Religion and the WarYale University. Divinity School
Religion
Religion and the War
Yale University. Divinity School
World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Religious aspects
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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