Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Zweites Paar von Fragen; was wissen wir von Gott; Weisheitsliterarur, Pantheismus

Kurzinhalt: The second pair of questions has to do with the order of knowledge and language. There is the noetic question: how is this God who is present as Savior and Judge to be known?

Textausschnitt: 19a The second pair of questions has to do with the order of knowledge and language. There is the noetic question: how is this God who is present as Savior and Judge to be known? Related to it is the onomastic question: how is this God, who is known to be present but also known to be God, to be named? These related questions underlie the prevailing Old Testament paradox, inherent in the divine Name Yahweh, which was sharpened by Deutero-Isaiah. The Name of God is ineffable; it is not given to men "to know what God is. On the other hand, God has given himself to be known and named by men. We have seen the resolution of the paradox in Moses' prayer. God is known through his "ways," in the course of his "visitations" of his people. The two words are almost technical. The latter is used in Exodus 3:16 where Moses is bid to tell the elders of Israel that God had "visited" him. Its use is frequent elsewhere to express the historical interventions of God, whether in gracious rescue or in wrathful judgment. In and through these visitations, God is known. Hence the first answer to the noetic question is that the knowledge of God is mediated not by metaphysical reflection on the necessity of his being but by historical experience of his presence, which was not at all necessary but utterly contingent and most graciously free. Thus, God is known to be the "living" God. The epithet is constant and characteristic. It embodies the whole Israelite religious experience of Yahweh, the God of the fathers, who freely and graciously came down into the midst of the people, there to be the indwelling, energizing principle of their life as a people. It was this experience of the living God that was minted down into the humanly manageable coinage of the many names of God. Known as living, God was named from his manifold life-giving "ways" with his people. (Fs)

20a The question of the knowledge and names of God has a later development, which is visible in the wisdom literature. Two factors seem to have prompted the development. The first was fuller reflection on the primitive faith in God as creator of the universe. The Hebrew mind moved back to this reflection from the dominant religious experience of God as the Lord of history. The second factor was Hebrew contact with Hellenistic culture and its more refined idolatries and sophisticated skepticism. Then rose the question of the testimony of the material world to God. In its Hebraic form, the question was whether the cosmos testifies to the fact that it is not itself divine. From the depths of the ancient faith there came up a resounding affirmation. The Israelite world-view was never touched by any taint of pantheism. However seductive to the philosopher, pantheism was no temptation to the people whose sense of God as the Holy One made pantheism unthinkable. Moreover, the Israelite world-view was purified of all sense of demonic inhabitation and control of the natural universe. Primitive mythologies were full of this sense of dark powers in nature, hostile to man as to deity. But the faith of Israel was cleansed of it by the lightsome sense of God as the one Lord. By the simple majesty of a word, uttered when he alone was "there," in the beginning, God, the First, facing nothingness, made the heavens and the earth. And his dominion over all the forces that dwell in the natural world was as absolute and unshared as his dominion over the destinies of the people whom he alone had also created, by his word of choice, out of the nothingness of a slavish existence in Egypt. (Fs)

20b There was, however, a more subtle issue. Given that the universe is not divine, is its reality wholly secular or is it also sacral? Does it so present itself as the work of God that the invisible Lord becomes somehow visible through it? Is nature, like history, a transparency, so that in its beauties and powers the higher majesty of its Artisan and Ruler is somehow apparent? The Hebrew answer is unhesitatingly affirmative. It furnishes the premise for the indictment, found in the Wisdom of Solomon 13:1-9, of the idolatrous intellectuals of Egyptian Alexandria and of all the Near East. So luminously evident does the answer seem to the Sage of Israel that, despite his sympathy for these men in their search for truth, he qualifies them as "thorough fools" (13:1) because of their failure to find "him who is" in the course of their scrutiny of "the good things that were visible." (Fs) (notabene)