Religion and the War. Yale University. Divinity School
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