Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Jesaia (der Rest als neues Zenturm)- Jeremia (er selbst als Zentrum); Exodus Israels von sich selbst

Kurzinhalt: Jeremiah: prophet to the nations; terminus ad quem: problems of order beyond the existence of a concrete society and its institutions; the third procreative act of divine order in history: The Exodus of Israel from itself

Textausschnitt: (1) Isaiah engaged in the supreme effort of a political intervention which, if successful, was supposed to be the beginning of the metastatic order. When the King of Judah did not respond to the appeal, the prophet formed his group of disciples as the remnant of Israel beyond the present concrete society;
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(2) A century later, Jeremiah was called to be the prophet to the nations. By the Message from Sinai Israel had been constituted as the holy center of all mankind, but the order of the Covenant and the Decalogue pertained only to the Israelite society; no order had been provided for the nations as a society of mankind. The blows of history had brought it home to Israel that there existed a mankind outside the Sinaitic order. The Philistine danger () If the Message from Sinai had revealed the order of history, obviously the wording of its intention could not be the last word in the history of order. This problem, recognized even by Amos, became fully articulate in Jeremiah's expansion of his prophetic concern from Israel to the Near Eastern oekumene. While "Israel" remained the holy center, the society under the new Message embraced the "nations"; and since both Israel and the nations were at the moment in a state of disorder, the center of order had contracted into the person of Jeremiah. (489f; Fs)

113/13 What the two responses have in common will come into view if their difference is characterized by the relative position of the time and space factors in their symbolization of order. Isaiah, after his experience with Ahaz, moved away from the concrete order of Israel into a future in which the true order of the "remnant" would become the center of a world society living in metastatic peace. Jeremiah moved spatially beyond the order of Israel into the contemporary disorder of Israel and the nations at war and expected it to give way in the future to the order of Yahweh which at the moment was concentrated in himself. Both prophets, thus, had in common the tendency to move away from the order of the concrete Israelite society toward an indeterminate goal. (490; Fs)

115/13 The fact must be accepted that the questions can find no answer. The terminus ad quem of the movement is not a concrete society with a recognizable order. If the concern of the prophets with this apparently negative goal makes sense nevertheless, it must have been motivated by the insight, though unclear and insufficiently articulate, that there are problems of order beyond the existence of a concrete society and its institutions. The metastatic experience of Isaiah, which hitherto has been considered under the aspect of a sterile withdrawal from the realities of Israel's order, will appear in a new light if it is considered as an experience of the gulf between true order and the order realized concretely by any society, even Israel. And Jeremiah's experience of the tension between the two orders, his suffering participation in the divine suffering, is even articulate enough to make it certain that the prophet had at least a glimpse of the terrible truth: that the existence of a concrete society in a definite form will not resolve the problem of order in history, that no Chosen People in any form will be the ultimate omphalos of the true order of mankind. When Abram emigrated from Ur of the Chaldaeans, the Exodus from imperial civilization had begun. When Israel was brought forth from Egypt, by Yahweh and Moses his servant, and constituted as the people under God, the Exodus had reached the form of a people's theopolitical existence in rivalry with the cosmological form. With Isaiah's and Jeremiah's movement away from the concrete Israel begins the anguish of the third procreative act of divine order in history: The Exodus of Israel from itself. (491; Fs) (notabene)