My Reflections on Witness To The Truth, By, Edith Hamilton

My Reflections on

Witness To The Truth

By, Edith Hamilton

Born in 1873, Edith Hamilton was a student of Latin and Greek her entire life.  She Graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1894.  She was head Mistress of Bryn Mawr School for Girls in Baltimore for twenty-five years and began writing in 1930 when she was 63.  Most of us “of a certain age” are familiar with her Mythology, but she has also written two wonderful books dealing with the Jewish Prophets and with Jesus the Christ. (Biography from the Cover of Witness To The Truth).  The latter, Christ and His Interpreters, Witness To The Truth, 1948, is the subject of these Reflections.  (page numbers refer to Witness to the Truth).

Hamilton states in her introduction that we alone as God’s people can give proof that God is.  “No man hath seen God at any time.  If we love one another, God dwells in us.”  “That was the only proof Christ asked from His disciples.  He did not ask for belief.” (from the introduction).  The Greek word we translate as belief means primarily trust, and Hamilton believes that this is what Jesus wanted from his followers. 

In Chapter 1, Hamilton states that to study the records we have of Jesus, to look closely and to think out what he really meant, is dismaying because what he demanded, Christians do not do and almost never have done.  “The Christian life as we see it and live it is an easy life.  All this and heaven too.”(12)  Hamilton believes that Christianity has moved from making public demands to making private demands, that Christianity has become more about getting ourselves to heaven than serving the world in Jesus’ name, than helping to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth.  As she reads the New Testament she senses that Christ has been replaced with incomprehensible statements, rituals and magical events.  In her understanding, “Christ has been petrified, sanctified, and deified, away from life.”(12)

In her writing, Hamilton recognizes that the Gospels grew as time passed by.  She understands that the four Gospels were not firsthand accounts, rather they were accounts the authors found written by others, or heard from others who had perhaps known Jesus.  This allows her to suggest that the picture is more important than the frame and that Jesus is more and different than he often appears in the church.  In this book, Hamilton attempts to take us back to Christ, using Socrates and St. Paul as guides to find an understanding of the man who walked the roads of Galilee and lived and died for the truth.

Hamilton works her way through the four Gospels trying to peel back the layers that were added over the forty to seventy years between the time of Jesus’ life and the writing of the Gospels.  Her hope is to find the Jesus who lived among the people and determine what was important to him in his life, what he taught, what he did and how he lived.

Hamilton suggests that the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain from Luke contain teachings of Jesus, including the two versions of the Lord’s Prayer that give the reader an idea of what was important to Jesus in his life.  This leads her to conclude that Christianity should be about living as Jesus did rather than about believing certain doctrines and creeds that were developed by the church over time.  Hamilton believes Jesus saw his mission as one to the pain of the world, to heal, to console, to set free. (110)

Hamilton believes the church failed when it conceived Jesus as a semi-human “who floated over the roads of Galilee, not a human being, but a divine marvel.  He had superhuman powers.  He was not limited by time or space.  What was to happen lay clear before him.  He could calm the winds and the waves.  There could be no idea that humans should be as he was.  Obviously they could not be.  His life, removed from all doubt and uncertainty, all temptation could have no application to merely human lives.  All they could do was to wonder and adore.  So the Church turned away from the Sermon on the Mount and the Garden of Gethsemane to an unfathomable mystery, God himself hanging upon a cross.  This was their way out.” (200)  Christianity ceased to be about a way of life and became about a way of belief. 

Hamilton believed that Christianity was about following instead of believing.   “Jesus never demanded of the people who wished to follow him that they must first know this or that, the nature of the Trinity or the plan of Salvation.  He had not insisted on conviction of sin or consciousness of forgiveness or any belief whatsoever.”(204)  In order to be safe against this way of living, “the church built a wall of Creeds and theologies, riches and power” (205) to protect itself.  “The church was safe.  But one thing its ardent builders and defenders failed to see.  Nothing that lives can be safe.  Life means danger.  The more the church was hedged about with Confessions of Faith and defended by the mighty of the earth, the feebler its life grew.”(205)

“To have faith in God was to accept what the authorities, men high in the church or learned in the book, asserted was the Truth.”(211)  It was a state of things which could last only as long as people chose not to question it. (211)  As questions were asked, and “as one after another of the ancient bulwarks, strengthened through centuries of theological thinking, gave way under the assaults of the scientists: the six-day creation, the Garden of Eden, the sun that stopped at the word of the man of God, the toppling down of the whole stupendous structure before astronomy and geology and physics seemed to undermine the foundation of religion.”(212)  The church went astray in a matter of supreme importance.  She turned faith, without which there is no religion, into something which had no connection with faith.”(212)

It is important to remember that faiths’ record is made up of lives, not creeds.  Jesus did not say, “I will tell you the truth,” He said I am the truth.  His life was a light to the world.  Light needs no proof. It needs only to be seen.”(218)

“When Christ said, ‘resist not evil,’ he did not mean, Submit to evil but, only goodness can end wickedness; only truth can conquer falsehood; only mercy and purity can put a stop to cruelty and lust.  To Jesus, to be good was what counted.”(227)  This to say, “the Gospels are not an explanation or a theology.  They are the record of a life.  Human beings have asked of religion what religion does not give.  You will ask in vain for reasons and explanations, why this or that calamity has happened.  Religion does not answer.  It gives no reasons.  It does not explain why.  It shows humans how to live.  To that question the religion of Christ does give an answer, adequate for all needs and in all perplexities.”(229)

According to Hamilton, “Christ saw truth in terms of life, on earth and in heaven.  His statement of truth was his own life; the proof was he, himself…He believed that few would find the Way he walked on, but there was no other way to the truth that sets people free: ‘whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it’—the ultimate, joyful, never-to-be-lost freedom from self.  ‘I am among you as one who serves.’”(229)

Edith Hamilton brings her book to a close with the following statements which I recommend to all who are a part of the church, as well as to all who have given up on the church created by human beings.  “the kingdom of God is at hand.  That is it.  No special preparation is needed, no special belief in this or that.  All that is needed is to turn away from darkness to light, only to start in that direction.  This way led Christ to the cross.  For those who would find this way and follow it…He said that they would do even greater works than he had done.  The spirit of truth would be with them forever and guide them into all truth.”(230)

In some way Christ and his way still live on today.  “He is the assurance that his way leads to life, in the kingdom of God which will never end.”(230)

So, to leave you with Hamilton’s own words, words which were true in 1948 and words that are just as true today in 2011, words that will be true as long as there are those who follow the Way of Christ.

“The Kingdom of God is at hand.  There have always been people who lived in it.  Times of fearful evil and misery come, but never a time when the kingdom is not at hand for those who seek it.  It is here today, a power indestructible, unconquerable.  He who proclaimed it taught ‘as one having authority.’  The record of his life has a strange authority.  ‘the power of the good which lays upon us the obligation to fulfill it.’”(230)