Napier
Chapter 2: Legend. Covenant with the Fathers (Genesis 12-50)
D. The Prophet Isaiah
7. The Quality of Faith
Isaiah to the king (Hezekiah?) :
In that day you looked to the weapons of the house of the forest [Lebanon -- the reference is to Judah’s arsenal], and you saw that the breaches of the city of David were many, and you collected the waters of the lower pool, and you counted the houses of Jerusalem, and you broke down the houses to fortify the wall. You made a reservoir between the two walls for the water of the old pool. But you did not look to him who did it, or have regard for him [Yahweh] who planned it long ago. [22:8-11]
For Isaiah, there is only one alternative to frustration, defeat and death, and that is absolute faith in Yahweh. We almost hear him say, He that would save his life must lose it.8 He does say, If you will not believe you shall not be established. We think Isaiah is misread as a pacifist.
Certainly he is misread as a "quietist" if the term connotes the
deprecation of human effort. Isaiah never condemns human effort per se, but the attitude in which human effort is undertaken. Trust in the work of human hands -- any kind of work -- is iniquitous when that work is conceived as itself the ultimate end. In the words quoted above, Isaiah says in effect, What you have done is in fact what Yahweh would have had you do, but is it brought to nought because you have put your faith, your trust, in what you have done and not in him in whose wisdom and for whose purposes all must be done.
And this brings to a head the essential point in the inter-pretation of the prophets, the so-called ethical prophets. But we can say it better in the categories of social ethics of our own time. In terms, then, of our own time, human effort, social reform, slum clearance, decent wages and working hours and living standards, racial understanding, human brotherhood, world government, adequate medical care, the alleviation of human suffering, the promotion of human rights, the establishment of personal security -- all of this, to be sure, we acknowledge as "good"
and, hopefully, we work, we expend effort, toward these ends. But if
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these are ends in themselves -- if the "good" society becomes God -- then the unqualified prophetic word (right or wrong, and this we are not arguing) pronounces upon them the sentence of damnation. Good in themselves, these efforts become diabolical and doomed to defeat when they are themselves the end, and man is made God. "You did not have regard for him who planned it long ago."
If Isaiah does not say, as a creed of the Christian church puts it, The end of man is to glorify God, he does say with his sharp existential reference to Judah that it is the sole end of covenant man to glorify Yahweh!
We think the faith of Isaiah anticipates remarkably a quality of the faith of Paul, that great Christian apostle to the nations. Paul makes explicit what is always centrally implicit in Isaiah: "Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin" (Rom. 14:23b) This declaration, implicit or explicit, that whatever man does is accursed except it be done to the glory of God appears to us to be either the revelation of God himself or, as some would say, the excretion of a diseased mind.
Footnotes:
1 This, and all subsequent dates in this chapter, are after pp. 29 ff.
2Ibid., pp. 39 f.
3The introductory formula (supplied by the Deuteron of Kings) usually correlates the reign of the king in question ruling king in the sister
kingdom (see, e.g., I Kings 15:1 exclusively internal synchronism makes absolute dating difficult if not impossible. In most instances, scholars have been able only to approximate the dates of accession and death.
For a discussion of the nature of the problem, see T. H. Robinson, op.
cit., "The Chronology of the Regal Period." pp 454 ff.
4 For treatment of the literary problem of Isaiah, see Peake (ed.) op. cit.
p. 436; more exhaustively Pfeiffer, op. cit., pp. 416-21; more conservatively, with the literary problem placed sensitively in the context of theology and history, John Bright, The Kingdom of God (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1953) , pp. 71 ff.
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5 Isa. 8:16; and see Martin Buber (tr. Carlyle Witton-Davies, from the Hebrew) , The Prophetic Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 147 and 202 ff. Aage Bentzen also speaks of Isaiah’s "circle of disciples" in Introduction to the Old Testament (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 2nd, and two-vol. ed., 1952), II, p. l08..
6 Op. cit., p. 136.
7 Some scholars question the authenticity of this passage. Granting that the verses which immediately follow (Isa. 29:17-24 are probably
"Deutero-Isaianic milieu" (Buber, op. cit., p. 208), the case against 29:16 is, in my judgment, quite inconclusive.
8 Mark 8:35, Matt. 10:39, Luke 9:24; cf. John 12:25.
16
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From Faith to Faith -- Essays on Old Testament Literature by B. Davie
Napier
B. Davie Napier, at the time of this writing was Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Intepretation at Yale Divinity School. He later became President of Pacific School of Religion. He is a minister of the United Church of Christ and an author of several books on the Old Testament. Published by Harper & Brothers, New York, 1955. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.