A Comparative View of Religions

by Johannes Henricus Scholten

From all this it seems fair to conclude that the religion of the oldest forefathers of Israel had its root originally in one and the same soil with the religion of the other Semites. Out of an earlier nature-religion there developed among the Semites the conception of Baal, the lord of nature, and of Molech with his inhuman worship. While, however, the other Semites remained in this lower stage, or rather sank back more and more into the immorality of the nature-religion,—an hypothesis suggested by a comparison of the religious state of the nations of Canaan in Abraham's time with their state at the time of the conquest of the land by Joshua and afterwards,—in the family of Abraham, religious consciousness rose to the recognition of a deity, who, although he had a right to human sacrifices, yet did not claim such sacrifices, but was satisfied with men's willingness to bring them to him. With this higher development of religion, the names of the Supreme Being, Baal and Molech, originally common to the whole race, came more and more into contempt, and were regarded as the expression of abominable idolatry,[37] while even the worship of Jahveh under the form of a calf, originally permitted, was later branded by the prophets as heresy.

Though it was in the family of Abraham that even in Mesopotamia[38] the beginning of this higher development of the Semitic religion showed itself, which, after his migration to Canaan became the heritage of his family, yet the patriarch of Israel did not stand alone in this respect among the Semites. The old Canaanitish chieftains also of the patriarchal period, Melchizedek and Abimelech, worship the same God as he,[39] while on the other hand in his own family not all traces of polytheistic superstition have disappeared,[40] and these traces are also visible still later in Israel.[41]

The patriarchal religion, which afterwards with the great majority fell into oblivion, was recalled afresh to men's minds by Moses, and the God of the fathers was preached by him under the name before unknown of Jahveh,[42] to whom, with the exclusion of all other gods, religious worship is due.[43] The Jahveh of Moses, like the El Eljon of the patriarchs, is the one only object of worship (Deus Unus), yet without excluding the possibility of other gods existing.[44] Not until later did the more developed conception of Jahveh arise as the one only God (Deus unicus),[45] who is throned in heaven, and like the Elohim of the patriarchs, encircled by celestial beings (Bene Elohim, Malakim, Angels), who execute his commands, yet are not objects of religious adoration.

The religious standpoint of Moses is the legal. Jehovah stands related to his people as the Holy, as lawgiver and judge; and the true moral consecration to God is symbolically expressed in the ritual, especially in the sacrifice, while the relation of the people to God is based upon the mediation of the priests. Along with this, and out of Mosaism, after the time of Samuel, prophetism was developed, in which independent religious conviction, outside the limits of the priesthood, and without distinction of rank or birth,[46] awoke among the people. Prophetism, in the domain of religion, is the development of the religious spirit to individual independence and freedom. The prophet, rising above the legal standpoint and outward ceremonial, puts the essence of true worship in morality,[47] but recognizes also along with the deepest feeling of dependence upon God, in the independence[48] and spontaneity of the religious and moral life, the irresistible power of the divine spirit, by which the Most High, though apart from the world and throned in heaven, puts himself into the closest and most intimate communion with the true worshiper. Thus the gulf which divided Jahveh, as a God afar off, from the world and his worshipers, closed up more and more. With the conviction of the pureness and truth[49] of her religion, Israel felt the calling to raise it to the religion of the world, and in the realization of this she saw the ideal of the future.[50]

b. The Israelitish religion after the Captivity.

The free character which distinguished prophetism in the religion of Israel changed, after the return of the people from captivity, especially with the party of the Pharisees, to literalness and formalism. The prophets gave place to the synagogue, the living proclamation of the truth to scriptural erudition, the spirit of freedom to slavish subjection to Scripture and tradition. As the ancient productions of the Indian literature, originally the expression of the popular thought of India, were elevated by the Brahmins into Veda, holy, inspired scripture, so also the religious literature of Israel took on the character of a closed Canon, so that what was once the expression of religious life became now rule of faith. The standpoint of the law which prophetism had already overcome was again strongly maintained, the law enriched with a number of new ordinances, and the essence of religion made to consist partly in dogmatic speculation, partly in a merely outward service, devoid of inner life. The Messianic prediction, or the expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre,—which in the older prophets was the natural and historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true religion of which Israel was the bringer,—[51]returned, yet not as the ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a dogma, the product of scriptural interpretation. The pure monotheism, by which formerly a place in the Providence of God had been allotted to everything, even to moral evil,[52] became corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the conception of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The angels, originally the messengers of Providence, became under mythological names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many middle beings who filled the space between the Deity, existing apart from the world, and the world. The lower world (sheol, [Greek: aidês]), formerly the general abode of the dead, of bad and good without distinction, was split into two parts, paradise and gehenna, and became a place of recompense, and, along with this, religion, once an end, became the means of warding off a dreaded punishment, or of gaining a future of bliss. The doctrine of immortality, as the continuation of man's moral development, which was formerly unknown in Israel, appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the form of a bodily resurrection of the dead, at first of the righteous only, but afterwards in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just before the end of the present state of things, the great judgment of the world, of living and dead, was to be held, heaven and earth renewed, and the kingdom of God founded. Beside the learned party of the Pharisees stood the Sadducees, who subordinated religion to politics, rejected the Messianic idea and the authority of tradition, and, in denying immortality in the form of a bodily resurrection, failed to perceive the truth of immortality, for whose recognition the premises and germs existed in the religion of Israel, though not as yet developed. The third party, that of the Essenes, was marked by quiet piety, and in many respects also by excessive asceticism. In the midst of the Pharisaic formalism, the unbelief of the Sadducees, and the pietism of the Essenes, there was yet in Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though not above the dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open for the true religion, and who set the true blessing to be looked for from the Messiah in the satisfying of their religious and moral needs.

3. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

The Israelitish religion, which reached its highest stage of development in prophetism, but which among the later Jews after Ezra degenerated, with the Pharisees into formalism and worship of the letter, with the Essenes into mysticism and asceticism, and which with the Sadducees, along with the sacrifice of the prophetic ideal of the future, was subordinated to politics, developed in Christianity, but freed from once cherished national expectations and outward forms, into a purely spiritual knowledge and worship of God. Jesus fathomed the deep meaning of the religion of his people, and its original fitness to become, through higher development, the religion of the world. Jesus devoted himself to the end of forming the human race into one great society (the kingdom of heaven), of which religion should be the soul and life, and, convinced of his calling, proclaimed himself as the Son of man, who, as such, belonged not to Israel alone, but to mankind. Jesus combated both the formalism and exclusiveness of the Pharisees, and the unbelief of the Sadducees, and with word and deed preached a religion which, independent of all outward form, took hold of the human heart, and which, developing into an independent principle in man, was to find its commission, not in the authority of Scripture or tradition, not even in that of his name, but in its own power and truth. In him religion appeared as the power of self-sacrificing love, which fears not even death, and to which dying is not the losing of life, but the development of life. In distinction from other religions, in which either God and man are strangers to each other, and opposed to each other, or man's personality is, as it were, sunk in God, Christianity is the religion by which man, in the full enjoyment of individual development, and with the sense of his own strength, lives in the consciousness of the most entire dependence upon God. Religion in its highest form, conceived as the oneness of man with God, is realized in Christianity.[53]

4. ISLAMISM.

The religion of the ancient nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula originally exhibited a polytheistical character, in the form of the worship, in part of sacred stones, in part of the powers of nature, especially of the stars, whose position and motion were thought to exert an influence, beneficent or baneful, upon the destinies of men. With these conceptions was combined a certain leaning toward monotheism, which manifested itself especially in the common worship of Allah taala (equivalent to El Eljon), which was afterwards quickened and strengthened by association with the Jewish tribes, with whom they held themselves to be related by descent from Abraham. The Parsee doctrine of demons, also, was not unknown in Arabia, after the conquest of the Persians in the fifth century. After the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, Christianity also, though in a corrupt form, or, definitely, in the form of Monophysitism and Nestorianism, which had been condemned by the church, became established in Arabia.