Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Spannung: Prophet - König -> 3 Phasen ((Hosea, Amos - Isaia - Jeremia)

Kurzinhalt: institutional, metastatic, existential phase

Textausschnitt: 89/13 In the prophetic occupation with the problem three phases can be distinguished:
(1) an institutional phase, represented by Amos and Hosea;
(2) a metastatic phase, represented by Isaiah; and
(3) an existential phase, represented by Jeremiah. (474; Fs)

90/13 In the first phase, when the great prophets began to express the crisis of Israel in the alternatives of disaster and salvation, the criticism of the present order was no more than supplemented by the evocation of a future perfect order. The faith in a cultic restoration of the present order was broken, to be sure, when the restored order of the future was separated from the present state of things by an abyss of destruction. But the future was conceived as an institutional order, not so very different from the present one, minus its imperfections. When Israel had to be destroyed because of the misconduct of the people and the king, the end would be a restoration of the survivors under a king after the model held up by Yahweh in the oracle of David. With regard to the people, Amos 9:8 envisages the survival of a "remnant" as the ethnic nucleus for the future: (474f; Fs)
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91/13 With regard to institutions, the threats of destruction in Amos 9:9-10 are followed by the promise that "the fallen tabernacle of David" will be raised again from the ruins (9:11). With regard to the general state of things, the concluding oracles (9:13-15) envisage the fortunes of Israel restored, with the countryside flourishing and the cities rebuilt. And Hosea, finally, completes the picture with the oracle (Hos. 3:4-5): (475; Fs)
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92/13 In Amos and Hosea, the cosmological form still exerted a strong influence on their conception of the process of history. Although their alternatives of disaster and salvation went beyond the restoration of order through the cult, they substantially did no more than break the cosmic rhythm down to a sequence of disorder and order in historical time. With Isaiah, the younger contemporary of Hosea, begins the insight that one cannot advance from the cycle, in which institutions are restored through the cult, to the irreversible emergence of ultimate order in history without radically recasting the symbols. When the ebb and flood of cosmic order becomes the darkness and light of successive periods in history, new expressions for the dynamics of order, not yet provided in the compactness of cosmological symbols, must be differentiated. With Isaiah the experience of metastasis, of the substantive transfiguration of order, that was inchoately present even in Amos and Hosea, enters the prophetic concern with Israel's rulership. The motivations of Isaiah's experience, as well as its evolution in the course of about four decades following the call of ca. 740/34, are still discernible in the sequence of prophecies which at present form the text of Isaiah 6-12. (475f; Fs) (notabene)