Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Exodus 3; dreifache Offenbarung: immanent in der Geschichte, transzendent zur Geschichte, transparent durch Geschichte; scandal of particularity

Kurzinhalt: God first asserts the fact of his presence in the history of his people: "I shall be there." Second, he asserts the mystery of his own being: ...

Textausschnitt: 10c This exegesis needs to be completed by a brief theological analysis. The text, thus understood, contains a threefold revelation-of God's immanence in history, of his transcendence to history, and of his transparence through history. God first asserts the fact of his presence in the history of his people: "I shall be there." Second, he asserts the mystery of his own being: "I shall be there as who I am." His mystery is a mode of absence. Third, he asserts that, despite his absence in mystery, he will make himself known to his people: "As who I am shall I be there." The mode of his transparence is through his action, through the saving events of the sacred history of Israel. However, what thus becomes known is only his saving will. He himself, in his being and nature, remains forever unknown to men, hidden from them. I should like briefly to develop this threefold significance of the divine Name revealed in our text. (Fs) (notabene)

11a "I shall be there, actively, with you." The initial revelation is of God's will to "come down" to rescue his people. The mode of expression in verse 8 is anthropomorphic, but the anthropomorphism, here as elsewhere in the Old Testament, serves to emphasize the reality of God's intervention in history. Moreover, the verbal form in verse 14 has a frequentative sense: "I shall be with you time and again, in many 'visitations.' " It also has the connotations of becoming, or perhaps even befalling, rather than simply of being. God does not indeed become God, but, in the successive junctures of history, in the new situations that continually befall, God becomes God-with-his-people. Finally, as the verbal form asserts the contingency of the divine presence, it also implies its continuity. Over against the inconstancy and infidelity of the people, who continually absent themselves from God, the Name Yahweh affirms the constancy of God, his unchangeable fidelity to his promise of presence. Malachi, the last of the prophets, stated this first facet of the primitive revelation: "I [am] Yahweh; I do not change" (3:6). (Fs)

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12a "I shall be there as who I am." Here the perspectives of meaning lengthen into two reaches of mystery. There is first the mystery of the sovereign freedom with which God presents himself to the people. The initiative of the presentation rests with him; he "comes down" but not as though summoned. The religion of the Old Testament is utterly free of any magical element. Yahweh asserts his power by his own free choice. He cannot be controlled by magical constraints. He does not deliver himself into the power of men or permit men to dispose of his power. Moreover, although the Old Testament revelation bears, if you will, on the function of God in history, Yahweh is not the functional God of contemporary immanentist theory and its theologically decadent taste-a God whose function is to respond to man's religious needs and satisfy his spiritual aspirations. In the final analysis, Yahweh is not present to meet the needs of men or to fulfill their aspirations or, even, to terminate their quest for something beyond themselves. Yahweh does not intervene in history or enter the human situation as if he were in any way required by history or by the situation. God comes down to men in their misery always as he came down to Moses in Midian, "to the westward part of the desert." He comes down with all the mystery that attaches to the concept of freedom when freedom is stretched to infinity-to the point where it breaks through the limits of the conceptual, goes beyond the manner of understanding that conception may bring, and passes into the far regions of utter ineffability. Precisely in the mysterious freedom of his presence Yahweh is manifested as the Lord, the one Lord of his own action, who does not abide man's questions because he stands beyond all questioning. In giving himself the Name Yahweh, God forestalls the question that is somehow native to the heart of man, "Why are you here?" or, in its more usual form, "Why are you not here?" The answer, which refuses the question in both its forms, is: "I shall be there as who I am."