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No. VII.
By Rev. M. R. Miller
To the Rev. Dr. Schlessinger
Dear Sir:
The Sermon on the Mount is the Magna Charta
of the kingdom of Jesus. If anything in that sermon
can be clearly proved inconsistent with the identity
of Judaism and Christianity, this furnishes the
strongest proof against Christianity as identical
with Judaism. You take up some points in this
sermon, and endeavour to prove from them,
Christianity, in some of its principles, repugnant
to Judaism. My opinion is, that you could not have
invited me to a more attractive field for the
examination of the alleged identity.
The first sentence of the Sermon, “Blessed are the
poor in spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven,” excites a smile of piteous contempt. By
poor in spirit you understand the opposite of
compos mentis, and wonder if Jesus could have
entered the kingdom of heaven on his own terms. This
passage gives you your leading proof that
Christianity encourages the neglect of mental
cultivation. The meaning evidently is, that every
Christian must be humble—must be ever ready to take
his proper place in the dust before God. To prove
conclusively the disputed identity in this point,
let me give you the same principle in your own
Scriptures. Isa. lxvi. 2: “But to this man will I
look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite
spirit, and trembleth at my word.” Psalms xxxiv. 18,
“The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken
heart, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.”
You appear not to be pleased that I wait on you with
so many questions; let me then here turn to our
courteous reader, and ask him, if a man indeed rich
in spirit may not, in one instance, be pinched with
poverty of argument?
The doctrine of Jesus in relation to marriage,
admitting <<546>>divorce in only one instance,
appears to you excessively severe. It is worth the
trouble of inquiry, how much truth there is in your
assertion that Christians never pay any attention to
it. It is important here to keep in mind the
distinction between a divorce a vinculo, and
a divorce a mensa et toro. The divorce which
Moses gave a man who was not pleased with his wife
the privilege of giving her (Deut. xxiv.), was a
vinculo, man and wife separated for life. Judge
Kent has the following in relation to the divorce
a mensa et toro, i. e. from bed and board, “The
decree of divorce is always by the canon law, sub
spe reconciliationis.”* Blackstone says, “In
case of divorce a mensa et toro, the law
allows alimony to the wife, which is that allowance
which is made to a woman for her support, out of the
husband’s estate.”
Now, let me tell you that the English common law
knows no such a thing as a divorce a vinculo.
“For the canon law,” says Blackstone, “which the
common law follows in this case, deems so highly and
with such mysterious reverence of the nuptial tie,
that it will not allow it to be unloosed for any
cause whatsoever, that arises after the union is
made.” You will call this overdoing the matter in
attention to the law of Jesus. It is true that man
and woman who have been formally married can be
separated, but only in those cases in which the
union is proved ab initio null, in which the
parties were in the beginning not competent to make
the contract.
Hence the divorces a vinculo matrimonii, for
adultery, have been granted by special acts of
Parliament. Judge Kent says that no divorce took
place in the colony of New York during a hundred
years preceding the Revolution. “At length the
legislature, in 1787, authorized the Court of
Chancery to pronounce divorces a vinculo, in
the single case of adultery, upon a bill filed by
the party aggrieved.” Stricter attention to the law
of Jesus could not have been given. A few pages
after this we meet with the following from Judge
Kent. “The policy of New York has been against
divorces from the marriage contract, except for
adultery. We meet with a great variety of practice
and opinion on this subject, in this country and in
Europe, and <<547>>among ancient and modern nations;
but the stronger authority and the better policy are
in favour of the stability of the marriage union.”
“So strict and scrupulous has been the policy of
South Carolina, that there is no instance in that
state since the Revolution, of a divorce of any
kind, either by the sentence of a court of justice,
or by act of the legislature. In all other states
divorces a vinculo may be granted judicially
for adultery.” The Judge proceeds to state, that in
some of the States an absolute divorce cannot be
granted, for any other reason arising after the
marriage than adultery; and that, in other States,
adultery is not the only ground of absolute divorce.
One other extract from the Commentaries of Kent.
“Voluntary divorces were abolished by one of the
novels of Justinian, and they were afterwards
revived by another novel of the Emperor Justin. In
the novel restoring the unlimited freedom of
divorce, the reasons for it are assigned , and while
it was admitted that nothing ought to be held so
sacred in civil society as marriage, it was declared
that the hatred, misery, and crimes, which often
flowed from indissoluble connexions, required as a
necessary remedy, the restoration of the old law, by
which marriage was dissolved by mutual will and
consent. This practice of divorce is understood to
have continued in the Byzantine or Eastern Empire,
to the ninth or tenth century, and until it was
finally subdued by the influence of Christianity.”
This extract gives the precise reason for voluntary
divorces which Jesus gave for the permissive
enactment of Moses in relation to divorces. In both
instances the law yielded to the hardness of men’s
hearts. But, according to the teaching of Christ,
there ought to be, in a Christian community, no
divorces except for one cause. According to its
origin and its nature, the union can, in no instance
except one, be dissolved; the husband may receive
any bodily injury, he may become insane, he may lose
the means of procuring his daily bread, he may
become so cruel that her safety requires her to live
apart, yet the Christian wife always views herself
as still his, and never thinks of another husband.
And woman never has her full right in any community,
where the husband is not considered equally bound to
his wife. Happy <<548>>for the Jews in Russia,
Poland, and Palestine if they had interpreted the
law after Shammai and Christ, rather than after
Hillel.
No
reasonable objection can be made to Christ’s
prohibition of the then customary oaths, by heaven,
by the footstool of God, by Jerusalem, and by one’s
own head. Such a custom of swearing implies a
distrust, dishonesty, and degradation in society,
which are inconsistent with the Christian character.
It
is unquestionable that many Rabbis have so explained
and asserted the perpetuity of the law of Moses in
all its parts, that they could not have a fraternal
feeling towards all Gentiles, or towards their
enemies. It was a command to show no mercy to the
seven doomed nations. In some of the Psalms, very
severe language is used against enemies and
strangers. Equally severe is the imprecation of
Nehemiah, “Hear, O Our God, for we are despised, and
turn their reproach upon their own head, and give
them for a prey in the land of captivity, and cover
not their iniquity, and let not their sin be blotted
out from before thee.”
A
selfish, bigoted Jew could hardly fail to infer from
such passages that he was not required to pray for
his enemy. The possibility that such interpretations
were current in the time of Christ, admits of no
doubt. Hence the important question was to be
settled, whether, in the new system which Christ
would establish, the relations of the Hebrews to all
other nations should remain precisely the same as
laid down in the law of Moses. Should the Christian
community look with more favour on one nation than
on another, as the law did? Would it be consistent
in a follower of Jesus to follow the example of
Nehemiah, in praying that his enemies might be taken
into captivity, and that their sins might not be
covered? Jesus answered these questions, that the
relations of hostility in which the law placed the
Hebrews to certain nations were eventually to cease.
Now it was a duty to pray for enemies, and treat
them kindly, rather than hate them. Many severities
of the law against other nations have had their
time, and were proper in their time, but they must
no loner be thought of. The disciples were to avoid
the language of Nehemiah in prayer, and seek in
Christianity an<<549>>other spirit, Jesus taught
that the severities of the law towards other nations
were its appendages, not its essence, its
compulsions, not its freewill, its outward,
temporary defence, not its inner life, and that the
inner life, notwithstanding all accompanying
temporary severities, was destined to issue in a
system of universal brotherhood and love. This was,
in his view, the grand fulfilment of the law, and he
reproved the folly of holding the hull together,
when the life and growth of the seed within required
it to be broken.
This brings us to a point which you consider most
important. Many of the laws of Moses are not obeyed
by Christians: this appears to you very wrong, if
Christ came to give the law its highest fulfilment
in every point. My first answer is that there may be
many points in which Christians are bound to follow
the law of Moses more closely than they do. No one
dare deny that there are any grievous
inconsistencies. My second assertion is, that all
the laws of Moses cannot be binding now, and never
will be binding, even on the Israelites. If there is
any truth in Christianity, there is now no
obligation to sacrifice, and the restored Jews will
never again be required to shed blood for the
remission of sin. If the death of Christ was the
great sacrifice, the former law was grandly
fulfilled, and terminated in him.
Bear in mind, progress and development are God’s
universal law. You appear to have forgotten the
grand principle, that development or fulfilment
necessarily imply change, and, generally, tremendous
change. The mighty oak is the development or
fulfilment, according to divine law, of the acorn;
but how tremendous the change! The full-grown man is
the development of the little infant; he is the same
person that the infant was, yet his body has become
entirely changed as to its substance, and is
changing every hour. To argue that Christianity is
not identical with Judaism, because it does not
observe, or even wish to observe, all the Mosaic
laws in relation to fringes on the garments,
festivals, sacrifices, marriage, divorce, the
holding of a woman in slavery when her husband
becomes free, meat and drink, &c., is just as great
folly as to deny that a certain full-grown man ever
was an infant because he has ceased to wear
<<550>>the dress of an infant. The church of Israel
had its life and growth as well as any man, and it
could outgrow its original dress—its original forms
and restrictions. In the changes themselves it could
receive its grandest fulfilment.
According to promise, I now revert in a few remarks,
as I conclude, to the vexed question of the unity.
How you, Dr. Schlessinger and Mr. Leeser, smile when
this is mentioned, confident that no argument on
this point can move a Jew, and that I act foolishly
in mentioning it again. This does appear extremely
foolish for many reasons, a few of which I will
mention. If we try to prove the deity of the Messiah
from his names, Immanuel, The Lord our
Righteousness, The Mighty El: you readily
reply that Zedekiah means My righteousness is he,
still Zedekiah was a mere man; that Elijah means My
God is He, still Elijah was not divine; and that a
common child may be called Immanuel; and so far your
reply is true. If we lay before you the 110th Psalm,
and assert that David there calls the Messiah his
Lord, and that no one was properly David’s Lord
except the Most High; or inquire how he could call
his son, far in the future, his lord; you reply,
that David speaks of Abraham and then you never lose
your breath in wrestling with an the difficulties in
the going forth of the sceptre from Zion or, you
reply that a friend of David composed the psalm, and
calls David his Lord, and you can easily invent some
way satisfactory to yourselves, of evading the
difficulty of showing how David was a priest for
ever, like Melchizedech.
If
we then open before you Ps. xlv. 11, to prove that
the Messiah is called the Lord of the church of
Israel, and that she is commanded to bow down to him
or to worship him (וישתחוי-לו),
you cannot find in this homage anything that might
not have been rendered to Moses, or that may not
eventually be rendered to the best of men. We may
not be satisfied with these replies, still, knowing
that we have a more potent argument in reserve, we
may leave here, and place ourselves on a more
commanding eminence. From Luke vii. 27, it is clear
that Jesus considered himself the angel of the
covenant whose coming is promised in Malachi, and
John the Baptist, the forerunner. (This, by the way,
is a <<551>> refutation of your assertion that there
is no trace of my argument in the New Testament.)
Now we prove from Exodus iii. 15, that the
שם המפורש, the
naked name, the most holy quadriliteral, is applied
to the angel of the covenant. Moses inquires for the
name of the God who would send him to Pharaoh. The
angel or the God of the bush on whom Moses was
afraid to look, replies, “Thus shalt thou say unto
the children of Israel, The LORD [here occurs the
Tetragrammaton] God of your fathers, the God of
Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and
this is my memorial unto all generations.”
If
ever a messenger had an imperative occasion to give
the name of his master, and not his own name, this
angel had it here; but mark! he first gives the most
exclusive names of God, and then says that this is
his own name for ever. Were it written on the sun’s
pathway among the fixed stars, from the beginning of
the first to the close of the twelfth sign of the
zodiac, that the angel of the covenant is the
Eternal, the assertion could not be clearer or the
proof stronger; or were it written on heaven’s vault
along the line of these twelve brilliant
constellations, ישוע הנצרי
ה׳ הוא Jesus of
Nazareth he is the Lord, the letters could not
be plainer or more remarkable than they are in these
passages from Luke and Moses. My “identity” gives
you several such passages: how do you answer them?
The Tetragrammaton, according to your view, is
applied to created angels, to men, and even to
places. Be careful that you do not piteously beg the
question when you say that it is applied to created
angels: this is the precise disputed point: your
opponents say that it is applied to only one angel,
and he is the Eternal. The naked simple name itself
is never applied, either to a man or to a place.
Remember how most sacred and exclusive this name was
in the eyes of the Rabbis. From the Talmud we learn
that Rabbi Aba Shaul
reckoned among those who have no portion in the
world to come אף ההוגה את
השם באותיותיו. Yet this awfully sacred name
you can trample in the dust, when its sacredness and
exclusiveness make the Christian argument
unanswerable. If this name will not settle our
dispute, what can? If this name is not the exclusive
of the God of Israel,—he has no name in the Bible.
Dr. <<552>>Raphall argued against me that as the
Hebrews have no word in their language for trinity,
they never believed the doctrine; you may argue in
the same way that as there is no separate exclusive
name in the Bible for the God of Israel, therefore
Moses and the prophets were all atheists.
Most probably I made a mistake in giving such
emphasis to the cruelty of Robespierre; I did not
mean to accuse the Jews of cruelty; but if we
Christians must give up Christianity as a system of
error, and feel that we have no share in the
covenant with Abraham and David, and take as little
interest in the reading of the Bible as the Jews do
in giving it to us, it appears to me that we have no
other system of religion on which to fall than on Robespierre’s system.
In
conclusion, I leave my “identity” and your
refutation with the reader, and only ask that he
examine both in love for the truth, and decide for
himself. I remain,
Reverend and dear sir, most respectfully,
Your obedient servant,
M. R. MILLER.
New York, December 20, 1850.
Note by the Editor.—It would be useless in us
to reiterate the arguments of Dr. S., and reply
seriatim to Mr. Miller’s strictures. It is, however,
precisely the accommodating of the doctrines of
Christ, as developed in his Sermon on the Mount, not
in the literal sense in which he speaks, but in the
manner that his various followers choose to
interpret his words, which gives us the strongest
possible reason for doubting not alone his divinity,
but his divine mission. In regard, for instance, to
divorces, Mr. M. has himself shown that a great
diversity of manner prevails, not alone in different
states, but in the same state, at different times.
Everything is afloat on the ocean of arbitrary
enactment, and we refer our friendly opponent to the
great facility with which divorces are obtainable in
the very hotbed of Presbyterianism, the New England
States. Is it possible that adultery alone can cause
so many severances of the marriage tie? will it be
insinuated that morality is at so low an ebb as to
induce so many mortal sins to be daily committed? If
the question be answered in the affirmative, it
shows at once that Christian is no substitute for
Jewish morality.
In
the Church of Rome no divorces, we think, are
granted, except by the authority of the Pope; and if
history is to be depended upon, morality and
<<553>>fidelity to the marriage vow are not very
remarkably strong in exclusively Catholic countries.
Vice dwells there in high places, and kings and
queens are more than suspected. Does this prove the
efficacy of the doctrines of the Sermon on the
Mount? Must you drive people to absolute crime
before they may be relieved by an act, which alone
was wanting to save them from degradation? This is a
question as much for the political economist and
legislator as the theologian, and is so readily
answered that it requires no reply.
We
could easily go over the whole course; but Mr.
Miller’s own quotations from Kent’s work relieve us
from the task, as they confirm all we have advanced.
Respecting Moses’ vision in the thorn-bush, we fancy
that no commentator among the Jews ever believed
that the word “angel” there is synonymous with the
Lord; and in truth the messenger only spoke the
words of his Sender, and for Him only; repeating
thus the words with which he was charged. In fact,
the speakers change in the course of the narrative,
as will appear on a candid perusal of the third
chapter of Exodus. In other passages it also is made
evident that Moses did not desire the presence of
the angel, the same, perhaps, who first was sent to
him, to accompany the people on their expedition
against Palestine, and asked for the restoration of
the Divine Presence, whatever that was, but which
had been withdrawn for their sin in making the
golden calf. It requires indeed, another than a
Jewish education to discover Christianity in
Judaism; and let us once adopt the notion that we
are wrong, we cannot think otherwise but that Moses
was wrong also: he speaks always of ONE, not of a
combination; of a perpetuity in the Creator, not a
birth or decay; and however ingeniously you may
cover the idea of the trinity, it amounts to this,
that there is a diversity in the godhead, which
Moses, however, does not teach.
And as for that matter, Moses, speaking of himself,
applies the name of מלאך
“angel, messenger,” to his own person (Numb. xx.
16); and surely he claimed nothing like divinity, or
desired to be worshipped as a supreme being. That
some passages in the Scriptures are difficult of a
plain exposition, will be readily admitted; but the
commentary of Christian divines leads one to so many
absurdities, that we cannot for a moment put any
confidence in them especially as they are
contradicted by other passages equally
authoritative. Our endeavour is to reconcile, by a
careful analysis, whatever appears strange, and not
to produce more confusion by introducing new and
incompatible ideas which the Bible emphatically
condemns.
<<554>>
For the present at least we must close the
controversy here, not, however, without a
willingness to resume it at a later period, should
the means be at our disposal. At the same time we
expect that Dr. Schlessinger himself will reply to
Mr. M. should he think it worth his trouble to
continue the discussion, which has been forced upon
us by the action of the Presbyterian Synod of New
York. |
