Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Jeremia, Hosea, Amos, Jesaia - Dekalog; Konflikt zweier Ordnungen (auch: Sokrates, Plato)

Kurzinhalt: Disorder in Israel thus was measured by the comprehensive order of the Decalogue

Textausschnitt: 8/13 The passages from the Temple Address furnish valuable information on the sense in which admonitions of the prophets must be read. The categories so frequently used by modern historians when they speak of the ethics, or politics, or religion, or theology of the prophets may have their taxonomic uses, but they are anachronistic when applied to the prophets' intention, because the Israelite symbolism has its own logic: When the prophets raise problems of order, they refer them, through extensive interpretation, to the decalogic constitution.
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... 14/13 Disorder in Israel thus was measured by the comprehensive order of the Decalogue. As far as persons were concerned, the rich and the poor, the king and the priests, the sage and the false prophets were equally judged by the standard of antidivine or antihuman self-assertiveness () Was Israel identical with the Kingdom of Judah, organized under the Torah as interpreted by the King, his officers and priests; or was it identical with an entirely different community that lived under the Decalogue as interpreted by Jeremiah? (433f; Fs)
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18/13 The trial of the prophet and the mutual death sentences when the order of God is about to disengage itself from the order of man form an aggregate of symbols that recurs, at a distance of two centuries, in the Hellas of Socrates and Plato. Now the philosopher represents the order of the God of Delphi; the "priests and prophets" reappear as the sophistic intellectuals and politicians in the role of the accusers; there is again the strong minority of the "people" who vote against the death sentence; and there is Plato, who, in his dialogues, continues the trial and makes it clear that the gods had condemned Athens when Athens had condemned Socrates. The comparison should make us aware that we are dealing not with contingent events but with essential processes of experience and symbolization. Parallels of this kind are neither historical curiosities, nor do they suggest mysterious laws of history. They rather show that the relation between transcendent and mundane order, when it reaches the level of conscious experience in prophets or philosophers, will become articulate in closely related symbols; and when the men in whose experience the problem lives become a force in community life, the responses again will be so closely related that the pattern of action will become a symbolic play, acting out the drama of revelation. (436; Fs) (notabene)
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19/13 The drama, as it was acted out at the end of the seventh century by Jeremiah and his antagonists, originated in the prophetic experience of the conflict between the historical order of society and the divinely revealed order. Fortunately there is extant, in Isaiah's account of his first revelation, an autobiographical report of the type of experience which unfolds, when it enters the stream of communal life, into the drama of Jeremiah and his trial. In Isaiah 6:1-5 we read: (436; Fs)