The pagan gods might be satisfied with sacrifices, but the God of Israel cared only for justice and generosity and reverent obedience. 83. THE PROPHET AS AN ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS GENIUS What is the explanation of the rise of these few men with a world vision out of the common run of Israelites? Why were they able to see those ethical values which are easily apparent to us from the vantage point of time and distance, but which nobody else in their day could see? Whence came that passion for social righteousness so virile, so brave, so keen that it still animates us in our present day and our more complex situation? The only answer to these questions is the answer that must be given to every appearance of genius alike in the moral as in the literary or the practical sphere. The genius is never without natural heritage. He is always, as we have seen was the case with the prophets, a unit in the social process of his time and people. Yet he transcends his time and people by virtue of some great, inexplicable endowment of personality. We may approach nearer to the answer in the case of the Hebrew prophet when we realize that the fundamentally significant fact about him was his religious experience. He was a man who had an experience of God. To him the most evidently certain fact of life was God. Explain it as we may, the prophet lived with a most intimate sense of community with God. To him, therefore, the universe was through and through a moral universe. His theodicy and his theology were determined by the culture of his time. The sun, moon, and stars were the lights in the heavens, and were in some mysterious way "the host of heaven," but the solid earth was central in the cosmos. This view doubtless made it easier to think of the universe in moral terms than it may be for moderns. Be that as it may, the prophet believed that Jehovah was in control of the universe and that his central purpose was the achievement of righteousness. The prophets regarded the Hebrew people as holding a central place in this plan of God. At first it was probably little more than the idea that Jehovah, desiring one righteous people, chose Israel and provided a land where that end might be attained (Deut 29f.). But the idea developed until it reached the splendid conception that the redemption of Israel was to lead to the redemption of all humanity (Isa 49. 5-7). Psychologically, the religious experience of the prophet is not difficult to understand. He felt himself en rapport with the God who is good and is supremely interested in having people good like himself. This God is no respecter of persons. The rich, the powerful, the priests, who are conspicuous among men, are acceptable to him only as their deeds are righteous. Jehovah wills health and happiness to men, and all the good earth has been given to them for this end, and he hates tyranny and injustice. With this divine purpose the prophet found himself in complete sympathy. The only interest in the world that seemed significant to him was the achievement of goodness. Yet he found all about him human injustice. It pressed upon him in its thousand horrid forms at every point. By contrast this deepened his sense of the divine goodness and created a passionate longing that men's minds might be changed to that of God. Thus the divine goodness and human evil acted and reacted in the spirit of the prophet. Each threw the other into clearer outline. The prophet found himself taking the divine point of view, indignant with wrong, eager to chastise iniquity, yet ever hopeful of reformation, and ready to plead with the misguided people. A constructive program stretched out before his eyes with the ideal social state as its goal. Let the great give the weak a chance, let rich and poor combine in the building of society, let family life be purified, husbands and wives in mutual love, parents leading Consider the acute if the prices me sucie zf wire- to the mezing of the social process? 2 Read Dent 32 69: 2 Sam 7. 2-4 is 431-7. Ne the intensely patrictx ring of these passages. Only a Hebrew coali have written them 4 How do the prophets Instrate e codices of ethical opemum and ethical patriotism? How were they stingested in these respects from the so-called false prophets? 1 On what grounds could a prophet welcome national adversity? Can you conceive a modern prophet announcing in any time of national calamity that a foreign enemy would be victorious over his own country? 6. What was the essential difference in the mind of the prophets between Jehovah and the pagan gods? 7. How in the midst of a people bolding an unethical polytheism did the prophets come to believe in ethical monotheism? 8. In what sense is it proper to call the prophet a religious genine? 9. What were the fundamental religious convictions of the Hebrew prophet? How did these determine his social teaching? What type of person in modern times might be compared with a Hebrew prophet? 10. |