Religion and the War

by Yale University. Divinity School

It cannot be hard to pass judgment on the relative value of these three main hopes of the Old Testament. The primitive hope for God's special favor to his own peculiar people who are destined to have dominion over all others would have seemed, before the war, safely outgrown by humanity. If the world still needed a demonstration of the danger and falsity of any nation's belief in its peculiar excellence and in its exclusive right and destiny to rule, and the intolerable morals and preposterous religion that finally result from such claims, the aggressors in the present war have supplied it, and the rest of the world is united in the resolve that no further demonstration of this hope be undertaken. The early histories of the Old Testament and parts of its laws, its psalms and even its prophecies, contain expressions of just this belief in a peculiar people, for whom God made the world, and to whom the right belongs, secured by the divine favor and promise, to rule over all other nations. Some of the inferences and consequences of this faith that now shock the world, something of the hatred and the cruelty toward foreign peoples, the exaltation of vengeance, the arrogance and the inhumanity, find unreserved expression in this literature. But the meaning of the Old Testament is to be found in the denial and overcoming of this doctrine and of its results.

In regard to the two ways in which this denial and correction were chiefly undertaken, there can be no question where the greater value and truth are to be found. The prophet's criticism of the national hope and reinterpretation of it as the hope for righteousness really struck at the heart of the materialism and selfishness of the popular national hope, its false pride and its denial of trust and of good will toward mankind. But the apocalyptic modification of the older hope, though it fitted it for a wider view of the world and of history and a deeper experience of the power of evil, did not correct those moral and spiritual faults which were inherent in the older hope. There is no generosity, no faith in human nature, no sense of the present prevailing rule of God and power of good, no thought of the "secret of inwardness" and "the method of self-renouncement," in the religion of the apocalypse. The righteous kernel of Judaism, the holy few who feared the Lord, expected an invasion of divine forces on their behalf, the destruction of their oppressors and their own elevation to angel-like natures and God-like authority and blessedness. It could hardly be expected that they would exhibit Isaiah's virtue of humility, or Jeremiah's of inwardness and satisfaction in the communion of the soul with God, or Deutero-Isaiah's impulse to turn their present lowliness to greatness by ministry to those who persecuted them and even by death for others' transgressions. The greatest of the apocalypses are no doubt the canonical ones, Daniel and Revelation; and they are great in their confidence in the divine government of the world, and in its final vindication, and in their assertion of the martyr virtues. But they do not believe in man, and in God in man, though their belief in a God above is heroic. They do not hope for the world, or find God in the world; nor do they feel that they are in any sense responsible for the evil of the world and for its salvation from evil. Righteousness and blessedness belong only to heaven, and can come only from heaven to earth, and only by an act of God which will bring the present world to a sudden end. The faults of materialism and of self-interest which belong to the naïve nationalism of Israel's beginnings are still present in the conscious and sophisticated other-worldliness of the apocalyptic hopes, and reveal the inner untruth of a supernaturalism which reckons in terms of place and time, and looks above and ahead instead of about and within for the Kingdom of God.

The post-canonical apocalypses of Judaism fall within the period beginning with the attempt of Antiochus IV to make the Jews Greeks, and the successful resistance of the Maccabees and their establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom, and ending with the Jewish-Roman wars, the destruction of Jerusalem and the suppression by Hadrian of the final Messianic, political uprising under Bar Cochba; that is, from 108 B. C. to 135 A. D. It is of the highest importance to note that Christianity took its rise in the midst of this period, and that the apocalyptic hopes which these events encouraged and which in turn partly shaped the events, formed the immediate environment and inheritance of the new religion. The question as to the nature of the hope of the New Testament becomes therefore largely the question of the place which Jewish apocalyptical expectations had in the new religion and in the mind of its founder.

There are three elements in the hope of the New Testament which are found in the later Jewish apocalypses, but not in the Old Testament: 1. The coming of the Son of Man as judge of men and angels at the last day, which is always thought to be near at hand. 2. The reign on earth of Messiah and his saints, the living and the risen dead, for a certain period, during which they will overcome all the powers of evil. 3. The immortality of the spirit, the transformation of the righteous into angelic natures, fitting them to be companions of heavenly beings in the final consummation. For our understanding of these hopes and for our decision as to their truth and value it is necessary to look at them as they arise in Jewish writings and not only in their appearance in the New Testament.

The Son of Man appears first in Daniel, but there he is not an individual, but the symbol of a nation, "the people of the saints of the Most High"; and the vision pictures Israel as coming on a cloud, not from heaven, but to God, to receive from him authority to rule over the world. It is first in a part of the Book of Enoch, the "Parables," chapters 37-71, dating probably from the reign of Herod, that Daniel's "Son of Man" becomes an individual. It is important to understand the religion of this writer in order to appreciate the significance of this heavenly Messiah. His religion consists in faith in the reality of a spiritual world which is destined to displace the present world and to be the blessed abode of the righteous. God is "the Lord of Spirits," and the voice of Isaiah's seraphim becomes, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Spirits: he filleth the earth with spirits." The sin of the kings and mighty of the earth is that they deny the Lord of Spirits and the hidden dwelling places of the righteous. This is a religion of faith in heaven and its God and its angelic inhabitants, and in the destiny of the righteous soon to share its beauty and blessedness. Among those whom Enoch sees there, one is above all significant for man. He has the appearance of a man, with a face of graciousness and beauty, like an angel's. He is described as the Son of Man to whom righteousness and wisdom belong. He has existed from before the creation, and has been revealed to the righteous. Faith in him and hope for his coming have sustained the righteous in times of trouble, and by faith in him and in the Lord of Spirits and the heavenly dwelling places, they "have hated and despised the world of unrighteousness and have hated all its works and ways." Here is a religion of pure other-worldliness. The calling of this heavenly Son of Man is to be the judge of the world at the last day. He will then "sit on the throne of his glory," will "choose the righteous and holy" from among the risen dead, will condemn and send away to destruction the kings and mighty of the earth, who because of their unbelief in the unseen world have been proud and worldly and unjust. The righteous will dwell in the new heaven and earth, with the Lord of Spirits over them and the Son of Man as their companion, having been clothed with garments of glory and immortal life. The likeness between this religion and the apocalyptic type of New Testament Christianity is striking. But it is not Christian because it is without Jesus himself. This Son of Man has not already come and lived among men. The righteous have not learned of him that God is in this world as well as in the other, that he is a God of human beings, even the lowliest, and of birds and grass, of rain and growth. They have not learned that good is already stronger than evil; least of all do they know the greatest thing, that love is supreme, and that not by hating the world and its ways but by the ministry of love is the new world to be brought in. The religion of Enoch presents in pure and simple form, in pre-Christian Judaism, just that religion of dualism and pessimism, of despair of the present and the renunciation of effort to better the world, of strained expectation of divine intervention, which sometimes, and even now in some quarters, claims to be the only true Christianity. It is, in fact, Christianity with Christ left out.

The second element which the apocalypses add to the hope of the Old Testament and which the New Testament Apocalypse adopts, is the conception of a millennial earthly kingdom. This appears in probably an earlier part of Enoch, chapters 91-104. In a short Apocalypse of Weeks, after seven weeks of world-history up to the writer's present, an eighth week is predicted, in which the righteous shall wield the sword against their oppressors and establish the Messianic kingdom; then a ninth week in which the preaching of judgment to come will convert all men to righteousness; finally, a tenth week of final judgment against all angelic powers of evil, ending with a new heaven and an eternity of blessedness.

It is not only the fact that here and elsewhere these two hopes are proved to be Jewish, not Christian, in origin, that influences our judgment on them when they reappear in the New Testament; it is also the understanding of them which their Jewish form makes possible. They are two forms of adjusting the old national and earthly hope of Israel to a new, more universal and transcendent form of faith and hope. In the religion of the "Parables" of Enoch the transcendent practically transforms and displaces the earthly. In the millennial scheme, the heavenly follows the earthly in time. Resurrection enables some of the dead to have part in the earthly, while translation into angel-like, immortal natures fits men for the final heavenly life. The understanding of the origin and purpose of these hopes makes it unnatural and irrational to regard them as literal disclosures of the unseen world and of future events.

The third hope which Judaism added to what its sacred scriptures contained was the hope for immortality of the spirit. It happens that this also appears earliest in Judaism in the Book of Enoch (especially chapters 102-104). Enoch solemnly assures his readers that he has seen it written in heavenly books that joy and glory are prepared for the spirits of those who have died in righteousness. This is not a resurrection of the body to enable one to have a share in the earthly kingdom, but a transformation which fits men for the realm of spirits.

When we turn in the light of the older hopes to the New Testament and ask what are the hopes that belong properly to Christianity, and how are they related to the present hopes of the world, we meet the problem presented by the importance of properly apocalyptical expectations in the first Christian community. The case is something like that which meets us in the Old Testament, and we have here no less than there to distinguish and to choose. The hope of the early Christian community was no doubt first of all for the physical coming of Christ and the establishment of his kingdom; but there developed also within the New Testament period two movements away from this, one in an ethical and spiritual direction, and the other toward emphasis on the individual life after death. The first of these is more characteristic of the New Testament religion than the other. It is the tendency of Paul to emphasize the present inward experience of Christ, and the transforming power of his spirit more than the hope of his coming, though he receives this from primitive Christianity and does not doubt its literal and early fulfilment. It is, I believe, beyond question that Paul's Christian hope is chiefly, as Royce has argued, the hope for a new humanity created by the spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of love. This is in a measure already experienced. Christ dwells in the Christian and makes him a center and source of love. His spirit breaks down barriers and ends divisions. Unity and peace are its effects. Through this one, present spirit of Christ each man becomes a distinct but essential member of the new body; and Paul's greatest hope is for the completion of this unification of man in mutual helpfulness and brotherhood. Paul attests also the other tendency away from the outward future coming of Christ to the hope for a life with Christ and like Christ's after death. This eternal life with Christ is also experienced by Paul as in some real sense present. The indwelling spirit of Christ is already transforming the Christian into his own immortal nature. In the Johannine writings these two tendencies of hope away from the apocalyptic toward the spiritual go still further. The Christ in whom the Christian now abides creates a distinctive unity among his disciples, a love one to another which the world has not known; and at the same time the experience of this present Christ is already the possession of eternal life. According to this which we might call the prophetic in distinction from the apocalyptic hope of the New Testament the new world of human unity in love and coöperation is to be brought about not only by the present spirit of Christ, but also by the moral choice and endeavor of man. It is through human love that the divine love works, and the rule of God is present so far as men overcome evil and create good. And even the immortal life is not solely a hope in God, but is to be attained by each soul here and now through its choice of the will of God and in the degree of its moral oneness with God.

That which most concerns us is no doubt the question which of these hopes, the eschatological or the ethical and inward, was held and taught by Christ. My own conviction is that the new and distinct hope, the spiritual, belongs to him and proceeds from him, and not the familiar Jewish apocalyptic. Two opinions stand in the way of this judgment; two opposite types of literalism in Biblical interpretation. Dogmatic literalism accepts scripture throughout, and refuses to distinguish between higher and lower, between truth and error, in what is written. In regard to hope, this view leads to great stress on prediction and fulfilment. The assumption is that the Biblical predictions that have not been fulfilled will come to pass in the future. This is precisely a fundamental assumption of the apocalypse. It is solely upon this conception of scripture that many devout Christians rest their expectations of the outward coming of Christ and his thousand-year reign on earth, just as the same idea of Biblical predictions leads orthodox Jews to expect that Jerusalem will be the capital and Israel the ruling nation of the world. This literalism stands in the way of the world's present acceptance of Christianity as the religion of its highest hopes.