he was identified with the divine realm. He
was preached as "the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all
creation," (Colossians 1:15.) as "the effulgence of his [God’s] glory, and
the very image of his substance," (Hebrews 1:3.) as the Logos who in the
beginning was with God and was God. (John 1:1.)
Unquestionably something new had happened to the idea of God, not only
absent from the Old Testament but contrary to some of its strongest
predispositions.
XIII
In this process by which Jesus was progressively reinterpreted in new
patterns of thought, it is customary to see the gradual elevation of a man
to the divine realm. In the simplest presentation of Jesus in apostolic
preaching, he was called "a man approved of God unto you by mighty works
and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you, even as ye
yourselves know .... who went about doing good, and healing all that were
oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.’’ (Acts 2:22; 10:38.) Before
the New Testament writers were through interpreting him, however, the most
august categories of the ancient world had been employed, and he was the
Messiah, the Lord, the Logos. He had been deified. That this led Christian
thinking far beyond the original historical facts concerning his life,
teaching, and ministry is commonly emphasized. It is more important for
our purpose, however, to observe the effect which the deifying of Jesus
had, not on the Christian conception of him, but on the Christian
conception of God. When Jesus, in the interpretation of his followers,
became the divine Lord and Logos, not only was their thought of Jesus
elevated but their thought of God was changed. Christ became the dominant
factor in it. It was now in his face that they saw the light of the
knowledge of God’s glory. As New Testament thinking developed, not only
did Christ become more and more identified with the divine world but the
divine world became more and more identified with Christ. His character
became central in the idea of God and the concept of God was thereby
Christianized. So profound were the changes involved in this, that, from
the point of view of the New Testament believer, Paul was justified in
writing to his converts, whatever their previous religious allegiance
might have been, "Now that ye have come to know God, or rather to be known
by God." (Galatians 4:9.)
To put the matter simply, in Christian thinking God became Christlike.
The divinity of Jesus became not only an assertion about Jesus but about
divinity. Still the Most High was the majestic sovereign of the universe,
"who created all things," (Ephesians 3:9.) and whose invisible might is
revealed "through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and
divinity.’’ (Romans 1:20.) Into this inherited framework, however, Jesus
was introduced as the essential portrait of the divine nature, the very
"image of God." (II Corinthians 4:4.) When the early Christians thought of
the divine, therefore, they thought of Jesus, so that while their
theological reinterpretations of him, often in contravention of historical
accuracy, changed their ideas of his earthly life and ministry, (E.g., on
the way John’s Gospel changes the picture of Jesus’ attitude toward
sinners from that presented in the Synoptics, see Ernest Cadman
Colwell: John Defends the Gospel, chap. 4.) his earthly life and
ministry still exercised a profound influence on their theology.
The effects of this were so pervasive that to define them is like
describing a change of climate. Nevertheless, some of the fruits of the
change can be identified.
The individual extension of God’s care to people one by one was clearly
emphasized as it had never been in the Old Testament scriptures. Intimate
care for individuals was characteristic of Jesus and if he was the "image
of God," such must be the nature of the divine interest.
God’s saving grace and mercy gained new positiveness and new
dimensions, becoming more actively seeking and sacrificial than it had
ever before been pictured as being. Jesus’ life was love in motion,
outgoing determination to save, free grace expended without regard to
merit, and on the terms of the New Testament’s thought of Christ, God so
loved the world. (Cf., e.g., Pauline passages on the grace of God: Romans
3:23-25; 5:15-21; Ephesians 1:3-7; 2:4-8.)
The special care of God for sinners was made central and emphatic. That
the righteous were to be loved and the iniquitous hated by both God and
good men was the natural attitude of the early Old Testament, and no
development of thought was more difficult of achievement than the
extension of merciful, forgiving, saving love to sinners. In Jesus,
however, this became one of religion’s specialties, exhibited with
tireless patience in his ministry and commended by him as the evidence of
godlikeness. (Matthew 5:43-48; cf. Romans 5:8.)
The purpose of God was conceived as represented in and carried out by
Christ. Still the "Majesty in the heavens" (Hebrews 8:1.) exercised
sovereignty over the course of history, and with prevenient ordination, as
well as grace, the potter had "a right over the clay," (Romans 9:20-21.)
but this directive control of the Most High was now conceived as "the
eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Ephesians
3:11.)
The dominant attribute of God, the criterion of judgment with reference
to which other aspects of the divine nature were estimated, became the
kind of love the New Testament writers found in Christ. The paucity of
Pauline references to the earthly ministry of Jesus is commonly
emphasized, but when one takes the full measure of them, and adds all the
intimations of Paul’s insight into Jesus’ quality and character, one may
reasonably decide that the apostle understood his Master very well. He
besought his readers "by the meekness and gentleness of Christ"; (II
Corinthians 10:1.) he based his admonition concerning the duties of the
strong toward the weak on the example of Christ, who "pleased not himself"
; (Romans 15:1-3.) he urged generosity on the Corinthians after the manner
of Christ -- "Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that
ye through his poverty might become rich"; (II Corinthians 8:9.) he
pleaded for the virtues of humility, harmony, magnanimity, saying, "Treat
one another with the same spirit as you experience in Christ Jesus";
(Philippians 2:1-5 [Moffatt translation]) he saw the bearing of one
another’s burdens as the fulfilment of the "law of Christ"; (Galatians
6:2.) he urged on his readers forgiveness, "even as the Lord forgave you,"
(Colossians 3:13.) and considerate love, "even as Christ also loved you."
(Ephesians 5:2.) This centrality of love in Paul’s thought of Christ was
carried up into Paul’s thought of God, and as Christ’s love "passeth
knowledge’, (Ephesians 3:18-19.) so, too, God’s love is to Paul tireless,
potent, holding believers in a bond so strong that nothing in the universe
can separate them from it. (Romans 8: 38-39.) As for John, who certainly
tried to understand his Master’s earthly ministry, the consequence of
Christ’s influence is plain: "God is love; and he that abideth in love
abideth in God, and God abideth in him." (I John 4:16.)
Obviously something new had entered into the idea and experience of
God. This creative factor was not so much a concept as a personality. Old
frameworks of thought were carried over from Jewish tradition and new ones
were added from the Hellenistic world, but for Christians the portrait in
all of them was "the face of Jesus Christ."
XIV
Even this, however, does not carry our thought far enough. The center
of the New Testament’s interest is not so much an idea as a deed. In
Christ God had performed a supremely important act for the world, so
climactic that prophecy found there its culmination and so determinative
that all man’s future was conditioned on it -- such is the Christian
Scripture’s dominant conviction. Like the Old Testament, the New does not
move in realms of calm, philosophic discourse; all its writings have some
practical intention, such as the upbuilding of the church, the defensive
presentation of truth, the overthrow of gainsayers, and the winning of
converts. Both Gospels and Epistles are engaged not mainly in the careful
balancing of ideas but in the militant presentation of a crucial deed, the
very hinge of history, on which swings the world’s fate and each man’s
destiny. The characteristic attributes of the early Christian idea of God,
therefore, cannot be fully understood apart from this consummate and
creative act which he had wrought in Christ
In this regard a deep difference separated the Hebrew and the
Hellenistic world views. As Professor Edwyn R. Bevan puts it, (for the
following antithesis see "Hellenistic Judaism," in The Legacy of
Israel, edited by Edwyn R. Bevan and Charles Singer, p. 50.) the
Hebraic view of the world was based on "an apprehension of God as
righteous Will, Some One who does definite ‘mighty acts’ in the
world-process"; it conceived history as "a Divine plan beginning in God’s
mighty act of creation and leading up to a great consummation in the
future"; it associated "the Divine plan with a Divine community, a ‘people of God’ chosen to
be the vehicle of God’s purpose." In the Hellenistic world view, however,
God "tended to become immovable Being, to which men might indeed strive to
attain, but which did not do particular acts in the world-process"; the
course of history itself "was a vain eternal recurrence, a circular movement, leading nowhere";
"deliverance was attained by the individual when he detached himself in
soul from the world." (Ibid.) As between these two ways of
regarding the cosmos, the New Testament is predominantly Hebraic. Many
influences of Hellenism are discernible in the Christian scriptures, some
of them potent in their effect, but as for the underlying idea of God and
the world, the Jewish view maintained its hold. God is righteous and
loving Will, a doer of mighty deeds; history is a process, under his
sovereign control, in which he performs decisive acts; the church is the
chosen vehicle of his purpose -- such is the New Testament’s world
view.
As in the Old Testament, therefore, the idea of God had been
progressively formulated, not so much in the light of philosophic
disquisition as in the light of his mighty acts for Israel, from the
deliverance out of Egypt to the least and latest sign of his effective
control over human affairs, so in the New Testament the idea of God was
centered not in a concept but in a deed. God had sent his Son into the
world; (John 3:16-17.) what the prophets had desired to see and hear had
now come to pass; (Matthew 13:17.) of the most hopeful foresights of
ancient seers it could be said, "To day hath this scripture been
fulfilled;" (Luke 4:17-21.) believers had "passed out of death into life,"
(John 5:24.) and had been "delivered . . . out of the power of darkness,
and translated . . . into the kingdom of the Son of his love." (Colossians
1:13.) A supreme and saving deed had been done, an unprecedented act of
God for man’s salvation, and in the light of that the ideas of
God’s nature, character, and purpose grew to new amplitude and bore new
fruit.
It is the more important to emphasize this because of the prevalent
stress in our time upon the apocalyptic hopes of early Christians as
altogether centered and absorbed in a future event -- the triumphant
return of Christ from heaven. Granted the dominance of this hope in the
New Testament! The early disciples did live with a glowing expectation of
a divine climactic act that would usher in a "new heaven and a new earth,
wherein dwelleth righteousness." (II Peter 3:13.) Nevertheless, this
ardent hope cannot be adequately understood save as an integral result of
a supreme event which had occurred already. God’s greatest deed was not to
be done; it had been done. What was to come by way of culmination was
corollary and consequence. The transcendent act had already been
performed: "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who
is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." (John 1:18.)
The idea of God in the New Testament stems out from this deed. "God
commendeth his own love toward us," writes Paul -- not in a philosophy but
in an act -- "in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
(Romans 5:8.) The early Christians, therefore, lived not simply in
expectation of the future but in glad appropriation of a deed already
done. They were convinced that the kingdom of God had come upon them;
(Matthew 12:28.) that "the darkness is passing away, and the true light
already shineth"; (I John 2:8.) that here and now they had entered into "eternal life"; (John 3:36.) that already they had been "begotten
again," (I Peter 1:23.) saved "through the washing of regeneration and
renewing of the Holy Spirit," (Titus 3:5.) and given "the right to become
children of God." (John 1:12.) No deed comparable with this, they were
sure, had ever been done before, and to them God was primarily the kind of
being who could and would do it. As the early Hebrews thought of Yahweh
first of all as the one who had delivered them out of Egypt, so the early
Christians thought of God as the one who had rescued them out of the power
of darkness and translated them into the kingdom of his Son.
Particularly pertinent to our present theme is the fact that by this
saving deed believers conceived themselves as ushered into a new
experience of sonship to God. The fatherhood of God in the New Testament
is most explicitly manifest, not in what is said about God, but in what is
said about the Christian experience of sonship. God desires sons -- in
that idea his fatherhood is most emphatically made plain. Paul says, "The
earnest expectation of creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of
God." (Romans 8:19.) The act of God wrought in Christ had this for its
aim: "When the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son . . . that
we might receive the adoption of sons." (Galatians 4:4,5.) In the eyes of
the New Testament this deed has now been done. The right has been given
"to become children of God’’; (John 1:12.) "as many as are led by the
Spirit of God, these are sons of God’’; (Romans 8:14.) no longer slaves,
they have become sons and heirs, and their address to God is, "Abba,
Father.’’ (Galatians 4:6-7; Romans 8:15.) From Jesus’ remembered
admonition, "that ye may be sons of your Father", (Matthew 5:45.) to the
Epistles rejoicing in the Christians, "adoption as sons through Jesus
Christ,’’ (Ephesians 1:5.) this idea runs. They were using an old phrase
but it seemed to them packed with new meaning. Far from being wholly a
postponed expectation of Christ’s return, as extreme eschatologists
affirm, the glory of the early Christians lay in their appropriation and
exploration of the experiences already opened to them by the great deed of
God in Christ --- "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places
in Christ." (Ephesians 1:3.)
XV
Indeed the richness and variety involved in the developing experience
and idea of God in the New Testament began to overflow the customary forms
of historic theism. There was one God, but there was also one Lord,
belonging to the divine world, who supremely revealed him; and, as well,
there was one Spirit --"his Spirit that dwelleth in you." (Romans 8:11.)
Jewish monotheism stood for the sole existence and sovereignty of the one
God; Christianity was soon trying to secure new dimensions in its theism
by thinking of the Father as revealed in the Son and made immediately
available to every believer by the indwelling Spirit. This enrichment of
the idea of God Paul expressed in a benediction, now a familiar formula,
but which, at first, voiced the amazed and grateful experience of
discoverers who saw theism unfolding into new dimensions -- "The grace of
the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy
Spirit, be with you all." (II Corinthians 13:14.) The life and ministry of
Christ had been divine; their own interior experience of spiritual renewal
and sustentation was divine; their God was no longer a cosmic creator,
father, and king only, but, as well, a revelatory character, "full of
grace and truth," and an indwelling spiritual presence. All this was not
yet trinitarian dogma. It was rather an expansion and enrichment of
theism, an overflowing of the idea of divinity into new forms of thought.
The unilinear nature of the old monotheism seemed to the new experience
inadequate. The early Christians could not say about God all they wished
to say in the mental patterns and terminology of traditional monotheism.
Their experience had too many facets, was too rich and copious. Quite
without intending to start a development that would issue in the classic
creeds, they saw themselves, as a matter of fact, dealing with the Divine
in three major ways as the cosmic Creator and Father, as the incarnate
Savior and Character, as the interior Spirit of Power.
Far from being, as it later became, a too precise surveying of the
divine nature, this trinitarian experience involved, at first, a humble
and grateful acknowledgment of unfathomable mystery in the Eternal. The
Bible’s greatest passages concerning God, in Old and New Testaments alike,
are suffused with this sense of mystery. The Book is not a good forest to
cut timber in for theistic dogmatism. Not only are its ideas of God in
constant process of change, but it is everywhere conscious of depth beyond
depth in the divine nature, uncomprehended and incomprehensible. The
questions of Zophar in the drama of Job are true to the spirit of
Scripture:
Canst thou by searching find out God?
Canst thou find out the
Almighty unto perfection?
It is high as heaven; what canst thou do?
Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? (Job 11:7-8.)
Indeed, as we might expect, it is the most confident believers who
acknowledge most humbly their limited insight into what Paul called "the
deep things of God," (I Corinthians 2:10.) and say with the Great Isaiah,
"There is no searching of his understanding." (Isaiah 40:28.) In the New
Testament this sense of God’s unfathomable profundity, "dwelling in light
unapproachable," (I Timothy 6:16.) is nowhere more plainly indicated than
in the idea that while God is one, as contrasted with polytheistic ideas,
this unity is diversified and copious, and not confined, as a bare
monotheism implies. When Paul talked about God he used ampler language
than monotheism had ever before been equipped with -- "filled unto all the
fulness of God"; (Ephesians 3:19.) "Christ in you, the hope of glory";
(Colossians 1:27.) "The Lord is the Spirit." (II Corinthians 3:17.) In all
this he was not metaphysically analyzing the divine nature but was
indicating the manifoldness of the divine approach to man, and was
endeavoring, in the spirit of his own words, to express the ineffable --
"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!
how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out!"
(Romans 11:33.)
Incredibly difficult it would have been to imagine such an outcome from
the early beginnings of the theistic idea in Israel. Indeed, in
retrospect, the road traveled by the idea of God through the Bible as a
whole presents a fascinating spectacle.
Beginning with a storm god on a desert mountain, it ends with men
saying, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit
and truth." (John 4:24.)
Beginning with a tribal war god, leading his devotees to bloody triumph
over their foes, it ends with men seeing that "God is love; and he that
abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him." (I John
4:16.)
Beginning with a territorial deity who loved his clansmen and hated the
remainder of mankind, it ends with a great multitude out of every tribe
and tongue and people and nation, (Revelation 5:9.) worshiping one
universal Father.
Beginning with a god who walked in a garden in the cool of the day or
who showed his back to Moses as a special favor, it ends with the God whom
"no man hath seen . . . at any time" (John 1:18.) and in whom "we live,
and move, and have our being." (Acts 17:28.)
Beginning with a god who commanded the slaughter of infants and
sucklings without mercy, it ends with the God whose will it is that not
"one of these little ones should perish." (Matthew 18:14.)
Beginning with a god from whom at Sinai the people shrank in fear,
saying, "Let not God speak with us, lest we die," (Exodus 20:19; cf.
Deuteronomy 5:25.) it ends with the God to whom one prays in the solitary
place and whose indwelling Spirit is our unseen friend.
Beginning with a god whose highest social vision was a tribal victory,
it ends with the God whose worshipers pray for a worldwide kingdom of
righteousness and peace.
Published by Harper & Brothers.in many editions in the
1930s. Published by Harper & Brothers.in many editions in the 1930s.
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