Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Der Gottlose der Bibel; Typ 2 -das gottlose Volk; politischer Atheismus; Götzendiener = Atheist;

Kurzinhalt: They did not fall into idolatry; they made free choice of it, decided for it, gave deliberate preference to it. In Paul's cold language ...

Textausschnitt: 79b The second type of the godless man in the Bible takes the form of the godless peoples. The phenomenon appears in the Old Testament. So Jeremiah, for example, speaks of "the peoples who do not know God" (10:25). If reappears in the New Testament. So St. Paul, for example, speaks of "the peoples who do not know the God [the Father] and will not listen to the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thessalonians 1:8). Outside the people of God are the people who are "godless in this world" (Ephesians 2:13). The concept "people" here bears its high biblical sense, which is religious and moral. The criterion of belonging or not belonging to the people of God is not racial descent, political allegiance, or even ritual practice. They are the people of God who know him, that is, "go with" him, realize their religious and moral relation to him by a life of faith and obedience. (Fs)
79c Here we encounter the biblical analogous prototype of the massive contemporary phenomenon known as political atheism, the godlessness--of the polis, the people that, publicly as a people, are godless. Here, too, in the concept of the Two Peoples is the biblical analogue of Augustine's later conception of the Two Cities. (Fs)

80a The godless peoples receive harsh judgment in the Bible. Their condition is painted in somber colors. In a word, they are in a condition of nonexistence. The judgment is to be understood in the light of the biblical conception of the knowledge of God. The people of God are constituted a people precisely by their knowledge of him, by their faithful, active recognition of his presence among them. This knowledge of God is the public philosophy or the social consensus that creates and sustains the political existence of the people. In the opening phrase of its implicit statement, "We, his people," the plural "we" has meaning and consistency only through the adjective "his." The historical existence of the people, as a social unity organized for action in history, gets its sense-its meaning and its direction-from the knowledge of God, with whose vitality all their temporal destinies are bound up. It follows in biblical thought that the peoples who do not know God have no principle of spiritual existence. They are in a state of nonexistence as peoples. They make no sense; their condition is absurdity. The condition is designated in the Bible by the symbol of darkness: the godless peoples "sit in darkness and in the shadow of death" (Luke 1:79). The New Testament text is a conflation of two texts from Isaiah, who joins with the image of darkness (the symbol of nonexistence) the image of a dungeon prison (the symbol of captivity). (Fs)

81a From the eighth century B.C. onward, the prophets work out this conclusion in two steps. First, all the idols of the nations, whether they be the forces and phenomena of nature or the manufactured products of human art, are "nothingnesses," and their works are "nought" (Isaiah 41:24). They have no existence in the Hebraic sense, that is, no active existence, no power to save. As gods they are not even there. They are nullities, things of the void, absurdities. Second, the worship of idols nullifies the worshipper. "What they are," says the Psalmist, "those who make them will be, whoever puts his faith in them" (Psalm 115:8). The idolatrous peoples take on the condition of the idol which is impotence, emptiness, nonexistence. They are and they are not, which is absurdity. They inhabit the earth but they exist in the void. They are empty of the human substance, which is the knowledge of God. They are, if you like, the "hollow men" of Eliot's phrase. In the phrase of Isaiah, they are "lovers of ashes" (44:20) with no more solidity or cohesion than a heap of dust. (Fs)

81b Moreover, they cannot plead, as an excuse for their idolatry, that they are simply ignorant of the one true God as they might be ignorant of some far continent to which no one from among them had ever voyaged. The single witness of St. Paul will serve here instead of many texts. He voices the whole Israelite tradition and reinforces its validity under the new dispensation when he writes from Corinth his serenely savage indictment of the idolatrous peoples whom he had encountered in his travels. "They are," he says, "without excuse" (Romans 1:20). They had refused the evidence that was before their eyes in the cosmos which is sacral in the sense that in it the "invisibilities" of God, his "eternal power and divinity, are clearly seen upon rational reflection." It was not just that they made a mistake; their fault was not of the intellectual order alone. Their idolatry was "impiety and wickedness" (1:18), a grievous fault of the moral order. They did not fall into idolatry; they made free choice of it, decided for it, gave deliberate preference to it. In Paul's cold language, "they did not see fit [or: intend} to have God in a true knowledge" of him (1128). Their intention went elsewhere-to a "lie" over the "truth," to "the creature rather than the Creator" (1:25), to a god of their own making who would be present to them, powerless perhaps, but at least undemanding. So it happened that "they nullified themselves by their own arguments and their senseless mind plunged into darkness" (1:21). This did not happen by accident, inadvertence, sheer error. The issue had been one of intention, and it had been made clear to them: "What can be known about God was publicly knowable; for God himself had made it public knowledge" (1:19). The issue was therefore put to their freedom. This is why they were without excuse. Behind their idolatry lay not a misconception but a choice. In the end, they were godless in consequence of a will to godlessness. (Fs)