Christian Ethics by Georgia Harkness Part 1 Foundations of Christian Ethics
Chapter 2: The Covenant, the Law, and the Prophets
3. The prophets
aside.
It need not surprise us, though it did both surprise and anger his contemporaries, to hear Jesus say:
The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. (Mark 2:27.) There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him;
but the things which come out of a man are what defile him. (Mark 7:15.)
If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. (Matt. 5:23-24.)
Any other attitude toward the law would have been to forsake both the hesed of his fathers and the way of the God he came to serve and to reveal. It was obedience in love which actuated Jesus, and it is this which he sets before us today.
makes it impossible to withdraw either element without losing the heart of their message. They never doubted that Israel was the chosen people of God and that a righteous, gracious, but exacting God demanded obedience of his people. What they objected to, as the burden of their message, were the misunderstandings of God’s will which substituted ceremonialism for justice, mercy, and faith, and the apostasies whereby the people persistently violated their side of the covenant.
Did the prophets reject the cultic side of Israel’s religion? Their invectives against the substitution of ritualistic correctness for
righteousness leave open this possibility, and of the greater prophets Ezekiel alone, standing on the threshold of the postexilic period,
expressly calls for a purified ritual as an integral part of the worship of Yahweh. Opinions differ as to whether the others rejected outright the sacrificial cult. It seems more probable, however, that what they protested was not its existence, deeply embedded as it was in the covenant relation, but its perversion through exaltation to a place of primacy. Comparably, no Christian today need object to the ritual and traditional observances of the Church when these contribute to the
worship of God, but every Christian ought to protest when "doing things right" in the Church becomes a substitute for righteousness.
Second, the prophets must be understood in both an individual and a social context. This is true whether what is being considered is the source or the object of their message. They were for the most part lone figures assailing the popular mores, and hence misunderstood. But to assume that they were solely individual religious geniuses is to miss the fact that they emerged out of a religious community and spoke to a religious community. They were Hebrew prophets, not Greek philosophers or Buddhist Bodhisattvas, and they never dreamed of stepping outside of this framework. Furthermore, though we are accustomed to think of a progressive growth in a sense of individual responsibility from Amos to Ezekiel, the difference at this point is probably overstated. The message of every prophet, Moses, Samuel, Nathan, and Elijah as well as those who came later, was to every individual within the community of Israel, and neither king nor humblest subject was exempt from the obligation to obey the will of Yahweh. The application of this fact to mistaken modern notions of an
"individual" versus a "social" gospel is obvious.
Third, though explicit monotheism and universalism were a late development, their nucleus is implicit in all prophetic preaching. The
ceremonialism of Israel, though understood by the people as the mark of Israel’s particularity, had actually much in common with other primitive religious rites. This similarity was one reason why they found it so easy to take over Canaanitic worship. It was in the ethical insights of Israel, as these were seen most clearly by the prophets, that the greatest
distinctiveness lay, and in their vision of the God of righteousness was the germ cell of monotheism. The gods of the nations were many because the nations were many; the God of righteousness was one, and in his hand lay the destinies of nations. As we noted earlier, no sharp distinction was drawn between nature and history; God was the Maker and sovereign Ruler in both spheres. From this conviction, implicit in the whole idea of the covenant but seen with fullest clarity by the prophets, it was a logical step to the conclusion that God had given to Israel special privileges in order to be the special servant of all mankind.
This insight, glimpsed by Amos, was destined to come to full expression in the Second Isaiah.
Fourth, the prophets saw with utter clarity the persistent fact of sin, and saw it not as maladjustment or even as failure to "hit the mark" of some objective human standard, but as sin against God. It was rebellion against God and disloyalty to God that made the self-centered luxury of the rich, the exploitation of the poor, bribery, drunkenness, and harlotry such evils. This is not to depreciate the prophets’ sense of social justice;
they had it in splendid measure. But it was grounded in something more basic than human law or tribal standards. Micah said:
what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
This conviction was the basis of both prophetic judgment and the message of hope. The God who could not countenance sin would not save from destruction even his chosen people who persisted in sin. But neither could the God of mercy abandon his people to their sins. A remnant would return; the Messiah would be sent; the Kingdom would come. Although one reads in the prophets page after page of
denunciation and promised doom, it was never the prophets’ last word, for it was not God’s last word. Those prophets and theologians of today who, like the Old Testament prophets and Paul, from whom they draw much of their message, have a clear and powerful sense of sin would do well to accent as much the prophetic note of hope through the grace of God.
And fifth, in everything the prophets said, they spoke to the current situation. They spoke from a perspective that was more than "current,"
but they never spoke in abstractions. Where they enunciated general principles, as in Micah’s definition of true religion just noted (6:8) or Isaiah-Micah’s still unfulfilled vision of a warless world (Isa. 2:2-4;
Mic. 4:1-4), they spoke to the people as they were, in terms of what ought to be. The prophets saw and set forth visions that still stir us, but they were not "visionaries." It is because of their utter realism as they spoke within the conditions of a social and political community — or to adopt a current term, a responsible society — that next to the teachings of Jesus we find in them our firmest basis of social ethics.