Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Jeremia: Jahwe: universaler Gott der Geschichte - der Prophet als sein Sprecher; das messianische Problem

Kurzinhalt: Messianic problem; constant concern of the prophets: the historical order under a universal God; Who will be the carrier of historical order in the future?

Textausschnitt: 79/13 The experience of Yahweh as the universal God of history, and of the speaker of his word as a "prophet to the nations," has become fully articulate only in Jeremiah, but it was present even in Amos, the first in the line of the solitary prophets whose sayings are extant. In Amos 9:7 we read: (470; Fs)
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80/13 A more drastic ranking of the nations with Israel and of Israel with the nations is hardly conceivable than through the suggestion that the divine choice for the Exodus was not restricted to the goy gadosh. Such freedom from bondage as the nations achieved, they also were granted by Yahweh; and with the Exodus from bondage they accepted, as did Israel, the law of Yahweh, though in the restricted form of a commandment to recognize the fellow-humanity among themselves in their conduct. Hence, they fall under Yahweh's judgment, like Israel, when they grossly violate the rules of humane conduct in their quarrels, as Amos casuistically details in his prophecies against the nations (Amos 1:32:3). This constancy of the prophetic problem from Amos to Jeremiah, and even to Ezekiel, has resulted in a distinct literary form - if the term may be used for spoken words and their tradition - which is still discernible even in the secondary, postexilic organization of the prophetic books. In this form must be distinguished
(1) the types of oracles which enter into larger complexes of meaning,
(2) the variety of meaningful combinations of the basic types, and
(3) the superimposed order of the collections. (470; Fs)
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83/13 From the middle of the eighth century B.C. to the fall of Jerusalem, the historical order under a universal God is the constant concern of the prophets - that much is confirmed by the pervasiveness of the literary form just described. This general problem, though, is no more than the background for the prophets' specific concern with the fate of Israel on the suddenly enlarged world scene. For the recognition, in Amos, that Yahweh is the God of the nations as much as of the Chosen People does not abolish the peculiar status of Israel as the center from which radiates the order of history. While the concrete terms of the Message will no longer apply to the recalcitrant people, its intention is not invalidated by the defection of the empirical Israel; and that intention can be realized only if the intended historical order has an omphalos. For the order of society and history participates in the order of God only in as much as the universal, transcendent God is experienced as such in the faith of men who order their existence in the light of their faith and thereby become the representative center of society and history. If the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah are doomed, the question becomes ever more burning: Who will be the carrier of historical order in the future? If it is no longer the people and the king of Judah, who then will be "Israel"? What kind of "people" under what kind of "king" will emerge from the imminent destruction as the new Israel under the new Covenant? Since in the prophetic occupation with such questions the figure of a ruler more satisfactory than the contemporary Davidic Kings looms large, the whole complex of questions has come to be called, by a historiographic convention, the "Messianic problem." (471f; Fs) (notabene)