§ 10.
The Ethical Aim of Prophecy.
The prophet is not as such a proclaimer of future events. The prophetic preaching always has a moral end in view, and even its proclamation of the future serves this end. The disclosures respecting future events are determined and measured by the moral requirements of the present. Although all prophecy has been occasioned by the historic circumstances of the time in which it was uttered, nevertheless it does not surrender the progress of revelation to planless chance; for as God in the history of the world makes all the activity of human freedom a cooperative factor in the fulfilment of his decree, so in the history of revelation he causes the different phases of the times to become impulses of his revelation, which seeks step by step to reach its New Testament goal.
Remark. The gradual enrichment of the believing consciousness, brought about by the prophets, the deepening and purification of religion itself is effected through the looking out into future. The essential salvation, the full reality of the divine decree lay in the realm of the future. The prophecy was therefore for the present a religious and ethical lever, not a satisfaction of the intellectual desire for knowledge, but a practical longing for salvation.
§ 11.
The Prophets as retrospective Seers.
"The Lord Jehovah does not perform anything", says Amos (III, 7, compare Gen. XVIII, 17; Ps. XXV, 14) "unless he has revealed his secret to his servants the prophets". This insight into the grounds and the ends of his government which God grants the prophets extends from the present not only to the future, but also to the past; for in order to understand the present, one must not only know the future with which it is pregnant, but also the past from which the present has sprung. Therefore many prophets from the time of Samuel, Nathan, and Gad (I Chron. XXIX, 29) were historians of their time. Therefore the Tora, which is regarded in Ezra IX, II as a prophetic work, begins with the primitive history of the human race and the historical antecedents of Israel. And hence the Pentateuchal narrative proceeds as a historical work, which relates the history of Israel further until the Babylonian Exile ((
Hebrew characters)), and which is more or less characterized by its
