Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: die Botschaft: Israel - Bund - Annahme - Gebote; Klärung in der Zeit der Krise; 3 Argumente

Kurzinhalt: Berith drama: it unfolded in a sequence of three distinct acts; crisis: motive given for an inquiry into the precise meaning of existence under God

Textausschnitt: 60/13 To be Israel meant to exist in continuity with the action of the Berith drama. In the first act of this drama, in the Message of Exodus 19:4-6, Yahweh had promised to make Israel his own possession (segullah) among all peoples, the royal domain of his immediate servants (mamlekheth kohanim), and a holy nation (goy gadosh), on the condition that the people hear his voice and keep his covenant. The cosmicdivine order of Egypt was to be superseded by a new order of history under the world-transcendent God who had revealed himself from Sinai. In the realm of symbols, the royal domain as the divine center of order in the cosmological empire was accordingly transformed into the Chosen People, the holy omphalos of world-history. Only when the Message had been accepted, followed the second act, the ritual conclusion of the Berith between God and the people that now had become "his people." And in pursuance of the Berith, finally, Yahweh proclaimed the Decalogue as the fundamental law of the people's order. The meaning of the drama, though it unfolded in a sequence of three distinct acts, was one and indivisible; no part of it could be removed without affecting the whole. ... This chain of meaning running through the acts in which Israel gained its existence in historical form had not been made explicit, however, in the traditions of the events. It had remained indeed so deeply embedded in the accounts of the events themselves that even in the extant form the narrative is unclear on the point whether the Berith precedes the Decalogue, or the Decalogue the Berith. Only in the crisis of Israel, when the continuity of its existence as the goy gadosh had been made problematic by the empirical conduct of people, ruling class, and court, as observed by the prophets, was the experiential motive given for an inquiry into the precise meaning of existence under God. (458f; Fs)
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61/13 The prophets tried to save the order of Israel through clarification of its meaning. We followed this struggle, in the reverse order of the Berith drama, through Decalogue and Covenant, because the empirical observation of conduct in violation of the commandments furnished in fact the motive of inquiry. Under the impact of this inquiry, as we have seen, the symbols of the Berith drama disintegrated, because their compactness of meaning proved inadequate to express the differentiated experiences of the prophets. The normative and existential issues of the Decalogue had to be distinguished, as far as the lack of a philosophical vocabulary permitted the distinction; and a catalogue of virtues, describing the existential order, was developed. This new table of virtues, ...
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62/13 When the prophetic critique of symbols reached the center of revelation, it was no longer possible to restrict the argument to specific issues of misconduct. The chain of meaning contained in the Berith drama burst at once in violent articulation. The constitution of being as a whole, with the origin of its order in God, was at stake. The magnitude of the conflicts can better be understood by first listing the three sets of arguments which had to be taken into account at once: (460; Fs)

(1) When the prophets measured the empirical conduct of Israel by the symbols of the Berith drama, they could observe that the people neither heard the voice nor kept the covenant of Yahweh. They knew that the Decalogue had become a matter of legal and cultic observance in violation of the spirit, and that the Covenant had been broken. In this situation of disorder on the human side, when the people no longer fulfilled their obligations under the Covenant, the question imposed itself whether the divine partner was still bound by his promise. Was the Message still valid? Was Israel still the Chosen People in the Sinaitic dispensation of history? These were the questions suggested by the contractual symbolism of the Berith. (460; Fs) (notabene)
(2) As soon, however, as the prophets raised them, the abyss of revelation and faith proved incommensurate with the logic of contract. For the substance of the Covenant was provided not by the meeting of the minds of equal partners but by the revelation of God as the source of order in man, society, and history. The set of legal argument concerning conclusion, violation, and dissolution of an agreement had to be supplemented by a second set of argument concerned with the substance of revelation and its consequences. On the level of substantive order, the God who had revealed himself and made the choice could not be assumed either to have deceived the people with false promises or to have deceived himself about the qualities of the human partner. Moreover, the revealed will of God to create a new order of history could not be assumed to be stultified by the opposing will of the human subject of order. The revelation of God, once it had entered the reality of history, could not be thrown out of history by a human decision to ignore it. (460f; Fs)
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(3) This second train of reflections, conducted in the certainty of prophetic faith, of the knowledge of God, however, encountered the incontrovertible facts of Israel's misconduct, the empirically observed symptoms of the crisis of order which motivated the prophetic struggle: that revelation could be ignored, that faith could be abandoned, that the covenant could be broken, that the Chosen People even did not care to be chosen, and that it was on the point of being annihilated by imperial powers who were no more paragons of virtue than was Israel. (461; Fs)