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(Continued from p. 354.)
By
the Rev. Dr. W. Schlessinger
Mr. Miller says (p. 22): “As the God of Israel is
eternally and necessarily one, either Christ must be
the God of Israel, or he is another God!” Mr. Miller
seems not to have thought of a third case, which is,
that Christ was nothing more nor less than a man.
Mr. Miller also displays, in quite a naïve
manner, on the same page, his ill-humour against
Maimonides. This sharp-witted thinker, this
victorious hero in the field of faith and of the
sciences, must necessarily be a thorn in the eye of
every Jew-converter. The doctrine that God has no
material form, and that it is sinful to ascribe to
Him any corporeal qualities, is not in good sooth an
invention of Maimonides, but was from the beginning
a fundamental principle of Judaism. But it is only
to combat reason, and to carry folly to an
extreme point, in Mr. Miller, when he attempts
to make us believe that we Jews are idolaters,
because we do not believe in the divinity of the
crucified, as in a general sense of the word we
reject the possibility of God having during a period
of thirty-three years walked on earth in the shape
of a man.
Whoever is no stranger in the domain of mathematics,
and has but the least acquaintance with logical
argumentation, will agree with us in maintaining
that if, according to the Christian dogma, Christ
was the second person in the deity, when farther,
according to the same doctrine, the second person in
the Godhead is in reality but one being with the
first person, Christ must necessarily have also been
identically the same as the first person of the
deity and consequently God himself—the Father—must
have been manifested in the body in the person of
Jesus. It is therefore no subject of debate for a
thinking Jew, whether God, as Maimonides, in quality
of a true disciple of Moses, teaches us to regard
Him, is a creature of <<460>>metaphysics, of the
imagination, or of scientific pride, or the rather,
whether the god of Mr. Miller is a phantom of the
brain, an uncertain something, or the spurious
offspring of a false philosophy.
Mr. Miller may twist and turn and strive, as he
will, he cannot remove out of himself the inherent
ideas borrowed from paganism: for him there exists
no God if he has not revealed himself in human
shape. Whoever worships a god in Christ must first
create for himself his god, and take due pains to
come to an understanding with the idea thus created
for himself. The Israelite, on the contrary,
worships an almighty, eternal, invisible Being, who
called by his mere word all the worlds into
existence; whose word however is no more god
himself, than either time, space , or world is
invested with the attributes of godhead.
According to the doctrine of Holy Writ, no eye of
man, not even that of Moses, has ever beheld God;
whereas it is perfectly possible for men to hear
clearly and distinctly the voice of God, which is
nevertheless not God himself, and receive thus a
distinct impression of God’s word, and God’s will;
provided only they do not lose, or have not lost
through prejudices, through yielding to passions,
through evil habits, through sinning, the delicate
susceptibility which is capable of being impressed
by the voice of God. This doctrine is no product of
intolerable assumption of a human philosophy, but
rests for support upon a plain declaration of
Scripture, the authority of which Mr. Miller does
not seem to recognise.
We
read in Exodus xxxiii. 20: “He (God) said Thou canst
not see my face for no man can
see me when he is alive.” From this we must draw the
natural deduction that the sensual eye never sees
God, whilst at the same time men are permitted to say
that their mental eye, their spiritual vision,
beholds God.
We
have neither pleasure nor the will to follow Mr.
Miller step by step, to expound all the Bible
passages which he has quoted. It is enough for us to
maintain that wherever the appearing of God is
spoken of, it can mean nothing else than that the
various persons so favoured came to the conviction
through surprising, unusual, and wonderful
occurrences, that the all-superintending Providence
observed and protected them and
<<461>>directed
their affairs. Any observation under such
circumstances made by the outward organs of sight
made on such an impression on them that they at once
beheld the Deity with their spiritual eye.
Respecting the holy quadriliteral name of God we
have already given our view in
the April number of
this year’s Occident, page 30, that although this
name, properly speaking, belongs only to the Supreme
Being, it is demonstrable from many Bible passages,
that it is applied to angels and even to other
beings. The Bible likes to express itself in human
phrases, and has therefore occasionally transferred
the name of the Sender on the messenger whom He has
deputed. At the same time, the Scriptures are to a
surety not responsible for the folly that some men
should have taken advantage of this circumstance to
hold angels as identical with God or for a second
person in the Godhead.
The Lord makes winds his angels, flaming fire his
servants executing in given time and space some
definite purpose of the divine will. Angels are for
us a reflection merely of God’s almighty power; but
it would be nothing else than pure idolatry to pay
them adoration as divinities, to pray to them, not
to mention to identify them with God. Taking this
into consideration the whole structure of arguments
made use of by Mr. Miller, and which are to
demonstrate that the angel (messenger of God) is God
himself and that God revealed or manifested himself
in the second person, falls to the ground, and is
dissolved into its inherent nothingness.
Mr. Miller talks a great deal about the angels that
appeared to Hagar, Abraham, Jacob and to Moses at
the burning bush, as also concerning the one of whom
mention is made in Judges ii. 1-3; but all this has
not the smallest argumentative power, and cannot
cause us to doubt, for one moment even, of the
correctness of our conviction. Whoever does not
believe in advance in the divinity of Christ cannot
to certainty be induced by these innocent angels to
deny the unity of God. But we will give one striking
proof from Exodus xxxiii. 1-4, in case there be yet
one to be found who has need to be convinced that
angels are not identical with God. “The Lord said to
Moses, Depart, go up from here, thou and the people
whom thou host brought up out of the land of
<<462>>Egypt unto the land which I swore unto
Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, Unto thy
seed will I give it; and I will send an angel before
thee, &c., unto a land flowing with milk and honey;
for I will not go up in the midst of thee, because
thou art a stiff-necked people, lest I consume thee
on the way. And when the people heard these bad
tidings, they mourned, and no man put his ornaments
upon him.”
The people evidently mourned; and this announcement
is called “bad tidings,” because God would not go up
in his immediate presence with them, after they had
worshipped the golden calf, but only promised to
send an angel with them. If now this angel had been
the second person of the deity, and consequently
identical with God himself, what cause would there
have been for mourning? Nevertheless this angel is
the very same who, so to say, forms both the key and
corner stone in Mr. Miller’s argument on page 36.
Mr. Miller loves to address to us a multitude of
questions; and on several pages of his pamphlet you
can discover a whole troop of signs of
interrogation. We therefore take the liberty to put
to him the following questions.—Admitting that his
proofs are of any value, how does it happen that
not a trace of them is to be found in the New
Testament? The verses of the Holy Scriptures
cited by the apostles have evidently so little
weight to turn the balance in favour of the divinity
of Christ, that these gentlemen ought to have
embraced with joy the proofs which Mr. Miller now
presents to us. If the authors of the Scriptures
actually believed in the second person of the Deity,
why did they not express this in explicit and
unambiguous terms? A point on which, according to
the fancy of Mr. Miller, the salvation of mankind
depends ought not to have been permitted to rest so
long in obscurity.
Why did not Isaiah especially, who, as the
Christians love to persuade themselves, is said to
have known more of the divinity of Christ than any
other man, not drop the smallest word to tell us
that there exist several persons in the Godhead?
And why, at last, did not the Governor and Ruler of
the universe, when He revealed to His people Israel
from the summit of Sinai the ten commandments
of eternal life, communicate to them the slightest
announcement of his second person? Can it be
supposed that it was less important for them to know
<<463>>this, than that they should make to
themselves no idol, nor form of any thing? And
still, Mr. Miller avers, whoever does not believe in
a second person worships merely an idol of his
imagination.
It
is our opinion that whoever reflects on these
questions with due earnestness, with sincerity,
without bias, with reverence for God, and with love
for God, cannot avoid to confess to himself at
length, that it cannot be otherwise but that Moses
and the prophets have known something of the
messengers of God, but nothing of a diversity of
persons in the Godhead; and that, had the doctrine
of the trinity been already in vogue and power in
those times, these men of God would have condemned
it, and laboured against it with the same zeal as
against any other pagan doctrine.
It
is, however, as clear as the sunlight, and it stands
as firm as the firmament, that Moses and the
prophets knew and taught nothing of a trinity, but
inculcated a pure monotheism, as we read (Deut. vi.
4): “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the Lord
one.”* It is accordingly subject to no doubt
whatever that to the person who for the first time
appeared with this doctrine among Israel and
endeavoured to obtain adherents for the same, is
applicable what is prescribed for us in Deuteronomy
xiii. 2-6 : “If there arise in the midst of thee a
prophet, or a dreamer of dreams and he give thee a
sign, or a token, and the sign or the token come to
pass whereof he spoke unto thee, saying, Let us go
after other gods, which thou dost not know,
and let us serve them: then shalt thou not hearken
unto the words of that prophet, or unto that dreamer
of dream; for the Lord your God proveth you, to know
whether ye indeed love the Lord your God with all
your heart and with all your soul.
<<464>>
“After the Lord your God shall ye walk, and him
shall ye fear, and his commandments shall ye keep,
and his voice shall ye obey, and unto him shall ye
cleave. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams,
shall be put to death; because he hath spoken revolt
against the Lord your God, who hath brought you out
of the land of Egypt, and who hath redeemed thee out
of the house of bondmen, to mislead thee from the
way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk
therein; and thou shalt put the evil away from the
midst of thee.”
In
page 50, Mr. Miller presents us Jesus of Nazareth as
the messenger of God and the true Messiah of Israel,
and bestows upon him extravagant praise, placing him
in rank far above Abraham and Moses. But all this is
nothing new, and it has been placed before us
millions of times ere this, and we have been again
and again asked to accept of the same. The few new
doctrines which emanate from Jesus have nothing
attractive and enticing for us, as we have already
explained above. Jesus himself cannot serve as an
example for our imitation, and, according to our
view, it is a grievous sin to draw any parallel
whatever between him and Moses.*
Where, tell us, are the merits which Jesus acquired
for himself as legislator for mankind? In addition
to his labours for all the world, Moses was the
meekest, the most modest, of men, desiring not the
least honour for himself whereas Jesus must have
been filled with the most frightful pride, and the
most unpardonable and sinful assumption, if it
be true what his apostles relate of him that he
considered himself as the second person in the
Godhead, and one and the same with God. It must
however be considered that had Christ been actually
that which his apostles allege him to have been, it
would have been easier for him—a god—than Moses to
acquire for himself the belief and confidence of the
whole people of Israel. How can we then put the
least credence in the miracles which are related of
him, when he failed in the greatest of all miracles,
universal acceptability, in which Moses so eminently
succeeded?
(To be concluded.) |
