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 BR 121 .073 1908 
 Orelli 
 
 Peculiarity of the 
 religion of Bible 
 
Foreign Religious Series 
 
 Edited by 
 R. J. COOKE, D. D. 
 
 Second Series. i6mo. cloth. Each 40 cents, net. 
 
 DO WE NEED CHRIST FOR 
 
 COMMUNION WITH GOD ? 
 
 By Professor Ludwig Lemme, of the University 
 of Heidelberg 
 
 ST. PAUL AS A THEOLOGIAN 
 
 (two parts) 
 By Professor Paul Feine, of the University of Vienna 
 
 THE NEW MESSAGE IN THE TEACHING 
 
 OF JESUS 
 
 By Professor Philipp Bachmann, of the University 
 
 of Erlangen 
 
 THE PECULIARITY OF THE RELIGION 
 
 OF THE BIBLE 
 
 By Professor Conrad Von Orelli, of the University 
 of Basle 
 
 OUR LORD 
 
 By Professor K. Miiller, of the University of Erlangen 
 
The Peculiarity of the 
 Religion of the Bible 
 
 By 
 CONRAD VON v ORELLI 
 
 Professor of Theology at Basle 
 
 NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 
 
Copyright, 1908, by 
 EATON & MAINS. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The general character and purpose of 
 these books have already been indicated in 
 the Introduction to the entire series, so that 
 on the publication of this the second part it 
 need only be said that each of the six vol- 
 umes in this series has a peculiar value of 
 its own. The authors are recognized schol- 
 ars of high rank in their several fields of 
 research, and while the task of translating 
 the extremely involved German of some of 
 them into good English has been at times 
 most difficult, and something may have been 
 lost in the process, nevertheless their fine 
 perception of divine truth, no less than their 
 scientific method of treatment, will appeal to 
 the honest judgment of thoughtful men and 
 will strengthen conviction in the validity of 
 evangelical teaching. 
 
 In St. Paul as a Theologian Professor 
 Feine exhibits Pauline theology as the con- 
 tent of the apostle's missionary preaching 
 based upon his personal experience of Jesus 
 Christ, and not, as certain critics affirm, an 
 attempted systematizing of Christian thought 
 5 
 
6 Prefatory Note 
 
 modified or enlarged by odds and ends of 
 Rabbinic theology brought over by Paul 
 from Judaism. Incidentally, in opposition 
 to the criticism of Wrede, Weinel, and 
 others, the author shows the dependence of 
 Paul upon Jesus. 
 
 The Peculiarity of the Religion of 
 the Bible, by Professor Orelli, is an 
 answer to the ancient query now often heard 
 among some theologians of a liberal type 
 and not a few specialists in the department 
 of Comparative Religion, "Are not Arbana 
 and Pharpar better than all the waters in 
 Israel, may I not wash in them and be 
 clean ?" A fitting companion to this volume 
 is The New Message in the Teaching of 
 Jesus, setting forth the profound originality 
 of the Master Teacher. Do We Need 
 Christ for Communion with God? and 
 the excellent volume entitled Our Lord pre- 
 sent in a very clear and satisfactory manner 
 the impossibility of eliminating or of sub- 
 ordinating the Christ of Christendom in 
 Christian thought and life. 
 
 It is only stating exact truth when we say 
 that notwithstanding the immense learning 
 and intellectual brilliancy of eminent schol- 
 
Prefatory Note 7 
 
 ars in the camp of so-called liberal theology, 
 there is evidence, as may be seen in a recent 
 work, The Modern Jesus Cult, by Professor 
 Wilhelm von Schnecten, himself a radical of 
 the modern school, that the equally brilliant 
 and scientifically equipped defenders of the 
 historic faith have shown the emptiness of 
 radical thought and fully established the 
 historicity of the gospel records. 
 
 On the whole, we are of the opinion that 
 these volumes, the value of which is not in 
 quantity but in quality, will be found help- 
 ful and suggestive, and that a comprehen- 
 sive survey of the important subjects cov- 
 ered by this foreign religious series will jus- 
 tify the statement that evangelical faith has 
 nothing to fear from unfriendly criticism. 
 
 Editor. 
 
THE PECULIARITY OF THE RELI- 
 GION OF THE BIBLE 
 
 I 
 
 The Old Testament Religion 
 
 "Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall 
 not be reckoned among the nations." 
 
 Thus Balaam, the heathenish seer, charac- 
 terized in his first parable the people upon 
 whom devolved the highest mission in the 
 history of religion. That we have to do 
 here with a real prophecy is proved by the 
 many thousand years of history of that peo- 
 ple who even in their dispersion among the 
 nations can never wholly deny their racial 
 peculiarity and mental separateness. The 
 Hebrew race owes this peculiarity above 
 everything else to its religion, which was 
 unique among the religions of the nations, 
 as unique as Christianity which arose from 
 it and which, as the highest blossom, was 
 destined to become the universal religion for 
 all nations. 
 
 And yet these two, Judaism and Chris- 
 9 
 
io The Peculiarity of the 
 
 tianity, do not stand so isolated in the world 
 as has formerly been imagined. To those 
 genealogical lines by which the Israelites 
 felt themselves connected with the entire 
 human race (Gen. io. n) correspond also 
 religious relations. It is true that between 
 the most diverse religions inner, though not 
 historical, relations may be proved, which 
 relations rest on the analogy of every human 
 spiritual and mental life biblically expressed ; 
 on the self-manifestation of God to all men. 
 But, as a rule, homogeneousness is much 
 more apparent where it concerns consan- 
 guineous tribes. As is known, the people 
 of Israel belonged linguistically and ethno- 
 graphically to the so-called Semitic group; 
 we shall therefore not be surprised to find 
 here also the nearest relatives as far as reli- 
 gion is concerned. How was the Israelitish 
 or Old Testament religion related to the 
 religion of the Edomites, Moabites, Ammon- 
 ites, Arameans, and other nations of like 
 blood, as well as to the religion of the more 
 distant Assyrians and Babylonians who also 
 belonged to the Semitic group? 
 
 But let us first examine what is meant by 
 the Old Testament religion. Wellhausen, 
 
Religion of the Bible ii 
 
 Stade, and others assert that the old Israel- 
 itish national religion was something differ- 
 ent from what is usually understood by the 
 Old Testament religion, namely, a worship of 
 Jehovah 1 as a limited tribal or national god 
 who was originally a god of weather and 
 war, but exercised no authority beyond his 
 people and country. He was not considered 
 as an absolute ruler upon earth or as creator 
 of the universe; nor did ethical qualities 
 belong to his nature, though ethical attributes 
 were occasionally ascribed to him. Thus this 
 Is raelitish- Jehovah religion, as to its inner 
 content, did not materially differ from the 
 Chemosh-religion of the Moabites, the Mo- 
 loch-religion of the Ammonites, the Baal- 
 service of the Canaanites, etc. Since the time 
 of Moses, however, Jehovah was looked upon 
 as a jealous God, who on his soil and among 
 his people would tolerate no other gods 
 '(monolatry, not monotheism), but who nev- 
 ertheless was to share in the government 
 with the Cananaean Baalim, which had al- 
 ready possessed the country and would not 
 be driven from the sacred places. It was 
 
 1 For the name Yahve used by the author, I have sub- 
 stituted the form familiar to English readers. — Editor. 
 
12 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 only in the eighth century B. C. that the 
 so-called "literary prophets," headed by 
 Amos, proclaimed Jehovah as the sole ruler 
 and at the same time declared his covenant 
 with Israel, which was formerly considered 
 as a natural relation, as one established upon 
 ethical conditions; and as such was indis- 
 soluble. These prophets were the founders 
 of the ethical monotheism which after the 
 exile became the religion of the people. 
 
 In this conception of the school above men- 
 tioned there lies a fundamental error. Ac- 
 cording to my opinion this false notion has 
 been best refuted by the Scotch scholar James 
 Robertson. 1 But even such a critical investi- 
 gator as Professor Giesebrecht has shown 
 the untenableness of this view. It is strange 
 therefore that Professor Stade in his Com- 
 pendium of the Old Testament theology 
 (1905) should repeat it again with such 
 dogmatic confidence. It is the more pleasing 
 that Professor Bantsch 2 has very recently 
 emphasized in the most powerful manner 
 the necessity of revising the historical-evolu- 
 tion schemes of the Wellhausen school after 
 
 1 The Ancient Religion of Israel before the Eighth Cen- 
 tury (German second edition, Stuttgart, 1905). 
 
 2 Altorientalischer und Israelitischer Monotheismus, 1906. 
 
Religion of the Bible 13 
 
 he had convinced himself especially by com- 
 paring the religio-historical connections that 
 it would not do to press the old Israelitish 
 history of religion into the scheme of the 
 evolution theorists. 
 
 In brief we state the following: Even if 
 we should admit without examination the 
 literary critical results of a Kuenen, Well- 
 hausen and others which we could not advise, 
 the essential traits of ethical monotheism, 
 it must be admitted, already existed long be- 
 fore the time of Amos, as is seen in the his- 
 tory of Elijah, whose compositions these 
 critics put before Amos, and especially in 
 the ancient Jehovah-document of the Penta- 
 teuch, which is certainly of higher antiquity. 
 Think of Genesis 2. sqq., the history of the 
 creation of man, of the paradise, the fall, 
 the deluge, building of the tower of Babel, 
 destruction of Sodom, etc. To avoid these 
 instances Stade would indeed eliminate these 
 portions from the ancient Jehovah-document 
 and consider them as very recent Hebrew 
 revisions of foreign materials which orig- 
 inated shortly before the exile in the time 
 of Babylonian-Assyrian influence. But here 
 the arbitrary character of the criticism is too 
 
14 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 notorious. The unaffectedly naive manner 
 in which God is spoken of in these selections, 
 as coming down from heaven upon earth to 
 view the building made by men, of com- 
 municating to Abram his purpose to convince 
 himself personally whether the inhabitants of 
 Sodom were as bad as their reputation, 
 shows us indeed the oldest Hebrew writings 
 which have come down to us. Notwith- 
 standing the childlike imperfection in which 
 God is here presented and exhibited, he 
 is nevertheless the Almighty God who dwells 
 in heaven, the creator of everything which 
 is on earth, the all-ruling one who exercises 
 righteous judgment over all nations, and so 
 by no means a limited tribal or national God 
 in whose character the ethical was no con- 
 stituent element. 
 
 These primeval testimonies point back to 
 the pre-monarchical period. Before Samuel 
 Israel must already have had this sublime 
 knowledge of God. From whom could it 
 come but from Moses, whom all ancient 
 documents revere as the founder of the Is- 
 raelitish national religion? But Moses also 
 proclaimed the God whom he preached, not 
 as one who had thus far been entirely un- 
 
Religion of the Bible 15 
 
 known, but as the God well known to the 
 fathers. The name which all narrators of 
 the Pentateuch mention as the first which 
 stood in close relation to the God of Israel 
 is Abram. 1 This name, according to all 
 analogy, can only have been that of a human 
 individual, not that of a god nor of a tribe, 
 as one has tried to make himself believe ; and 
 that this personality must be considered as 
 historical, can today be scientifically affirmed 
 with greater certainty, as may be shown 
 from the monuments, than it could have been 
 twenty or thirty years ago. 
 
 When we speak of Old Testament or Is- 
 raelitish religion, we mean that which the 
 religiously enlightened Israelites since 
 Moses, even since Abram, professed. That 
 this monotheism became purified and de- 
 veloped itself from Abram to Moses, from 
 Moses down to Amos and Isaiah, from these 
 down to Jeremiah, is also our opinion. The 
 Bible itself bears witness to this, when for 
 instance it commences a new epoch of reli- 
 gious development with Moses and marks 
 
 1 Properly Abiram — " my father is exalted " : a beautiful 
 expression which denotes at once God's eminence and 
 intimacy! See the analogous formations, Abishua, Abim- 
 elech, Abinadab, etc. 
 
1 6 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 this epoch by making known a new name 
 of God: "And I appeared unto Abraham, 
 unto Isaac, and unto Jacob as El Shaddai 
 (by the name of God Almighty), but by my 
 name Jehovah was I not yet known to them" 
 (Exod. 6. 3; see 3. 13 sq.). A new name 
 never means for the ancient Hebrews a mere 
 formal change in the appellation, but has 
 always its objective cause in the new rela- 
 tions of the named. Applied to God the new 
 name means a new disclosure of his deeper 
 being, and according to this an advance of 
 man in his understanding. "Evolution' ' is 
 not wholly a bad term for this progress, for 
 it expresses a self-unfolding of the Deity 
 which allows man to look deeper into his 
 nature. 
 
 It may also be frankly admitted that, in 
 this people as in other nations, higher and 
 lower religious tendencies present themselves 
 simultaneously. The God comprehended by 
 Moses became the common possession of the 
 whole people only incompletely, because hea- 
 thenishly disposed undercurrents still pre- 
 vailed among them and often became over- 
 whelming, especially when the people were 
 scattered over Canaan and entered into tribal 
 
Religion of the Bible 17 
 
 relations with the older settlers, who sur- 
 passed them in culture. But with Professor 
 Ed. Koenig, 1 one must retain as a fact, his- 
 torically demanded and conceded, that from 
 the beginning of the national history of 
 Israel we notice a purer religion among the 
 appointed religious leaders of the nation, 
 than may be perceived among their cognate 
 neighbors, or the still more heathenishly dis- 
 posed Canaanites. 
 
 1 Die Haiiptproblem der Altisraelitischen Religionsge- 
 schichte, 1884, G 7. sq. 
 
1 8 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 II 
 
 Personal Authors and Bearers of the 
 Religion in Israel 
 
 Whence this higher knowledge of God? 
 Whether we abide by Moses or go back to 
 Abram, according to the testimony of all 
 Pentateuchal sources, it is always an indi- 
 vidual personality which is mentioned as the 
 human starting point. This is of great im- 
 portance. It has often been pointed out that 
 personal founders of the different religions 
 are known, whereas others appear as the pro- 
 duct and possession of the whole of a tribe 
 or nation. This difference, however, is in- 
 deed only a relative one. On the one hand 
 the so-called founders of religion themselves 
 stand on a national native soil, whose influ- 
 ence on them is easily perceptible; on the 
 other hand in the origin of all religions, we 
 must imagine some especially endowed and 
 inspired individuals as being more productive 
 than others, just as in the progress of cul- 
 ture, whether w T e know their names or not. 
 Yet it is nevertheless of importance for the 
 
Religion of the Bible 19 
 
 whole peculiarity and life of a religion, 
 whether it originated, so to speak, from one 
 personality and is ruled by him, or whether 
 it developed more collectively and is con- 
 sidered as the product of the whole. When 
 a personal genius has impregnated the whole 
 of a religion and is considered as its origina- 
 tor or bearer, the acknowledgment is ex- 
 pressed therein in the first place that religion 
 in its foundation and origin is a personal 
 experience ; and in the second place that the 
 difference in the faculty of experiencing this 
 must be very great among individuals. Only 
 a few individuals become distinguished be- 
 yond others by this faculty, and hence be- 
 come authorities for others. 
 
 Now, neither among the Greeks in his- 
 torical time, the Romans, the ancient Egyp- 
 tians, nor Babylonians, do we find such reli- 
 gious authorities as a Moses, Samuel, and all 
 the great prophets, an Amos and Hosea, an 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah represent. Since in our 
 time we often meet with the assertion that 
 the Israelitish religion is wholly like the 
 Babylonian and an offshoot from it, let us 
 therefore look for once at the ancient 
 Babylonians and Assyrians, and ascertain 
 
20 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 who were their authorities in matters of reli- 
 gion. One might perhaps refer to the fact 
 that Hammurabi, king of Babylon, declared 
 that he received his laws from the sun-god, 
 just as Moses derived his from Jehovah. But 
 in the introduction to that code that ruler 
 mainly claims divine authority for his legis- 
 lation which, so far as the contents are con- 
 cerned, has nothing to do with religion. For 
 religion itself the Babylonians never appealed 
 to Hammurabi. Every Babylonian could have 
 certain religious exercises, that is, dreams, 
 apparitions, omens or visitations of divine 
 displeasure. In such a case he could consult 
 the interpreters of dreams and signs who 
 formed a separate class of the priesthood; 
 or he could ask the atoning priests who knew 
 which rites and sayings must be applied to 
 banish the evil. This priesthood was in so 
 far an authority for him, but only on account 
 of its superior knowledge. Like the Egyp- 
 tian, it possessed a transmitted knowledge 
 of the divine and demoniacal powers and of 
 the formulas for their exorcism. Such tra- 
 ditions of magic were easily propagated 
 from one generation to another; they did 
 not require in the practitioner any ethico- 
 
Religion of the Bible 21 
 
 religious conditions. Another Babylonian 
 sacerdotal body mediated to the people astro- 
 logical knowledge; its brightest minds had 
 most ingeniously observed the course of the 
 stars and made possible the calculations of 
 the course of the sun, moon, and planets. 
 This body was the authority for fixing the 
 calendar with the necessary instructions for 
 the correct use of certain days ruled by 
 special influences of the stars; but on the 
 whole this was no religion but a conception 
 of the world or indeed a religiously colored 
 cosmology. As prominent as these efforts 
 were in a physical respect, and great as was 
 the acumen and methodical endurance to 
 bring them about, as little did it require a 
 religious experience or illumination. Hence 
 the personality of these Babylonian or Egyp- 
 tian soothsayers and astrologers was wholly 
 unimportant for the matter itself. It only 
 concerned the correct handling of magical 
 technics. 
 
 This difference between the alleged reli- 
 gions and the Biblical is very important. 
 Its significance becomes clear at once when 
 one realizes what religion means. As truly, 
 in the first place, as religion is a revelation 
 
2.2 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 of man to God, more accurately, such a reve- 
 lation as the deity with immediate certainty 
 makes to man as ruler 1 ; so is it according to 
 its origin and essence a property and an ex- 
 pression of the human personal life. There- 
 fore, the more personal a religion is the more 
 original and vital it is. We shall therefore 
 not be surprised to find that the higher reli- 
 gions are just such as are their personal 
 founders and originators, who according to 
 the conviction of their adherents experienced 
 the deity in an extraordinary manner, where- 
 as religions which came out from a person- 
 ally undetermined tribal or national circle, 
 generally occupy a lower degree. 
 
 It is a characteristic of the Old Testament 
 religion that from the beginning it is con- 
 sciously witnessed by such men of God who 
 had themselves experienced God's manifesta- 
 tions. This concerns here not merely a 
 founder of religion who, like Abram or 
 Moses, had belonged to remote antiquity, 
 but in the bright light of history, as the ex- 
 amples of an Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
 Zechariah, and others prove. One might 
 
 1 Orelli, Handbuch der allgemeinen Religionsgeschichte, 
 1899, pp. 1 sqq. 
 
Religion of the Bible 2$ 
 
 call such men religious geniuses; but the 
 term would be unsuitable because these Is- 
 raelitish prophets were conscious of owing 
 their knowledge and their word not to their 
 own creative genius, but to an experience of 
 God, a revelation whereby they wholly knew 
 themselves as the recipients. Who was the 
 giver of these revelations? 
 
24 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 III 
 The Personally Living God of Israel 
 
 The correlate to this knowledge of God by 
 some persons forms the God who makes him- 
 self known to them. This God is absolutely 
 personal. This yields a second characteristic 
 whereby this religion differs from those of 
 cognate nations which were in part outward- 
 ly alike. There doubtless existed an inner 
 relationship between Jehovah, the God of 
 Israel, and the national deities of the Edom- 
 ites, Moabites, Ammonites, Arameans. A 
 closer examination shows that these nations 
 too were not far from being monotheistic. 
 It is an erroneous idea of some modern 
 scholars who think that from the beginning 
 these tribes had only a particular god in 
 view whose powers, according to their ideas, 
 were confined to the narrow limits of their 
 territory. 
 
 This view is connected with the assump- 
 tion that belief in one God is generally the 
 result only of a long historical development 
 
Religion of the Bible 25 
 
 From belief in demons (Animism) developed 
 in time belief in gods, and from this finally 
 belief in God. This hypothesis is neither 
 supported by history nor by the condition of 
 savages of the present time. In the first in- 
 stance we find in China belief in a supreme 
 God in heaven as early as the coexisting 
 belief in spirits or ancestral cult. But even 
 among wholly savage African and American 
 tribes one was surprised to find a widely 
 spread belief in a supernatural God, in a 
 God plainly in heaven, to whom not seldom 
 is ascribed the creation of the universe, and 
 who is also not wholly lacking in ethical 
 character. I refer for the Africans to my 
 book (Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte), p. 
 745 s< ¥i' '> f or the American red men to p. 
 775 s< ¥i' > f° r the Mongol-Tartaric nations 
 which are addicted to Shamanism (spirit- 
 cult) to p. 89 ; here we only quote two other 
 examples : 
 
 The missionary Allegret, a careful ob- 
 server, reported at the Religious Historical 
 Congress in Basel, 1904, about the "Fan" 
 people on the Congo, who had newly come 
 from the bush and up to this time had neither 
 been in contact with Christianity nor with 
 
26 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 Islamism. This tribe is so little civilized that 
 anthropophagy is practised by it ; but besides 
 the customary superstitious notions and cus- 
 toms which it has in common with the Ban- 
 tu-tribes, Allegret discovered in time and in- 
 deed among the older people and those mem- 
 bers of the tribe who remained more in the 
 interior of the country, an ancient belief in 
 God which is expressed in the divine name 
 Nzame (just as many other Bantu-tribes). 
 Of this God attributes are predicated in 
 terms belonging to a language now no longer 
 used, like: "The Almighty, the supreme 
 judge, the king of kings, the father of life." 
 This God, which the "Fan" people before 
 they met the whites represented to them- 
 selves as being black, but to which they now 
 ascribe a white color, forsook them, accord- 
 ing to their account, because of their dis- 
 obedience. 1 
 
 A second example from an entirely differ- 
 ent ethnographical territory, may be taken 
 from the Australasian Negroes. These are 
 classed as the lowest race of men. Compar- 
 ing structure of body and carriage they are 
 
 1 Allegret's notices are given completely in the Revue 
 de L'Histoire des Religions, 1906, pp. 1 sqq. 
 
Religion of the Bible 2.y 
 
 said to bear a resemblance to apes beyond 
 all others. In civilization they stand just as 
 degraded. They have no metals, no bows, 
 no pottery, no fixed dwellings. In regard to 
 religion they have long been quoted as tribes 
 which had no real religion but a wild Anim- 
 ism. But Dampier, the first European to 
 discover them, having been driven by a 
 storm to their coast in 1688, has pointed out 
 that they were always without the two upper 
 incisors. He praised their unselfishness, al- 
 though they were the most miserable people 
 he knew, in that they shared everything 
 among themselves, so that the old and weak 
 among them never suffered need. An unex- 
 pected light has now been thrown upon these 
 meager notices since these savages have be- 
 come better known. In the first place it has 
 been ascertained that all these tribes worship 
 a highest being, called Darumiihin or Bunjil, 
 commonly Biamban (Lord) or Papang 
 (Father). This God, who is also considered 
 as the creator, is benevolent and kind, but 
 very severe against the transgressors of the 
 laws and injunctions prevalent in the tribes. 
 The real name of God should only be men- 
 tioned in the Bora, that is, in his mysteries. 
 
28 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 An image of him was used in these mysteries, 
 but it was destroyed after the act of conse- 
 cration. Before this image of the god, the 
 young people were made acquainted with the 
 religious injunctions: reverence for age, 
 avoidance of all inordinate sexual desires, 
 etc. At the same time their stomachs were 
 thoroughly worked to cast out eager desire 
 and selfishness ; the breaking out of the front 
 teeth, which act also belonged to this drastic 
 religious instruction, had undoubtedly a like 
 significance ; the beast-of-prey nature in man 
 was to be removed thereby. These rites, 
 which according to what has been stated, 
 must have been peculiar to these Australa- 
 sians long before their contact with Euro- 
 peans, prove again that a very primitive re- 
 ligious degree may contain high elements of 
 a knowledge of God. So-called Animism by 
 no means excludes the worship of a Father- 
 God and Creator, and it might also exercise 
 ethical influence in the noblest sense of the 
 word. If by Animism one understands be- 
 lief in countless spirits, God can be distin- 
 guished from them in the most positive man- 
 ner, and, as Andrew Lang has demonstrated, 
 it is an undemonstrable hypothesis that is 
 
Religion of the Bible 29 
 
 given out from them. 1 It has, for instance, 
 often been thought that the idea of the high- 
 est God has developed from the analogy of 
 the human chiefs and rulers, as if these nat- 
 ural men had found it necessary to supply 
 also the realm of spirits with a regent. But 
 this worship of a God in heaven is found 
 also among such African tribes which have 
 no kings and hardly chiefs, as among these 
 Australians, where political rule is very little 
 developed. 
 
 Reverting from this glance at the lowest 
 peoples to the more nobly endowed Semites, 
 we have no reason to oppose the belief that 
 among them from time immemorial the 
 notion of a universal deity, ruling every- 
 thing, existed; of an El which can also be 
 paraphrased by Baal (Lord), Melech(king), 
 Adonai (ruler), and other names of a "high- 
 est God" as Melchizedek worshiped him 
 (Gen. 14. 18), standing above lesser gods. 
 The different Baalim of the Canaanites were 
 not originally mere local genii or demons, 
 but offshoots of a general heavenly deity 
 which, under the name of Baal samem, is 
 already attested as one of the oldest Phceni- 
 
 1 See A. Lang, The Making of Religion, 1898, pp. 189 sqq. 
 
30 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 cian inscriptions. 1 One may also see how 
 these Baalim show so many relations to the 
 sun which certainly could not have been in- 
 vented subsequently. Does one seriously 
 imagine that these tribes should have been 
 so narrow-minded as to believe that their 
 sun-god which they saw daily completing his 
 sovereign course over the world, manifesting 
 his power, was only limited to the few square 
 miles which their tribe inhabited? The 
 actual limitation was the result of the politi- 
 cal relation of the god to the individual tribe, 
 as well as of his endowment with special 
 local predicates and its worship under differ- 
 ent images. But the consciousness of its uni- 
 versality was never given up, and it asserted 
 itself in this that over the localized and 
 specialized gods, one easily put again a 
 supreme god of a general character, as the 
 Arabs before Mohammed put their altar over 
 the individual tribal deities and fetiches. 
 
 And yet, even aside from ethical differ- 
 ence, there exists an essential difference be- 
 tween the gods of the neighboring, closely 
 related tribes and the notion of the God of 
 ancient Israel. It consisted in this, that 
 
 iOrelli, 1. c, p. 232 sq.; Bantsch, 1. c, p. 40. 
 
Religion of the Bible 31 
 
 Jehovah, in his powerfully expressed person- 
 ality, is held to be entirely another God than 
 the deity among those other nations. The 
 deities of the Canaanites, Arameans, etc., be- 
 sides the Babylonians and Assyrians, had 
 something indefinite, dissolving. Hence they 
 could easily divide into male and female 
 halves ; could, as has been stated above, in- 
 crease through political and cultic peculiari- 
 ties to a plurality and turn again into one 
 another. They were frequently seen to- 
 gether in a single phenomenon (sensuous 
 heaven, light, sun), which invites the setting 
 up of a supplementary analogue (earth, dark- 
 ness, moon, etc.). Since, however, one was 
 semi-conscious of its more general character, 
 its contemplation is also connected with dif- 
 ferent phenomena (for instance, with the 
 sun and at the same time with a certain 
 planet) ; and finally this worship of the most 
 glorious phenomena strove for the worship 
 of a more impersonal natural whole, as the 
 Babylonian priest-religion clearly showed. 
 
 In Israel Jehovah remained one and the 
 same indivisible God. True, his spirit or 
 his name, or his face, was distinguished from 
 himself; but from this originated no new 
 
$2 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 deities, as in Phoenicia, where the goddess 
 Astarte was called "the name of Baal," thus 
 being an emanation of the god, or in 
 Carthage, where the goddess Tanit is called 
 "the face of Baal." 1 If we ask for the rea- 
 son why the deity of the Israelites did not 
 multiply in like manner and its personality 
 never obliterated itself, we must point in the 
 first place to the fact that as we have seen 
 Jehovah appeared unto some personalities 
 like Abram, Moses, and ever and ever mani- 
 fested himself to some leading men. In the 
 second place he manifested himself ener- 
 getically as a living God who enters into life 
 as none of the gods of Aram or Edom. But 
 these manifestations could never have been 
 understood as such unless now and then men 
 had been present like a Moses, Samuel, Eli- 
 jah, etc., who added the word to the deed 
 and explained to the people the often strange 
 acts of this God. This God who appeared 
 in absolute personality with power suffered 
 no other beside him. For "goddess" the 
 Hebrew language has not even a word. The 
 association of a female partner would appear 
 as an abomination to every Israelite who 
 
 1 Orelli, 1. c, pp. 240 and 242. 
 
Religion of the Bible 33 
 
 had grown up in the religion of Moses, 
 inoffensive as this notion was to all Semitic 
 tribes of remote antiquity. 
 
 We nowhere find in the Bible a disposi- 
 tion to substitute for the personally con- 
 scious God a semi-conscious or unconscious 
 power of nature or power of fate. This per- 
 sonality of God is an inner bond which holds 
 the Bible together from the first to the last 
 leaf, whereas the progressive world-percep- 
 tion of other nations easily led to the putting 
 of a supreme, mere impersonal power in 
 place of the desultory, individual deities; 
 as was done by the Egyptian and Babylonian 
 astronomers and the keen thinkers on the 
 other hand among the Brahmins. In the 
 Old Testament we find the opposite. 
 
 I must also expressly oppose those Assyri- 
 ologists who assert that the biblical narra- 
 tors of Genesis or of the books of Judges or 
 Samuel or even of the books of the Kings, 
 had in view an astral-scheme, an order of the 
 stars, according to which earthly events were 
 ordered. Whether astronomical figures form 
 the basis of certain primitive forms in Gene- 
 sis, for instance whether the number twelve 
 of the sons of Jacob is connected with the 
 
34 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 signs of the zodiac, is an archaeological ques- 
 tion which we will not argue here. What 
 I oppose is, that the narrators intended such 
 a connection or presupposed such as already 
 held by their hearers and readers. That, for 
 instance, the biblical narrator who speaks of 
 Abram, how he went from Aram to Canaan, 
 should have thought thereby of the moon- 
 god and intended by this to remind his 
 hearers and readers of the wandering moon ; 
 or that, when he tells of Joseph in prison, he 
 had in view the god Tammuz, who was kept 
 imprisoned in the lower world, etc. — these 
 are entries which radically destroy the spir- 
 itual and religious stamp of these simple, 
 unconstrained narratives. The more thor- 
 oughly the famous and ingenious astral doc- 
 trine of the ancient Babylonians is pro- 
 pounded, according to which every earthly 
 event has its heavenly type in the motions 
 and relations of the stars, the more force- 
 fully are we impressed by the very great 
 contrast between this view of the world and 
 the Old Testament where the sovereign God, 
 Jehovah, freely rules in nature and history 
 without being dependent on any scheme. 
 To this must also be added the ethical 
 
Religion of the Bible 35 
 
 element. This is by no means absent from 
 the old-Semitic deity (See Gen. 19 and 20. 
 11). Where the "fear of God" prevailed in 
 such a tribe, the right of the stranger was 
 also regarded, who was not indeed the pro- 
 tege of a local tribal god but of the general 
 deity. In the Babylonian version of the 
 Deluge, the motive for destroying the human 
 race seemed to be its wickedness. The god 
 Ea upbraided the god Bel only because he 
 destroyed the human race without discrimi- 
 nation instead of punishing the individual 
 sinner for his own sin, the wicked for his 
 wickedness, and from the Babylonian peni- 
 tential psalms we clearly see that one saw 
 the cause of suffering not only in the dis- 
 favor of a somehow offended God, but also 
 in offences against the moral law. Of such 
 a law the Babylonians had a consciousness 
 as highly developed as the ancient Egyptians, 
 according to a chapter of their book of the 
 dead. But not only did the conception of the 
 magic relation between the divine and earth- 
 ly sphere check among both peoples the 
 moral influence which religion should have 
 exercised, religion itself was too much con- 
 fused with nature. 
 
36 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 Where the deity is affiliated with nature 
 it easily loses its ethically sublime character. 
 Already the division of the deity into per- 
 sonal plurality became also fatal for it in 
 this respect. From the plurality of gods 
 arises opposition, and where the gods them- 
 selves are in a state of mutual warfare, the 
 moral authority which they should have over 
 against man is greatly weakened. How 
 could the deluge make an overwhelming im- 
 pression on the sinner when the greatest 
 gods, Bel and Ea, afterward quarreled about 
 it, whether it would not have been better had 
 that judgment not taken place, not to speak 
 of the passionate complaints of Istar or the 
 demeanor of other gods who for fear 
 crouched like dogs at the threshold of 
 heaven? We see in these myths as in the 
 poems of the Hindoos, Greeks, Germans, 
 etc., that with the interweaving of the deity 
 into the nature, its moral holiness was soon 
 lost. True that for the religious conscious- 
 ness these controversies, largely invented in 
 mythical tales, receded in the cult, but here 
 too they annoyingly asserted themselves 
 since man had not to deal with one holy 
 authority but with an indefinite number of 
 
Religion of the Bible 37; 
 
 powers whose interests were divided. One 
 complained, perhaps, that he did not know 
 which god he had offended, or he made use 
 of the weakness of these gods in order to 
 throw the favor of one into the scale of the 
 other ; worse than this was the natural con- 
 fusion of the deity which betrayed itself in 
 the very cult of these Semitic nations. This 
 confusion was served by giving free vent to 
 natural impulses, and again with killing the 
 natural life (human sacrifices). Lust and 
 cruelty celebrated their orgies in honor of a 
 deity which had been divested of its higher 
 moral consecration. It is known that the 
 Israelites were surrounded by such specifical- 
 ly heathenish vices (prostitution of women 
 and men, human sacrifices, especially infant 
 sacrifices) and that they often took hold of 
 the people owing to their tendency toward 
 sensuality. But these things were an abom- 
 ination to the holy God from Sinai, and were 
 again and again cast out when his faithful 
 professors succeeded in awakening the peo- 
 ple to fidelity toward him. Jehovah was 
 holy according to his nature, that is, he was 
 superior to the earthly human and especially 
 a consuming fire for all iniquity and sin. 
 
38 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 Nothing is so adapted to bring out this 
 superiority of Jehovah over other Semitic 
 gods than a comparison of the historically 
 related Babylonian myths which were, how- 
 ever, animated by an entirely different spirit. 
 This has been sufficiently demonstrated in 
 the brochures of S. Oettli, Ed. Koenig, R. 
 Kittel, A. Jeremias, F. Hommel, and others, 
 called forth by the sensational assertions of 
 the opposite in the Babel-Bible controversy. 
 At present, however, everyone can convince 
 himself of it when he compares the now 
 accessible Babylonian texts with the biblical. 
 Of this only one example : 
 
 It is said that the Adapa-myth 1 is another 
 form of the biblical narrative of the fall. 
 This Ad a pa is a man of primeval time, cre- 
 ated by the god Ea and endowed by him with 
 wisdom but not with eternal life. He min- 
 istered to this his god as priest in the city 
 of Eridu. Fishing one day he was cast into 
 the sea by the bird Zu, the south wind ; but 
 out of revenge he broke its wings so that it 
 could not blow for seven days. Anu, the 
 highest god of heaven, became angry and 
 
 1 Alfred J eremias, Das alte Testament in dem Lichte des 
 alten Orients, p. 72 sq. 
 
Religion of the Bible 39 
 
 called Adapa to account; Anu exclaimed: 
 "No mercy I" ; yet he suffered himself to be 
 appeased by the doorkeepers Tammuz and 
 Giszida, and ordered them to prepare a meal 
 for Adapa and to give him a festive raiment 
 and oil for anointing. Adapa accepted the 
 dress and oil but refused food and drink at 
 the suggestion of his god Ea which had said 
 to him: "Food of death they will offer to 
 thee, eat not thereof ! Water of death they 
 will offer to thee, drink not thereof !" Anu 
 was surprised at this refusal since he had 
 caused that food of life and water of life 
 should be given him, to give him life eternal ; 
 thus Adapa forfeited this gift. 
 
 One may consider Adapa as the primitive 
 man, and as in Genesis 3 we may here find 
 an explanation why immortality was refused 
 to man — but the ethical inferiority of this 
 legend over against the wondrous narrative 
 in Genesis 3 is obvious. Whether the good 
 god of the depth, Ea, grudged his beloved 
 immortality, thus playing the false part of 
 the serpent, or whether he trusted not the 
 fickle god of heaven — at any rate man 
 became the victim of obedience, not of 
 disobedience toward his creator, and lost 
 
40 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 the immortality intended for him in conse- 
 quence of the miserable disunion of the 
 gods. 
 
 With Jehovah, the God of ancient Israel, 
 truth, righteousness, kindness are inalienable 
 attributes. Moral perfection necessarily be- 
 longs to his nature. As such he already ap- 
 peared in the oldest leaves of the Bible which 
 contained pre-Mosaic matter. He punished 
 pride (Gen. n. 6 sq.), violation of the right 
 of hospitality (Gen. 19. 1 sqq.), the uni- 
 versal corruption of sin (Gen. 6. 5 sqq.), 
 but did not forget the righteous one who, 
 like Noah or Lot, he saved from destruction. 
 We admit that the ruling of this God had 
 in itself yet much that is inexplicable, in- 
 scrutable, and that his grace, like his wrath, 
 could not always be traced back to moral 
 propositions, but might sometimes have the 
 semblance of arbitrariness. But this is 
 entirely different from the assertion that he 
 acted capriciously and unjustly. His vota- 
 ries had themselves cast this reproach far 
 from him (Gen. 18. 25). Conscious, indeed, 
 that they often failed to understand his com- 
 mands, nevertheless they could not imagine 
 God other than as good, and the more they 
 
Religion of the Bible 41 
 
 developed themselves ethically, the purer 
 they apprehended the nature of their God 
 whom they knew to be the sum of ethical 
 perfection, and that every man stood in his 
 sight as sinful and therefore impure. 
 
42 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 IV 
 
 Development of the Knowledge of 
 God in Israel 
 
 Development in Old Testament knowledge 
 of God there certainly was. But whereas 
 we noticed among the Babylonians, Egyp- 
 tians, Greeks, Hindoos, and other nations, 
 that with the purification of religion personal 
 life in the conception of the deity recedes and 
 vanishes in the minds of the initiated, in 
 Israel we find the reverse. God is, was, and 
 remains the One who is sharply differenti- 
 ated from the world, the I who came to man 
 with a "Thou" and demanded from the 
 people : "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, 
 and with all thy might." This required a 
 personal attitude of the individual heart 
 toward him who comprises in himself full- 
 ness of personal life, but so that neither the 
 unity of his consciousness nor the energy of 
 his will shall suffer thereby. Should the 
 childlike anthropomorphisms which are 
 found especially in the oldest leaves of the 
 
Religion of the Bible 43 
 
 Jehovah document be stripped off, the an- 
 thropopathies remain, yea, they are increased 
 to the utmost by Hosea, who looked deeper 
 into the heart of God than any of his prede- 
 cessors. And though one should endeavor 
 to correct occasionally the pathological min- 
 gling (see Hos. 11. 9), the personal is re- 
 tained as an inalienable peculiarity of the 
 God revealed to Israel. Where reference to 
 a personal God recedes and religion is more 
 pleased with the observance of legally con- 
 stituted ritual, its decay is also obvious as in 
 the legalism of the post-exilic and later rab- 
 binic Judaism. 
 
 The ascending development, however, 
 which the Old Testament religion underwent 
 consists in this, that not only was the idea 
 of God himself purified and spiritualized, the 
 high perceptions of a Moses being improved 
 by later men of God, but the relation of the 
 congregation to this God became also more 
 personal. 
 
 From the beginning the religion of Jeho- 
 vah was indeed not a matter of a certain 
 caste or body; it was not so that only the 
 "initiated,' ' distinguished by speculative 
 power, could have perceived the nature of 
 
44 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 this God and his true qualities. As little did 
 this knowledge form the content of "mys- 
 teries" to which the initiated only were ad- 
 mitted. Jehovah demanded acknowledg- 
 ment from all people, all estates, sexes and 
 ages, even from bondservants and strangers 
 who dwelt among the people. This essen- 
 tially distinguished his worship from that 
 "monotheism" which one may find at its 
 best in the speculative formulas of Babylo- 
 nian and Egyptian priests. The god whom 
 they saw in high contemplation was on this 
 account already different from the Israelitish 
 because it was not objected to that the 
 common people worshiped the deity in a 
 number of partial phenomena. 
 
 Only in an isolated manner do we find in 
 those religions the claim of a god to autoc- 
 racy. Thus in Egypt, especially under 
 Amenhotep (Amenophis) IV, about 1400 
 B. G, who in opposition to the Theban 
 priesthood and the powerful god Anion, in- 
 sisted upon the sole worship of the sun-god 
 in the form of the winged disc of the sun. 
 On this account he was considered an apos- 
 tatized heretic. It is more likely that he 
 borrowed his ideas from the Semites than 
 
Religion of the Bible 45 
 
 that Moses, whose God Jehovah had no rela- 
 tion to the sun, should have learned from 
 him. According to E. Naville his more 
 political motives induced him to adopt the 
 rite of Heliopolis without forming, however, 
 a higher notion of his god than the other 
 Egyptians. 
 
 Recently one has imagined that he per- 
 ceived an analogy to this Egyptian struggle 
 for monotheism in the commendation of 
 the God Nabu (Nebo) by the Assyrian king 
 Ramman Nirari (about 790 B. C.), and he 
 considered it not as accidental that shortly 
 after this time lived that Israelitish prophet, 
 Jonah, the son of Amittas, who preached the 
 true God at Nineveh, and that Amos ap- 
 peared at Bethel proclaiming a purified 
 monotheism. But we cannot attach much 
 weight to this coincidence. We read indeed 
 in the inscription of the famous Nebo-statue 
 of that Assyrian king at the end: "Man 
 of coming times, trust in Nebo! trust not 
 in any other god!" 1 
 
 A tendency to perceive the divine in a 
 centralized form, we also meet with in the 
 
 Orelli, 1. c, p. 185 sq, 
 
46 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 ancient Babylonian moon-cult, 1 also in sun 
 worship. 2 But aside from this, that that 
 recommendation of the god Nebo might also 
 have other motives (sympathy with a cer- 
 tain priest-party, etc.), Amos would certain- 
 ly have strongly opposed the presumption to 
 perceive his God in a form as presented by 
 the Nebo-statue. Jehovah was absolutely an 
 entirely different being ; and the appearance 
 of the herdsman of Tekoa was not caused 
 by a theological wave which had brought 
 purer ideas from the interior of Asia. As 
 he himself vividly describes it, he was called 
 by his God from the flock to his prophetical 
 office with an impetuosity which he could 
 withstand as little as one can guard himself 
 from terror when suddenly the roar of a 
 lion is heard in immediate vicinity (see 
 Amos 7. 14 sq. and 3.8). It is not a learned 
 priest who is imbued with foreign influences 
 and brings a new teaching to his people, but 
 a common man of the people who was so 
 apprehended by his God that he had the 
 courage to oppose the heads of the secular 
 and spiritual government. He sounded the 
 
 1 Orelli, p. 182 sq., the Hymn to the Moon-god. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 192 sq. 
 
Religion of the Bible 47 
 
 trumpet of alarm to warn them of the judg- 
 ment of that God who has always proved 
 himself to be the all-powerful and holy one 
 in Israel. 
 
 That this God had power over all nations, 
 he by no means proclaims as something new 
 but recalls the fact as something old. This 
 only must be admitted, that as the political 
 horizon expanded at that time, so also this 
 divine ruler assumed grander dimensions be- 
 fore the eyes of the nation. The particular- 
 ism of restricted isolation was roughly 
 broken through by events, and one learned 
 to look also at the designed leading of other 
 nations by Jehovah. That it served a large- 
 ly concerned plan with a positive object in 
 view, Isaiah made especially clear, and this 
 purpose or goal of the history of the world 
 has since been kept in view by the prophets 
 in an ever more insistent manner. The 
 Mosaic God, in spite of his terrific majesty, 
 revealed that grace and mercy were of his 
 innermost essence (Exod. 34. 6 sq.). More 
 and more the knowledge grew that the 
 nations existed not simply to glorify God 
 as objects of his wrathful judgment, or to 
 serve him as instruments of judgment on 
 
48 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 his own people, but that they were also 
 objects of the loving care of God and were 
 destined after their obstinacy was broken 
 down to serve the true God who would also 
 gloriously manifest himself in Israel for 
 them, in order that they should take part 
 in his blessings and saving mercies. The 
 very Babylonian exile which on the one 
 hand served to fill the Jews with an insupera- 
 ble repugnance to the idolatrous aberrations 
 of heathenism, brought them on the other 
 hand into closer contact with the human 
 race outside and contributed no little to the 
 fact that illuminated minds among them 
 conceived the religion of Jehovah in a more 
 universal manner. 
 
Religion of the Bible 49 
 
 V 
 
 Development of the Relation of the 
 Old Testament Church to God 
 
 Contemporaneously with this development 
 a progressive individualization of religion 
 was effectuated. It showed itself more as 
 a relation of God to individual members of 
 the congregation, whereas formerly the in- 
 dividual receded behind the national. In 
 this too it has often been generalized too 
 much and judged too categorically. It has 
 been asserted that in older times the Israelit- 
 ish religion, in general, knew of no relation 
 of the individual to Jehovah but only of the 
 tribe or people to God. Only the people 
 were the object of divine love, care, and 
 sympathizing guidance. The individual 
 could not confidently expect it in private or 
 personal matters ; this was an exaggeration 
 of a true perception. How God cared for 
 the individual even in the smallest things 
 and punishes the sins of the individual, the 
 oldest patriarchal stories have already 
 proved. One could not put aside reference 
 
50 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 to them with the consideration that an 
 Abram, Isaac, Jacob, as types of the future 
 people, had to stand in just the same rela- 
 tion to Jehovah as the whole people after- 
 ward stood. In the consciousness of the 
 pious Israelites these fathers were not com- 
 mon ideas but personalities of flesh and 
 blood, and their example showed how Jeho- 
 vah dealt with his votaries, how he visited 
 them in mercy or punished their shortcom- 
 ings. That he thus stood to them in a cer- 
 tain personal relation and treated them in- 
 dividually was understood as a matter of 
 course. In those family-stories (history of 
 Joseph) we find overwhelming evidences 
 that God not only keenly observed the indi- 
 vidual acts of men and rewarded or punished 
 them according to incorruptible justice, but 
 also so directed them in a most specific way 
 that they would finally serve his plan. Thus 
 migrating men of Israel certainly encour- 
 aged themselves by Jacob's example whom 
 his God so faithfully preserved abroad and 
 helped him to fortune and prosperity. And 
 the women in ancient Israel, a Hannah or 
 the Shunammite, the friend of Elisha, in 
 their domestic concerns and matrimonial 
 
Religion of the Bible 51 
 
 cares could not think otherwise of God's 
 rule than as was told of the wives of Abram, 
 Isaac, and Jacob, where affecting- traits are 
 not wanting which serve to show that God 
 cared also for the tender feelings of a wife 
 and mother and espoused their cause (Gen. 
 29. 31 ; 21. 16 sq.). 
 
 It lies in the nature of the thing that in 
 the historical books of the Old Testament 
 as a rule we only hear of God's ways with 
 the people as a whole. Family life is only 
 mentioned where it became of importance 
 for all Israel. In like manner the prophets 
 as a rule were only concerned about the wel- 
 fare of the people. Nevertheless it is hardly 
 correct when one imagines that men of God 
 like Samuel, Nathan, Isaiah, and others, con- 
 sidered public affairs only as worthy of spe- 
 cial illumination by God's prophetical word. 
 One certainly asked of them instruction also 
 in private affairs, instruction not merely in 
 the sense of a legal decision, but also of 
 direction, counsel, and comfort in perplexing 
 questions and under heavy personal inflic- 
 tions. With what loving care such a man of 
 God could even enter into the little needs of 
 the private life and remove them through 
 
52 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 God's light and power, the history of Elisha 
 shows. It has been asserted against a "min- 
 isterial" activity of this man that in those 
 narratives from the colonies of the prophets 
 the question was only of alleviating outward 
 needs (in the present pastoral case it occu- 
 pied perhaps no less a place), but the main 
 thing here is this, that the individual life 
 also (not merely the communal or national 
 life) was governed by God's powers of 
 grace; and when, as we accidentally learn, 
 the same prophet on the new moons or sab- 
 baths gathered around his dwelling on 
 Mount Carmel the religious people from the 
 neighborhood (2 Kings 4. 23), he there 
 spoke to them in the name of his God cer- 
 tainly not only of national affairs, but 
 entered also into their personal, spiritual 
 wants. 
 
 It is, however, correct that in the course 
 of time the relation between God and the 
 congregation deepened and became thereby 
 more personal and individual. The small 
 communities of the faithful which Elisha 
 gathered around him, in part in the groups 
 of the prophets, were at that time a kind of 
 ccclesiola in ecclesia; such existed before 
 
Religion of the Bible 53 
 
 and constituted at the time of Elijah those 
 seven thousand who bowed not their knee 
 unto Baal. Here already tribal relationship 
 or consanguinity with national theoretical 
 recollections no longer formed or condi- 
 tioned communion, at least not such alone, 
 but belief in the ancient deeds of Jehovah. 
 Allegiance to him was decisive and also that 
 communion which the prophetic word had 
 established and fostered. This was the 
 kernel of the people of God which, according 
 to Isaiah and all his successors, was destined 
 to form the "remnant" of the future, a rem- 
 nant in which the national church should live 
 on through all the judgments of God and 
 extend into the time of final salvation in 
 order to realize some day the idea of the 
 theocracy. 
 
 In these prophetical hopes of the future 
 the later so-called Messiah occupies a promi- 
 nent place. In this also the strong tendency 
 of this religion toward personal develop- 
 ment expresses itself. The living and ruling 
 "anointed of Jehovah" occupied in religious 
 respect already an important position; and 
 though analogies are found for it elsewhere, 
 also it is peculiar to the Israelitish religion 
 
54 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 that it expects its consummation from a king 
 of the future, in whom the Godhead and 
 humanity shall meet the closest relation. 
 This hope is not connected with a future 
 priest but with a scion of the house of David, 
 a king after the heart of Jehovah. In him 
 Israel would somehow be personified in 
 order to enter upon the closest union with 
 God thinkable. When the people in their 
 representative head should be so harmoni- 
 ously united with the Lord, the serenity of 
 God's pleasure in his people and the pros- 
 perity of the latter comes of itself. 
 
 It is true with this son of David, rich in 
 honors, there is a remarkable contrast in 
 the picture of the "servant of Jehovah," 
 who is delineated in certain portions of the 
 second book of Isaiah (Isa. 42. 1-4; 49. 1-6; 
 50. 4-9 ; 52. 13-53). But these very peculiar 
 descriptions of the perfect servant form a 
 grand proof of the effort of this religion 
 toward personification. For the idea of this 
 servant and his office proceeds very properly 
 from the calling of Israel as the people of 
 Jehovah. This people were called to the 
 service which the servant rendered, but 
 proved themselves very unfit for it. Thus 
 
Religion of the Bible 55 
 
 comes before the eye of the seer a figure 
 who performs it without fault. That this 
 figure cannot be identical with the people, 
 present or future, is most clearly seen from 
 passages like Isa. 42. 6 sq. ; 49. 6; 53. 8, 
 where the people appeared rather as the 
 object of his deliverance and atonement. In 
 the picture, delineated in a strictly personal 
 manner, a plurality of godly, prophetically 
 active sufferers and confessors might at most 
 be uniformly comprised, but should one have 
 asked the seer who outlined the picture 
 whether he expected the fulfillment through 
 an individual or a collective plurality, ac- 
 cording to my conviction he would have 
 answered in the former sense. For this 
 view speaks not only the analogy of the Is- 
 raelitish history, where in the greatest epochs 
 an individual formed the medium through 
 which the whole work of the Lord was 
 mediated, thus Moses and Joshua, Samuel, 
 David ; but the servant himself is very clear- 
 ly made knowable as a second Moses or 
 Joshua, for instance, Isa. 49. 6, and also the 
 references to the Hope which one expected 
 from the future son of David, are by no 
 means wanting, as Sell in has especially 
 
56 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 proved. It is therefore a scion who pro- 
 ceeded from the people but by far surpass- 
 ing them in dignity and disposition, who 
 would help the people to a right attitude 
 before God and at the same time bring the 
 distant inhabitants of the world to an 
 acknowledgment of the revelation of Je- 
 hovah. 
 
 The many-voiced echo of prophetical rev- 
 elations we find in the Psalms. These allow 
 us to look into a more living, more affect- 
 ing, more personally reciprocal relation be- 
 tween Jehovah and his worshipers than the 
 hymns of the Riga Veda, or the Babylonian 
 penitential litanies with which they have 
 already been compared. It is also a mistake 
 to assume that the I of the Psalms is always 
 collective, spoken in the name of the congre- 
 gation as has recently been done again by 
 prominent specialists. True, the personifica- 
 tion of Israel as a national or cultic unit in 
 preexilic as in postexilic time is nothing 
 unusual. See the "Thou" in the Decalogue 
 and in the Aaronic blessing (Num. 6. 24- 
 26). Why should a singer not speak, pray, 
 praise in the name of his congregation ? In 
 the Psalms of Solomon, those apocryphal 
 
Religion of the Bible 57 
 
 hymns from the time of Pompey, this is 
 doubtless the case. But the prayer of Ha- 
 bakkuk (Hab. 3) speaks, after verse 14, in 
 the name of the congregation. In the 
 Lamentations of Jeremiah such seems also 
 to be the case ; and in the prophets we fre- 
 quently find examples or statements of such 
 hymnological performance of the congrega- 
 tion where it speaks of itself with I. Such 
 hymns may also be expected in the Psalms ; 
 but it is an unauthorized preconception to 
 suppose such there throughout, for there are 
 hymns in which he who prays is clearly 
 enough distinguished from the congregation 
 for whose edification he gratefully wishes to 
 make known his personal experience of sal- 
 vation; see Psalm 22 (verse 26), 40 (verse 
 9 sq.), and others. Outer experiences, and 
 inner feelings especially, are very often too 
 individualistic not to be wholly of a personal 
 nature ; and as a rule those individual songs 
 of prayer very clearly detach themselves 
 from the cultic hymns mostly belonging to 
 the later postexilic time, which were evi- 
 dently composed for the religious service of 
 the congregation. Even if one takes a song 
 like Psalm 23, where the question might 
 
58 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 perhaps arise whether it was sung in the 
 name of a righteous individual or of the 
 godly congregation, feelings of communion 
 with God are here (as in so many of these 
 glorious hymns of prayer, and also in the 
 penitential hymns, Psa. 32, 51) so devout 
 and warm that, at any rate, they must have 
 been first experienced by the individual be- 
 fore they could have been put into the mouth 
 of others. Thus the Psalter is a rich source 
 of proofs how personally and individually 
 this Old Testament religion developed in the 
 congregation. And these proofs belong to 
 many centuries. The statement supported 
 by the entire tradition that King David had 
 given an impulse to psalmody, deserves by 
 no means the skeptical refusal which today 
 is frequently bestowed upon it. Whoever 
 reads the description of David's behavior at 
 the rebellion of his son Absalom (2 Sam. 
 15. 19), which was certainly composed by a 
 contemporary, will at the outset believe this 
 king, with his fervent and tender as well as 
 truly pious feeling, capable of such lyrical 
 Prayers as Psa. 3, 4, 51, and others. And 
 whoever knows the prophets Amos, Hosea, 
 Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, cannot doubt that 
 
Religion of the Bible 59 
 
 the preexilic Israel had its cultic lyric poetry, 
 and he will not be surprised to hear in Psa. 
 137. 3, that it was known in Babylon. Our 
 present Psalter is indeed the hymn-book of 
 the second temple, not in the sense that all 
 these hymns were composed after the exile, 
 but rather that just as in our church hymn- 
 books, an old treasure of hymns was received 
 into it when many things may have been 
 changed in language or otherwise through 
 frequent use. 
 
 This much may safely be ascertained from 
 the Psalter as from other sources, that per- 
 sonal communion of the individual with God 
 was at all times very active among pious 
 Israelites. True, the hieratic apparatus was 
 still highly valued ; but already in the older 
 time, just as in this, we find close com- 
 munion of pious individuals with God. And 
 progressive prophetical revelation developed 
 this personal relation ever more freely. 
 Think of it, how the great prophets of the 
 eighth century abolished sacrifice as non- 
 essential, yea, as rather impeding true atti- 
 tude toward God; how Jeremiah repre- 
 sented the covenant-sign of circumcision as 
 worthless unless the ears and hearts were 
 
60 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 circumcised; how the same prophet de- 
 stroyed the trust in the temple as the holy 
 habitation of God and considered it as un- 
 necessary in a better future (Jer. 3. 16), 
 even the sacred palladium of the Ark of 
 the Covenant, when the Mosaic covenant 
 should be replaced by a New Covenant 
 which would be founded not upon outwardly 
 written tables but upon changed hearts (31. 
 31 sqq.). But let me also observe how 
 Ezekiel, who likewise so strongly empha- 
 sized change of heart as the condition of 
 future right relation with God (Ezek. 36. 
 25 sqq.), at the same time asserted as none 
 else did the individual treatment of the indi- 
 vidual by the righteous God and thereby 
 also most emphatically enjoined upon human 
 pastorship its responsibility (Ezek. 18. 1 
 sqq.; 33. 1 sqq.). 
 
 It is evident how much such teachings 
 could contribute to the independence of 
 religious personalities in the congregation; 
 only it is a mistake to assume that such veri- 
 ties, when once apprehended by the indi- 
 vidual, must of themselves become the com- 
 mon property of the people or of the right- 
 eous. The external character of piety which 
 
Religion of the Bible 6i 
 
 the following centuries brought shows the 
 reverse. Religious cognitions do not evolve 
 like technical inventions and practices; on 
 this account advance in this department is 
 neither constant nor rectilinear. But there 
 came an epoch for Judaism when all the 
 noblest sap which had come up in the tribe 
 produced a blossom in which, humanly 
 speaking, the tribe surpassed itself. 
 
62 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 VI 
 
 The Perfect Bearer of God-Communion 
 — Christ 
 
 Jesus Christ professed the God of Moses 
 and of the prophets. So far he brought no 
 new religion. But being united with God 
 in a unique manner, he brought a new one 
 by bringing about through his person a new 
 revelation of men to God, and thus made 
 this relation more personal. 
 
 He himself called this God his Father and 
 by so doing attested a unique connection in 
 which he stood with God, a relation, which 
 in contradistinction to all men, even to his 
 disciples, must belong to him. The distance 
 between the Master and his disciples of 
 which we spoke above (p. 19) becomes here 
 the greatest, hence his authority, which is 
 the highest. Not only according to his own 
 statements but also according to the claims 
 of his appearance, Jesus stood in such a near 
 relation to God that the terms "inspiration," 
 "revelation," fail to convey the full idea. 
 God did not merely appear unto him, did 
 
Religion of the Bible 63 
 
 not merely reveal himself to him, did not 
 merely send his Spirit into him, but over 
 against the world and men he knew himself 
 as one with God. The future "theocracy" 
 was at the same time his kingdom. "He 
 that seeth me seeth the Father." But no 
 trace of pantheism is found here as if he 
 could no more distinguish the / and Thou. 
 The Father is so consciously and clearly dis- 
 tinguished from his own I, that on a certain 
 occasion he could also say: "Not my will, 
 but thine be done." And whenever he spoke 
 of the Father it was done with a fervor, an 
 unreserved love, a childlike trust, that one 
 must feel how real for him was this personal 
 life of the Father. Deeper yet than all the 
 prophets he knew the nature of God as 
 personal. The attitude of Jesus toward God 
 is without analogy among the religious 
 geniuses whom humanity has produced. 
 The meaning of religion has obtained in him 
 a peerless perfection. Here we have the 
 perfect relation of God and man in the Son 
 of man who was at the same time the Son 
 of God. 
 
 Mohammed scrupled at nothing so much 
 as that God should have had a son. His 
 
64 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 Allah, of whose strictly undivided unity he 
 was so proud, lacked the fullness of the per- 
 sonal life which was perfected in the Father 
 of Jesus Christ. Allah's relation to Moham- 
 med himself is much more outwardly. The 
 "prophet" to whom, in the language of the 
 Mohammedan theologians, Allah threw his 
 revelation-sayings like shooting-stars, stood 
 in no inner relation to him — with his inner 
 man he had nothing to do. This is most 
 obviously perceived from this, that an ethic- 
 ally satisfying influence upon his person did 
 not proceed from these revelations. This 
 want, which strongly contrasts his mission 
 with that of the Old Testament prophets, 
 and when compared with the conduct of 
 Christ altogether denotes a pitiful decline, 
 threw also an unfavorable light upon the 
 god preached by him. This want was in 
 general no less in his zealous professors. 
 They too obtained no living reciprocal rela- 
 tion between God and man; and where a 
 mystical absorption in Allah was sought as 
 in the case with the £ufi under Persian in- 
 fluence, the deity dissolved pantheistically. 
 Islamism was not, as its professors thought, 
 the highest degree of monotheism, but 
 
Religion of the Bible 65 
 
 showed that it was about to relapse into the 
 naturalism of heathenism. 
 
 Nor did Buddha, whom one is inclined to 
 put by the side of Christ as the founder of a 
 "universal religion/' deserve this honor. 
 What induced Sakamuni to seek deliverance 
 whereby he could first deliver himself and 
 then all men, was evil, sickness, age, death. 
 Fear of these made him an ascetic and when 
 he saw that the sore Brahmanic self -affliction 
 did not, after all, deliver him from the fear 
 of death, he became a meditating philoso- 
 pher. While meditating he imagined that 
 he found the means of deliverance for all 
 men in the knowledge of the four fundamen- 
 tal truths whose practical result is that man 
 must free himself from all lust, all desire for 
 life, and therefore extricate himself from 
 family ties and worldly affairs, in order to 
 be released from the entire enchainment of 
 causes and effects which hold man in the 
 spell of the evil world. 
 
 Already this starting-point of the mission 
 of Buddha stood below that which prompted 
 Jesus to redeem men. Jesus cared for some- 
 thing higher than that he himself could 
 escape from evil and afterward deliver 
 
66 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 others from it. He cared for the kingdom 
 of God; for the will of his Father. He 
 perceived the root of all evil to be the 
 estrangement of men from God. 
 
 Buddha also perceived that evil had an 
 ethical cause. He strongly emphasized that 
 every deed, whether good or bad, is closely 
 followed by its reward ; but he knew nothing 
 of God, the Father. The gods of India 
 were for him indifferent figures. Man 
 needed no God for his deliverance ; he must 
 deliver himself by keen thinking and strength 
 of mind ; there is no other way. Buddhism 
 preached a moral philosophy and its five 
 fundamental commandments were almost 
 identical with those of Moses contained in 
 the second Table ; but of the first Table, of 
 duties toward God, Buddhism knew nothing. 
 Prayer is therefore omitted; in its place is 
 cosmos, contemplation, absorption into the 
 unconscious which gives a blessed foretaste 
 of Nirvana; the evaporation of personal 
 existence and consciousness, the final hope 
 of the true disciple of Buddha. 
 
 Here we miss that which is constitutive 
 for every religion, the relation of man to 
 the deity. Ancient, original Buddhism 
 
Religion of the Bible 67 
 
 should be called a life-philosophy rather than 
 a religion. It had never become a religion 
 of the people, but, like Manichseism, would 
 have remained an order for the world-escap- 
 ing cultured had it not experienced an essen- 
 tial change in the interest of popularization, 
 whereby its too highly strained idealism took 
 an opposite turn. Had Buddha disdained 
 every cult he now would have become an 
 object of worship among a number of other 
 gods associated with him. The cult became 
 external, mechanical beyond anything seen 
 in many religions. It is true thatSakyamuni 
 should not be held responsible for this degen- 
 eration, but without it Buddhism had never 
 become one of the most diffused religions. 
 The small elite, however, which at present 
 conforms to Buddha in decided alienation 
 from family and worldly affairs, has no real 
 religion in its system, but an insufficient 
 equivalent for it. A religion without belief 
 in deity, without prayer, without hope, lacks 
 all that which is necessary for religion. The 
 heroic virtues, contempt of the world and of 
 self-devotion, may grow also on philosoph- 
 ical soil; but the love in which Buddhism 
 glories must not be confounded with that of 
 
68 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 the Christian. It lacks the root which the 
 latter has in its faith. Only when man knows 
 God as his Father, can he truly love his fel- 
 low-men as his brothers. Schopenhauer has 
 indeed imagined that theBuddhist love ought 
 to be preferred to the Christian because it 
 goes out indiscriminately also to animals; 
 but in this we see rather the inferiority of 
 this contemplation of the world which pro- 
 ceeded from Indian naturalism. Buddhist 
 love did not concern itself with the divine in 
 man, it was mere sympathy with nature, and 
 over and above it is strongly influenced by 
 calculation. One does not really love his 
 fellow-man but wishes to get rid of himself, 
 and to do this he must help him. Where 
 there is no positive life-aim, love becomes 
 aimless. 
 
 It would be difficult to understand how in 
 our days Buddhism could be successful in 
 any degree on the soil of civilized Christen- 
 dom — a doctrine which neither knows how 
 to satisfy religious need nor is able to put 
 before man a world-task which gives some 
 value to life — did we not know that many 
 have made shipwreck of belief in God and 
 his gospel of love concerning the world, and 
 
Religion of the Bible 69 
 
 consequently have fallen back on a wretched 
 pessimism for which the profound Indian 
 itinerant preacher seems to offer them a 
 worthy setting. Add to this that modern 
 Buddhist missionaries do not demand strict 
 Buddha-discipline, with its monastic renun- 
 ciation, and that over and above all the sys- 
 tem is mixed with a strong admixture of 
 modern aromatics, especially American spir- 
 itism, and is thus made palatable for "mod- 
 ern" truth. 
 
yo The Peculiarity of the 
 
 VII 
 
 The Consummation of the Congrega- 
 tion Through a Personal 
 Relation to Christ 
 
 In formal respects Buddhism shows many 
 points of contact with Christianity. Con- 
 sideration must be especially had to this, that 
 Buddha did not consider belonging to a 
 nation or caste the basis for forming a con- 
 gregation, but assent to his teaching and its 
 observance, thus making it an entirely per- 
 sonal matter. National Brahminism was 
 thus developed through Sakamuni into a 
 personal religion. On biblical soil Chris- 
 tianity made the same progress over Juda- 
 ism. 
 
 The congregation of Christ was estab- 
 lished according to another principle than 
 that of the Old Testament. Not birth, not 
 the law of the country or people determined 
 discipleship, but the personal attitude toward 
 Jesus. "Christians" (Acts n. 26; 26. 28; 
 1 Pet. 4. 16), adherents of Christ, the peo- 
 ple were called who believed on him. This 
 
Religion of the Bible 71 
 
 "sect" was composed of a people of both 
 sexes from all manner of origin, nation, lan- 
 guage, education, but by its very belief in 
 Jesus as the Anointed of God it was inward- 
 ly kept together, so that their unity and 
 brotherly love surprised everybody. Later 
 development must not make us forget that 
 Christianity was originally and according to 
 its essence not a national but a personal reli- 
 gion. The inner personal attitude of the 
 individual determines his relation to the con- 
 gregation, to the Church of Christ. Herein 
 consists an essential moment of the progress 
 of spiritualization and inwardness from the 
 Old to the New Covenant, from Judaism to 
 Christianity. 
 
 It is no less important to acknowledge and 
 to hold fast that the new relation in which 
 believing Christians stand to God as their 
 Father, is not merely opened by Jesus, dis- 
 covered and proclaimed, but is conditioned 
 by his person. Even according to the three 
 first gospels Jesus presented himself as the 
 One who decided on reception into or exclu- 
 sion from the kingdom of God. He per- 
 sonally remitted men their sins just as he 
 healed their diseases. His many healings 
 
*j2 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 which appertained to his daily work were not 
 merely proofs of mercy; for, according to 
 his mode of thinking, he did not care so 
 much that these children of men should 
 enjoy a few more years the use of their 
 sound limbs, but rather for this, that they 
 should enter into the kingdom of God. For 
 said he: "It is better for thee to enter into 
 life maimed, than having two hands to go 
 into hell," etc. (Mark 9. 43-47). These 
 healings had rather also the expressed pur- 
 pose to justify him as such who had power 
 to forgive sins (Mark 2. 10 sq.) and alto- 
 gether to prove him as the promised Christ 
 (Matt. 11. 4 sq. ; see also 11. 21 sqq.). 
 Where Jesus gave his disciples powers of 
 this kind, to heal diseases, to drive out im- 
 pure spirits, etc., he told them to act In his 
 name, as it were in his place. He also gave 
 them not merely a doctrine concerning God 
 and directions for a God-pleasing life which 
 were also valid aside from his person, so 
 that they could practice his injunctions also 
 without him, but what he taught them and 
 made them do, was to stand in immediate 
 relation to the kingdom of God, whose King 
 he is, which kingdom came in his person and 
 
Religion of the Bible 73 
 
 the full development of which was to be 
 expected in the future. 
 
 But a necessary preliminary condition 
 which must be fulfilled ere this glorious con- 
 summation could come about was, according 
 to the statements often repeated by Jesus, 
 his impending suffering, death, and resurrec- 
 tion in the near future. These assurances of 
 Jesus have not received as yet their proper 
 recognition by some of our modern theolo- 
 gians. Just as formerly in the old rational- 
 ism, so now on the part of some, a teaching 
 is pointed out as the essential service which 
 Jesus rendered to humanity, which could 
 just as well have been founded on itself as 
 upon his person, a teaching of the goodness 
 and love of the heavenly Father, as whose 
 child one may feel himself in all conditions 
 of life and despite of the accusations of con- 
 science, and of the brotherly love which one 
 should show to all men, even to his enemies 
 — a teaching, therefore, which one may see 
 already fostered in the Old Testament and 
 which Judaism could pluck as ripe fruit with- 
 out further special revelation of God. It is 
 not easy for these theologians to explain the 
 great stress which Jesus put upon the neces- 
 
74 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 sity of his suffering and violent death. They 
 would look upon this suffering and death 
 only as a kind of appendix and specimen to 
 that very teaching. Here Jesus's trust in 
 God proved itself under the most difficult 
 circumstances conceivable, and showed his 
 love to men in that he held back this proof 
 of it to the last. 
 
 I confess that this explanation of his un- 
 deniably voluntary death, considered in a 
 purely human, historical way, strikes me as 
 improbability itself. Whoever compares the 
 careers of other great founders of religion, 
 of a Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, must 
 above all things be surprised at the very dis- 
 proportionate shortness of the ministry of 
 Jesus. If he desired above everything to 
 impress men with such teaching by his word 
 and example, he had to preach and propa- 
 gate this truth as long as possible, in order 
 that it would have time to take sufficient 
 root in closer and wider circles; and with 
 his unlimited trust in God, he could not 
 doubt at all that a long and successful activi- 
 ty was assigned to him, from which one 
 could expect that it would serve its purpose. 
 Instead, he speaks almost from the begin- 
 
Religion of the Bible 75 
 
 ning and again and again of the cross, of 
 his coming suffering, and violent death; 
 yea, he speaks of it in such a manner (for 
 instance, Mark 10. 45; Matt. 20. 28) as if 
 he considered it as the chief object of his 
 coming, the climax of his mission! He 
 could not have had in view a mere didactic 
 martyr-death. Before definitely formulating 
 his teaching in any way, and before it was 
 understood in any degree — if only by his 
 most select disciples — and remembering all 
 the misunderstandings of his teachings unto 
 the last evening — how could he run so 
 prematurely to a martyr-death to confirm 
 by his example the truth of his teaching! 
 And if he wanted this, if he really meant to 
 illustrate merely the victory of trust in God, 
 or as, for instance, Ritschl explained the 
 meaning of ransom, if he wished to show to 
 his followers that one must not fear death 
 since the pious became not objectless in 
 death — he should not have died this death; 
 he ought to have died like a Socrates, with- 
 out sign of pain, convincing his disciples by 
 his serene face that death is nothing. He 
 dared not be sore amazed and very heavy 
 in Gethsemane at the mere approach of 
 
j6 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 death ; he dared not exclaim from the cross : 
 "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
 me !" This end, leaving aside the resurrec- 
 tion as problematical or unhistorical, is a 
 bad pattern for his followers. Only one in- 
 ference can be drawn from it : "If they do 
 these things in a green tree, what shall be 
 done in the dry?" If trust in God has not 
 kept the most godly of the sons of God from 
 such a dreadful end, what right have we to 
 expect from God anything better! 
 
 Wholly aside from the Christian faith, it 
 seems to me an impossibility from a purely 
 historical and religio-comparative point of 
 view to ascribe to Jesus that scheming in- 
 tention, considering his evidently spontane- 
 ous surrender to death. If we only had the 
 three synoptists, and no Gospel of John, and 
 not one Pauline Epistle, I could only infer 
 from the words of Jesus and his entire 
 demeanor that, according to the prophecies 
 of Scripture, he seems to have considered 
 his suffering and death as his principal work 
 for which his teaching was preparatory; 
 and the voluntary surrender of his life unto 
 death he seems to have conceived as a neces- 
 sary atonement for the sins of men, and by 
 
Religion of the Bible yy 
 
 which he expected to redeem many from the 
 curse of sin and its consequences. In other 
 words, what one calls the Pauline doctrine 
 of redemption is only the development of 
 that which Jesus consciously endeavored to 
 obtain. 
 
 By this position which Jesus occupied over 
 against his congregation, Christianity essen- 
 tially differed not only from Judaism but 
 also from Islamism, Buddhism, and other 
 spiritual religions. Mohammed is merely a 
 prophet, though "the seal of the prophets ,, 
 is merely a guide to lead men back to salva- 
 tion by the "straight way." But Jesus claims 
 to be himself "the Way." Buddha pretends 
 to be the enlightened one who knew the 
 truth. But Jesus called himself the "Light 
 and the Truth." Herman Oldenberg, the 
 acknowledged authority on primitive Bud- 
 dhism, once said that we could wholly fancy 
 away the person of Buddha without any 
 detriment to his system. He is, then, only 
 one of the Buddhas who have appeared in 
 the course of the aeons to make known again 
 the hidden or forgotten way to deliverance 
 from the burden of existence. 
 
 It is entirely different with the Gospel of 
 
yS The Peculiarity of the 
 
 Christ. By eliminating from it the person 
 of Jesus Christ, it loses its firm hold and 
 deeper content. The statement that we are 
 children of God, of the God who is Love — 
 which may be stated as the essence of Chris- 
 tianity — would only too soon succumb to 
 opposing experiences which rush against it 
 from the outside world and from one's own 
 consciousness and conscience. And even if 
 it could yet scantily assert itself, it would 
 lose the deeper content which it has in the 
 gospel and would sink down to a vague feel- 
 ing which we find in all grades of culture, in 
 religions of the most varied kind where God 
 is called on as Father of mankind, save that 
 no higher power of life proceeds from this 
 consciousness. 
 
 But if we emphasize the ethical as well as 
 the essential in the teaching of Jesus, a com- 
 parison of Confucius and the Chinese mas- 
 ters is to be recommended. The old rational- 
 ism has not seldom compared Jesus and 
 Confucius. It did it with a certain right be- 
 cause, as a moralist, it esteemed Jesus the 
 most. Now it is remarkable that, to the 
 question whether there exists a single word 
 which could serve as a central maxim for 
 
Religion of the Bible 79 
 
 the whole life, Kong-tse answered : "Is not 
 reciprocity such a word? What you wish 
 not done unto you, do also not to others." 1 
 Thus, what Jesus indicated (Matt. 7. 12) 
 as the contents of the Law and the Prophets, 
 Master Kong praised already 550 years 
 earlier as the sum of ethics. Jesus, it is true, 
 goes further by demanding: "Love your 
 enemies!" This the Chinese expressly re- 
 fused with the words: "By recompensing 
 the wrong with goodness, how then shall 
 goodness be recompensed? Recompense 
 wrong with right and goodness with good- 
 ness." But these are very much mistaken 
 who think that Jesus was the first who 
 preached love for enemies. Kong-tse refused 
 it as an exaggeration for the very reason 
 that his predecessor Laotse had taught it. 
 And when in certain quarters Jesus had re- 
 cently been represented with great partiality 
 as a social, moral philosopher, he had in 
 that Micius, 2 a not unworthy analogue, who 
 was indeed not considered orthodox but 
 wholly proceeding from the religious ideas 
 of ancient China, taught : "As heaven loves 
 
 1 Orelli, 1. c, p. 69 sq. 2 Ibid., 1. c, pp. 74 sqq. 
 
80 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 all men without discrimination and does 
 good to all, thus let one love all." His 
 maxim was: "Love that of the other like 
 your own. Would all act accordingly, all 
 social relations would turn out happily." 
 He expects therefrom an undisturbed gov- 
 ernment of the heaven over all the earth. 
 At the same time it is significant that the 
 objection that such a kingdom of mutual 
 love cannot be brought about on account of 
 the egotism of man, he answered: "If the 
 good example would be given from above 
 and reward and punishment would be used 
 for that end, it could be accomplished. How 
 have courtiers put themselves already out 
 of the way to please the rulers ! And if they 
 only would condescend to such an exercise 
 of love, one would experience that love 
 begets love and therefore yields much 
 profit." This optimism with reference to 
 the human will and power is characteristic 
 of all these Chinese teachers. They always 
 imagine that man on the whole is good, and 
 if he is only set right and sees the good 
 example, it cannot fail. Jesus did not share 
 this optimism ; otherwise he would not have 
 prepared for death. 
 
Religion of the Bible 8i 
 
 We see, however, that the specific in 
 Christianity does not lie even in the teach- 
 ing of a humanity of the furthest extent; 
 its essence lies in the person of Jesus united 
 with God and in his unique intercession for 
 man. By this the disciple of Jesus is also 
 inseparably united to this person. For 
 Christ is not only the teacher but the priestly 
 mediator, who assures for him access to 
 the heavenly Father. This gives to genuine 
 Christianity its special peculiarity. We have 
 not a hieratic apparatus, an impersonal insti- 
 tution, which assures to the individual his 
 salvation ; this is a degeneration of genuine 
 Christianity in the churches of a Catholic 
 type. It is also a degeneration when in cer- 
 tain newer Protestant theology it is some- 
 times taught. As a member of the Christian 
 Church I have part in Christ. Rather, when 
 and so far as I have a share in Christ have 
 I become and am a member of the true, 
 believing Church of Christ. 
 
 For this we may only refer to a charac- 
 teristic life-form of the Christian Church. 
 In comparative religion, ministerial acts 
 peculiar to a religion are always especially 
 important. Now Christianity has only two 
 
82 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 such forms which specifically belong to it: 
 Baptism and the Lord's Supper. It is of 
 great interest to note how strongly these 
 two acts testify the indispensableness of a 
 living relation of the individual to the per- 
 son of Jesus. Holy baptism is given in the 
 name of Jesus. It is an immersion and 
 submersion of the human person ; the going 
 down, as it were, of one's own ego, in whose 
 place, through the power of Jesus Christ, is 
 to come another, a new one. "Know ye 
 not," writes Paul, "that as many of us as 
 were baptized into Jesus Christ, were bap- 
 tized into his death? Therefore we are 
 buried with him by baptism into death : that 
 like as Christ was raised up from the dead, 
 even so we should walk in newness of life" 
 (Rom. 6. 3 sq.). This, however, is the Chris- 
 tian rite of initiation which is performed on 
 those who believe in Christ. Only after one 
 has given up his own person and taken 
 Christ, as it were, in its stead, does he be- 
 come, on the whole, a member of the church. 
 Baptism, the " washing of regeneration," 
 means thus a radical break with the past. Is 
 it not strange that Israelites, Mohammedans, 
 Hindoos, who inwardly are closely connect- 
 
Religion of the Bible 83 
 
 ed with Christianity, show an insuperable 
 aversion to baptism and cannot bring them- 
 selves to receive it ? This does not rest upon 
 a mere prejudice against an outward for- 
 mality, but on a correct feeling that many 
 Christians have with regard to baptism. 
 These feel that in it there lies the giving 
 up of the natural man, which is more pain- 
 ful than mere circumcision or the tooth- 
 drawing of the Bora, or the cruel consecra- 
 tions of the Mithra-service. It concerns 
 directly the death of the old man in the name 
 of Christ. 
 
 But when a man through his incorpora- 
 tion in Christ, the Risen One, has come to 
 a new life from above, he can only preserve 
 this life by communion with the person of 
 Christ. This expresses as clearly as word 
 and symbol can speak, the Lord's Supper. 
 Here Jesus assigns himself as meat and 
 drink. The Christian is to feed and to live 
 upon him who personally is the Giver of 
 the highest salvation. Jesus could not more 
 strongly express the connection of each indi- 
 vidual disciple to his person. Here are 
 entirely confirmed the Johannine statements : 
 "I am the bread of life." "Without me ye 
 
84 The Peculiarity of the 
 
 can do nothing!" "Abide in me, and I in 
 you," etc. 
 
 The idea of the church, the communion 
 of Christians among themselves, is indeed 
 of great importance in Christianity; but 
 compared to the relation of the individual to 
 Christ, this communion of the Christians 
 among themselves is secondary, for it is 
 established by that and always remains con- 
 ditioned by that. The closest communion 
 of Christians comes about only through the 
 Holy Spirit, who comes to every one and 
 becomes his personal possession after that 
 he has become a believer in Christ. Thus 
 the Christian state is perfected by a com- 
 munion of the human with the divine per- 
 sonal Spirit, which cannot be obtained out- 
 side of Christianity. We see Christianity 
 as the religion in which the divine personal 
 life opens the purest and richest, and per- 
 vades man in the most personal manner. On 
 this account it alone perfectly realizes the 
 idea of religion. It is the true, the perfect 
 religion. 
 
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