Ethics. Джон Дьюи
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moral movement of Christianity, had perhaps little definite content to the fishermen, and it is not easy to say just what they meant in moral terms to the writer of the Fourth Gospel who uses the phrase so often. With Paul, life as the realm of the spirit gets definition as it stands over against the "death" of sin and lust. But with all writers of Old or New Testament, whatever content it had, life meant above all the suggestion of something beyond, the gleam and dynamic power of a future not yet understood. It meant to Paul a progress which was governed not by law or "rudiments," but by freedom. Such a life would set itself new and higher standards; the laws and customs that had obtained were felt to be outgrown. The significance of early Christianity as a moral movement, aside from its elements of personal devotion and social unity to be noticed below, was the spirit of movement, the sense of newly forming horizons beyond the old, the conviction that as sons of God its followers had boundless possibilities, that they were not the children of the bond woman, but of the free.
5. The Social Ideal of Justice, Love, and Peace.—We have seen how this ideal was framed in the setting of a kingdom of God. At first national, it became universal, and with a fraternity which the world is far from having realized, it was to know "neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free." At first military, it took on with seer and psalmist the form of a reign of peace and justice. After the fierce and crude powers typified by the lion and the bear and the leopard had passed, the seer saw a kingdom represented by a human form. Such a kingdom it was that should not pass away. Such was the kingdom "not of this world" which Jesus presented as his message. Membership in this moral kingdom was for the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the merciful, the peace-makers, the hungerers after righteousness. Greatness in this moral community was to depend on service, not on power. The king should not fail till he had "set justice in the earth." He should "deliver the needy, and the poor."
Certain features of this ideal order have since found embodiment in social and political structures; certain features remain for the future. Certain periods in history have transferred the ideal entirely to another world, regarding human society as hopelessly given over to evil. Such theories find a morality possible only by renouncing society. The Hebrews presented rather the ideal of a moral order on earth, of a control of all life by right, of a realization of good, and of a completeness of life. It was an ideal not dreamed out in ecstatic visions of pure fancy, but worked out in struggle and suffering, in confidence that moral efforts are not hopeless or destined to defeat. The ideal order is to be made real. The divine kingdom is to come, the divine will to be done "on earth as it is in heaven."
LITERATURE
The works of W. R. Smith (Religion of the Semites) and Barton (A Sketch of Semitic Origins) already mentioned. Schultz, Old Testament Theology, tr. 1892; Marti, Religion of the Old Testament, tr. 1907; Budde, Religion of the Old Testament to the Exile, 1899; H. P. Smith, Old Testament History, 1903; W. R. Smith, The Prophets of Israel, 1895; Bruce, Ethics of the Old Testament, 1895; Peake, Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament, 1904; Royce, The Problem of Job in Studies of Good and Evil, 1898; Pratt, The Psychology of Religious Belief, 1907, ch. v.; Harnack, What is Christianity? tr. 1901; Cone, Rich and Poor in the New Testament, 1902; Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity, tr. 1906; Matthews, The Social Teaching of Jesus, 1897; Wendt, The Teaching of Jesus, 1899; Pfleiderer, Paulinism, 1891; Cone, Paul, The Man, the Missionary, and the Teacher, 1898; Beyschlag, New Testament Theology, tr. 1895; The Encyclopedia Biblica, The Jewish Encyclopedia, and Hastings' Dictionary, have numerous valuable articles.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] M. Arnold, "Hebraism and Hellenism," in Culture and Anarchy, ch. iv.
[49] The Hebrew and Greek words for sin both mean "to miss."
[50] The general function of punishment as bringing home to the individual the consciousness of guilt and thus awakening the action of conscience, has an illustration in Shakespere's conception of the prayer of Henry Vth before the battle of Agincourt. In ordinary life the bluff King Harry devotes little time to meditation upon his own sin or that of his father, but on the eve of possible calamity the old crime rises fresh before him. Stimulated by the thought of an actual penalty to be imposed by a recognized authority, he cried: "Not to-day, O Lord! Oh, not to-day! Think not upon the fault my father made in compassing the crown."
[51] Recent excavations are held to confirm the prophets on this (Marti, Religion of the Old Testament, pp. 78 ff.).
[52] Job 27:1–6.
[53] Genung, Job, The Epic of the Inner Life.
[54] See Atonement in Literature and in Life, by Charles A. Dinsmore. Boston, 1906.
[55] Numbers 16, Joshua 7.
[56] John 9:2.
[57] Hammurabi's code showed a disregard of intent which would make surgery a dangerous profession: "If a physician operate on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and cause the man's death; or open an abscess [in the eye] of a man with a bronze lancet and destroy the man's eye, they shall cut off his fingers." Early German and English law is just as naïve. If a weapon was left to be repaired at a smith's and was then caught up or stolen and used to do harm, the original owner was held responsible.
[58] Numbers 35, Deuteronomy 19, Joshua 20.
[59] Mark 7:1–23.
[60] Hosea 2:5.
[61] H. P. Smith, Old Testament History, p. 222.
[62] Habakkuk 3:17, 18.
[63] The Song of Songs.
CHAPTER VII
THE MORAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE GREEKS
§ 1. THE FUNDAMENTAL NOTES
Convention versus Nature.—The Hebrew moral life was developed under the relation, first of the people, then of the individuals, to God—a relation at once of union and of conflict. It was out of the relation of the individual to social traditions and political order that the Greek came to full consciousness of moral law on the one hand, and a moral personality on the other. And just as in Jewish life the law and the prophets (or, later, the "law and the gospel") stood for the conflicting forces, so