Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Zusammenfassung: Problem Gottes im Alten Testament; Gültigkeit der 4 Fragen in unserer Zeit;

Kurzinhalt: whether God is here-with-us, what God is doing here for us, how we are to know the God-with-us, and how we are to name him ... The problematic is a datum of history, not a discovery of reason ...

Textausschnitt: 23b Perhaps I have said enough to fulfill my intention, which was to illustrate the proposition that the Old Testament problem of God was constituted by two interrelated pairs of interpenetrating questions in all of which the issue of the presence of God is raised. The questions are asked in the intersubjective, not the metaphysical, mode of conception. That is to say, the problem directly concerns the Emmanuel of Isaiah, "God-with-us"; it does not directly concern God as he is in himself, the God-whose-essence-is-to-exist of a later theology. In other words the problem is posed on the plane of the religious existence, not on the plane of philosophical-theological inquiry. The matrix of the questions is the historical present. Therefore the questions themselves are concrete; they are questions of the moment. They are, in consequence, instant, urgent, and momentous in the full sense. The issues they raise are presented not simply for understanding but for decision. The questions oblige man not only to rise to the heights of intelligence where affirmations are made but also to descend to the depths of his own freedom where decisions are formed. The Old Testament problem of God, as the problem of his presence, is not offered for solution but for resolution. The alternate resolutions are in terms of knowledge of God and ignorance of God, in the sense explained. The confrontation in the questions is with the living God, and the issue, in the end, is life or death. (Fs) (notabene)

24a Some emphasis must be laid on the origins of the quadriform problematic, on the situation out of which the four questions rise-whether God is here-with-us, what God is doing here for us, how we are to know the God-with-us, and how we are to name him. Evidently, it was God himself who constituted the problematic by creating the situation. He came down in gracious freedom, and he confronts man on the plane of human historical existence. It is this fact which raises the four questions in their biblical form. They do not form a rational heuristic scheme devised by man on the basis of his common experience of himself, of others, of the world, and of himself-with-the-others-in-the-world. They are not, in other words, the fruit of philosophical reflection. The problematic is a datum of history, not a discovery of reason. The four questions themselves came down, as Yahweh himself came down. It would be idle to ask them in their biblical form on any other than the biblical basis, which is the mysterious story inherent in the divine Name Yahweh: "I shall be there as who I am shall I be there." This Name was not a human invention, as men might call God the Unconditioned, or the Absolute, or the Power beyond ourselves, or the One, or whatever else. The Name Yahweh was a divine revelation. By the giving of it God himself put to men the problem of God in a form that reason, left to itself, could never have devised. In fact, Hellenic reason found the problem in its biblical form quite scandalous. And reason remains Hellenic to this day. (Fs)

24b I would further assert that, in its basic structure and in the central element of its substance, the Old Testament problematic endures as the permanent religious problematic of all mankind. The four questions remain valid for all time. Oddly enough, this proposition is implicitly recognized by the atheist school of contemporary existentialism. One may, if one wishes (so runs their thesis), assert that God is; the assertion is devoid of meaning because devoid of consequence. But one may not affirm that God exists, for existence means engagement in history, in a process of becoming, in all the risk of freedom. It cannot be permitted that God should so exist and also be God. The reasons for this thesis need not concern us here; we shall return to them later. At the moment the point is that this existentialist thesis itself attests, in an inverted way, the permanence of the biblical problem of God. For the biblical problem is precisely whether God so exists-whether he is engaged in history, in a process of becoming God-with-us at the risk of a clash with an opposing human freedom. (Fs)