have a right to hope for. Most evidently is this the case between us
and our enemy. We differ in things hoped for; and it is perhaps not
too much to say that the truth of our hope and the strength of our
hope constitute and measure our spiritual equipment for the winning of
the war. The Germans are fighting for their hope of national expansion
and domination, for their dream of a new world empire of the chosen
and fit people of God. We cannot question the strength of this hope of
theirs, and its powerful influence toward bringing itself to
realization. We and our Allies are resisting these nationalistic and
arrogant hopes, and are appealing to the contrary hope of an inclusive
human brotherhood, in which good will shall prevail between nations,
and hence right and peace. The hope that is truer, more in accordance
with the nature of things, the nature of man, the will of God, and the
hope that is most deeply felt and most loyally served, with most
conviction and most sacrifice, will prevail in the end. That is the
hope that will come true. Ours is inevitably a religious hope, for it
is universal in range, big as the world, and needs not only every
power of ours but the Power not ourselves to bring it about. It is for
every one who holds it intensely, in a real sense, a hope in God and a
hope for God. But is it certain that it is also a Christian hope, a
hope in Christ and a hope for Christ?
There are, not only between us and our enemy, but among ourselves,
radical differences as to what a Christian should hope for in the
present world crisis. There are those who search the Scriptures for
predictions of the Kaiser and his overthrow, and see in the
anti-Christian philosophy and in the anti-Christian arrogance and
cruelty of his militaristic state, a sign that the end of this evil
world-age is near, and that Christ will come quickly and set up his
reign on earth. And there are those to whom such literalism in the use
of Scripture and such externality in the hope for Christ's coming are
intellectually impossible and untrue, and religiously harmful. To them
the meaning of the Bible is to be found in the tendency and spirit of
its teachings, and their hope is for the presence and rule of the
spirit of Christ and the dominance of his principles in the common
life of humanity. This involves a radical difference in the hope of
Christians for a new world, a new human society, and in the ways in
which this hope will affect their motives and efforts. There are also
deep-going differences in regard to the hope for a life after death.
That many are looking eagerly for material, "scientific" proof through
physical communications from the dead, while many, on the other hand,
are feeling that immortality belongs to the race and not to the
individual, and that the sacrifice of the young and the strong finds
its only and sufficient end and justification in the new humanity they
die to create, indicates that Christ has not yet brought life and
immortality to clear light for humanity. Such differences are not to
be desired. If Christianity is to be the religion of the present eager
and pressing hopes of mankind and give these hopes elevation, truth,
and victorious endurance and enthusiasm, Christians should be clear
and united in the contents and character of their hope.
Among these hopes of mankind there can be no doubt which one has the
first place in the minds of the intellectual leaders and the actual
rulers of the allied nations. Never before has a truly prophetic note
been so clearly sounded by leading men of affairs, and by the press
and the leaders of public opinion, as well as by the poets and
preachers to whom prophecy naturally belongs. From all sides we have
expressions of a hope which four years ago was judged to be the dream
of impractical idealists, the hope for a new order of human life, in
which good will and mutual cooperation shall take the place of
suspicion and competitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever
motives of self-interest may have entered into the action of this or
that one of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact
remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion
of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the
expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national
self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this
appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind,
that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that
our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. This hope takes
concrete form in the word Democracy, and in the idea of a League or
Federation of free, democratic nations, bound together for the defense
of human rights, for cooperation in all that concerns human welfare
and progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of the
world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, and as
such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving peoples, against
the nation that glorifies war and would perpetuate it.
Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a
hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid
the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove
possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work
against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal
to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes
upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it
has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create
unity; many who see that it has withdrawn from the world, and think it
unadapted to provide the moral principles and spiritual energies of
the new social and political world-order. It is for us who believe in
the sufficiency of Christ to prove that he alone provides those
religious and moral principles and forces without which no democracy,
still less any federation of democracies, can stand.
The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed as the
deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as a goal that
we must now set out to reach is of course old in its beginnings, and
for a generation it has been taking ever stronger hold on the minds of
men. Prophetic utterances of this ideal could be quoted in abundance.
A striking example is a saying of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe
our world is about to begin to realize the words 'Love one another,'
without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered
them.... Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized
with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on this at
the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905: "I believe that this
thought, however strange the expression, 'seized with a frenzy of
love,' may seem, is perfectly true and is felt more or less clearly by
all men of our day. A time must come when love, which forms the
fundamental essence of the soul, will take the place natural to it in
the life of mankind, and will become the chief basis of the relations
between man and man. That time is coming; it is at hand."
The world war seems like a violent contradiction of the truth of such
prophecies. It seems for the time to have made love inadequate as a
summing up of morals and religion. We almost feel that the Sermon on
the Mount must be kept in reserve for other times. The war has made
love itself a hope. We renounce it for a time that we may resist a
power that threatens to destroy it altogether and put selfishness and
cruelty on the throne of the world. But the war has not in fact
disproved the faith that God is love and that love is the supreme law
and power among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal
of community and fellowship, and seems to be carrying us faster toward
the realization of human brotherhood than peace and prosperity were
doing. The greatest and most widely approved sentences of President
Wilson's war papers are those that give expression to "what the
thinking peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for
justice and for social freedom and opportunity." On the anniversary of
our entering the war, Gilbert Murray declared that England needed our
help in battle, but even more in upholding their true faith.
"Americans instinctively believe ... in freedom, peace, democracy,
arbitration, and international good will.... When the war is over
there will be a world to rebuild, and the only principles on which to
rebuild it are these principles." Germany denies the truth of these
principles, but in doing so it denies human nature and derives from
physical nature a state-ethics of struggle and the survival of the
strong. It denies the prophet of Galilee, and looks for its example to
Rome. Sometimes it has seemed as if the German denial of humanity and
affirmation of material and brute force were in danger of justifying
itself by the only test they admit, that of physical success. Where
can we look for help toward a living faith in liberty and brotherhood
over against the powerful demonstration we are offered of faith in
material force and in the progress of nations through aggression and
tyranny? We must look no doubt first of all to our own souls and
oppose to the faith in physical and animal nature a faith in human
nature and in the truth of its best instincts and ideals; and then to
those who know best and most worthily express the human soul and the
reality of its spiritual possessions. Not from the Bible alone, and
not only from Christ are such reassuring testimonies to be gained; and
we are not renouncing the unique value of the Christian religion when
we find that the faith and hope which it teaches are the faith and the
hope of the universal heart of man.
The poet laureate of England made his special contribution to his
nation's needs in time of war in the anthology, "The Spirit of Man."
"Our country," he says, "is called of God to stand for the truth of
man's hope." "Truly it is the hope of man's great desire, the desire
for brotherhood and universal peace to men of good will, that is at
stake in this struggle." From the miseries and slaughter and hate of
war, "we can turn," he says, "to seek comfort only in the quiet
confidence of our souls; and we look instinctively to the seers and
poets of mankind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies of
loveliness and loving kindness." They help us gain the conviction our
time most needs, "that spirituality is the basis and foundation of
human life," that "man is a spiritual being, and the proper work of
his mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and
to conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them into
submission to the spirit."
But the Bible also is a witness to just these convictions and contains
prophecies of just such hopes. Bridges includes very few citations
from the Bible, chiefly because it is so well known, but also because
"this familiarity implies deep-rooted associations, which would be
likely to distort the context." Alas, for these associations, for the
interpretations that confuse and the prejudices that blind the readers
of the greatest literature of spirituality and of hope which the world
contains. In spite of this, the Bible will be looked to by multitudes
for guidance and support in those hopes on which the future turns,
while the poet's fine work will be prized by few. It is only too
possible to fail to find in the Bible its testimony to that "hope of
man's great desire of brotherhood and peace" which constitutes the
most living religion of our time; and this failure will mean loss to
the hope itself of its most powerful support, and loss to the
Christian religion of contact and sympathy with the most urgent
spiritual need and aspiration of men today.
The Bible does contain various and contradictory hopes, and can
encourage expectations that are not in accordance with the best
conscience of our age, nor with our knowledge of the way in which
human progress is achieved. But there is nothing more instructive than
the relation of these different hopes to each other as the historian
understands them and there is nothing more worthy and inspiring than
the language in which the most spiritual and the most universal of
these hopes are expressed.
The original hope of the religion of Israel was that involved in the
unique and exclusive relation between the nation Israel and Yahweh,
its God. It was the hope of Israel's prosperity and power through the
certain favor of Yahweh, and his intervening help in times of danger,
most of all his help in the nation's wars. These were "the Wars of
Yahweh." Both the strength and the defect of the Old Testament
religion lie in this fundamental faith, the peculiarity and
exclusiveness of the relation between Israel and its God. It inspired
its early victories and created the kingdom of David. It sustained the
nation amid calamities and enabled it to maintain itself when other
small nations disappeared before the great world empires, and while
these also came and passed. It was a natural and not unreasonable
faith for its time, so long as Yahweh was only Israel's national God,
even though he was believed to be better and stronger than the gods of
other nations and destined to triumph over them; but when Israel's God
was believed to be the one and only God of all the world the doctrine
of Israel as his peculiar people must either lead to false claims and
have bad effects upon temper and conduct, or else be reinterpreted and
radically changed. Nothing can be more instructive as to the nature of
religious hope than to follow out two main lines of development by
which an adjustment was attempted between this primitive nationalism
and the later, larger thought of God and the world.
The great prophets before the exile, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah,
and after exile Deutero-Isaiah, were those through whom the faith was
attained that Yahweh is the one and only God; and the modification of
the national exclusiveness of Israel which they made was in the
direction of its complete subordination to ethical and spiritual
ideals. The one God of all was the God of righteousness, and of Israel
only on the condition and for the end of righteousness. But an ethical
in place of a national relation to God meant, if it was carried
through consistently, a universal relation of God to all men as
individuals, instead of a peculiar relation to one favored nation.
Consistency was not reached, yet glimpses, sometimes clear momentary
visions, of this individual, universal, ethical religion are to be
found in the great prophets; and in them the Old Testament religion
reaches its height. It is the prophetic denial of national claims and
hopes, not the older and always prevalent assertion of them, that
constitutes the reality and truth of the Old Testament hope. It is
hope for Yahweh and his righteousness, not for Israel and its glory.
It finds its highest expression in such predictions as Isaiah's
promise of security to the humble and believing; and Jeremiah's
expectation of the time when no special revelation will make known the
will of God to a chosen few, but when everyone will have his own
inward knowledge of God; and Ezekiel's belief that the new inward
nature which every man requires if he is to do that will of God which
he knows, will be achieved not only by his own free moral choice
(18:31), but also by the divine spirit, the transforming presence and
power of God (36:26, 27); and in Deutero-Isaiah's interpretation of
the peculiar relation of Israel to the one God of all the world as
that of Yahweh's Servant, his prophet to all nations, who brings light
to the heathen and deliverance from bondage, and who effects this
ministry even through his own shame and suffering for others' sins.
But there was a second still later way of adjusting the original
nationalism of Israel's faith and hope to monotheism and the
conception of a unity in nature and history; and this proved easier
and more popular than the other. In late prophecy and apocalypse the
hope of Israel's national and worldly prosperity and power takes on an
unearthly character. Instead of righteousness and spirituality as in
the earlier prophets, transcendence and heavenliness interpret or
displace the primitive hope. The heavenly region to which apocalyptic
prophecy transferred Israel's hope was a refinement of the physical,
but it was still essentially physical, a region whose riches could be
as sensibly enjoyed and as selfishly desired as the palace and throne
of an earthly kingdom. The heavenly powers by which this hope was to
be realized were divine, yet they were essentially material forces.
The prophetic hopes at their highest rest on human nature at its
highest, on the conscience and reason of man recognized as the will
and thought of God. But the apocalyptic hope, though it strains
language to magnify the contrast between its two worlds, the earthly
and the heavenly, the present and the future, does not succeed in
making them really different. Supernaturalism always fails to find the
real difference between man and God and so the way in which the
difference is to be overcome. This supernaturalism of the apocalypse
is seen also in the ways in which the hope is revealed. The seer
interprets in literal or artful ways the language of prophetic
scriptures regarded as divine oracles, or he is translated in ecstasy
to heaven and shown the secrets of the upper world and the future. The
coming of this new heavenly world men may pray for, and the time of
its coming they may seek to discover from sacred writings and
traditions and from the signs of the times, but only divine powers can
bring this evil world to an end, and only from heaven where they
already are can descend, in heaven's own time and way, the scenery and
the actors in the last great drama of history. There is in this hope
no strong ethical appeal, no prevailing sense that in the inward
region of the heart and in its instincts and desires and wills, God's
presence is to be found and his work for man experienced. Moreover
this hope for a new heavenly world means no hope for the present
world. It is evil and must grow more evil until God intervenes to
destroy it and brings down from heaven the realm of good. To renounce
the world and withdraw from it is the course of wisdom and holiness.
As a way of adjusting Israel's national hope to monotheism it is not
comparable with the prophetic way of ethics and inwardness. It is
still Israel, or the true Israel, that is to inherit the world to
come; and at its coming the world empire must first of all be
overthrown, for the new kingdom, heavenly and supernatural though it
is, is enough like the kingdom of Greece or of Rome to require its
fall and to take its place. The apocalyptic hope is the end of Old
Testament prophecy, but not its height. It was no doubt in some sense
fitted for its times, hard times, always, when the evils of life
seemed irremediable. It knew the need of divine help, and it
encouraged endurance and fidelity even to death. But it was not
grounded in the nature of men, and it was mistaken in its conception
of the nature of the world. It never quite escapes this inherent
falseness and confusion in its fundamental assumptions.
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 naive 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.