Spokesmen For God, by Edith Hamilton

Some Final Reflections on

Spokesmen For God, by Edith Hamilton

1936, The Norton Library

In this thoughtful and progressive book, Hamilton looks out how the 8^th through 6^th Century Hebrew Prophets changed the understanding of God for both Jews and Christians.  In her penultimate chapter, 12, she seeks to summarize not all that the prophets thought, but only what they thought which has value for us today.  Hamilton believes that these prophets were the first to see that love and compassion must belong to the divine.

As we read these prophets, we see that they make no distinction between religion and politics.  This seems to be because they did not think about fitting people for heaven, but about fitting people to make the world a better place in which to live.(p. 234)  “Politics then, was everyone’s religious duty, as was economics.  Problems of poverty and wealth are keenly analyzed in their writings.  Neither did they seem to have much interest in theology:  “they never enunciated a creed or stated a dogma or essayed a definition of anything they believed.  The only test of a person’s religion to which they gave a thought was the way that person acted.”(p. 235)

“Intellectually the prophets’ world is not our world, but that fact does not touch their value to us.  Spiritually they are our teachers.”(p.236). . . . “Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.  Great knowledge does not mean greater certainty. Oftenest the very reverse is true.  We are certain in proportion aw we do not know.”(236)  Even though we have more scientific knowledge than they did in their day, we can learn much from them about the ways we are to relate to God and to God’s people.  “Truths of the spirit are always true and these great teachers of the Hebrew Bible understood them as no others have, and in their works we find ourselves.

Hamilton, believes that the “prophets knew they were spokesmen for God, that they knew that they were nothing before God’s unutterable excellency and glory and yet each one felt that he had come close to God.  “They never entertained the idea of religion as an end in itself, comforting, satisfying aspiration toward inward purity and personal perfection.  And they never said, Believe this and you shall live.  Both of these ways also coud so easily be made substitutes.  Religions way \was different and not easy: Do this and you shall live.  Upon God’s true worshipers rested the tremendous responsibility of making God’s will a reality up on earth.”(p. 238)

What made the prophets different from any others who had spoken for God was that they “saw a world where no man was wronged by another, where the strong shared with the weak, where no individual was sacrificed for an end, where each individual was prepared to sacrifice himself for the end of making what God wished become a realized good.”(p.239)

I close this post by reflecting on what our world would look like today if the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Second Isaiah had succeeded in communicating to us God’s Vision for our world.  How would the debt ceiling and debt reduction talks in our country have developed differently than they have?  What would our congress and state legislatures have done differently in dealing with the Immigration issue in our country?  Would the issue have been solved already?   Would we have a Nationwide Health Care Plan that made healthcare available and affordable for all of our citizens?  These and other questions are worth asking ourselves and I believe we have the right to ask these questions of our governmental leaders and expect them to give us answers and to do something about them.  As the prophets believed, I too believe that belief, theology and religion are really about politics, economics and people.

I invite your thoughts on these questions and challenge all of us to seek to live the way of the prophets. 

Ben Alford