Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Hypothek - Kompaktheit; Propheten, Königtum, Landnahme, Jesus - Bergpredigt

Kurzinhalt: Doppelte Kritik der Propheten (Schwierigkeit der Sozialkritik vom Standpunkt der Siedler); Siedler - Nomaden,

Textausschnitt: 64/6 The nature of Israelite compactness has previously been defined as "a perpetual mortgage of the world-immanent, concrete event on the transcendent truth that on its occasion was revealed." ... The agricultural settlement in Canaan had familiarized the people with the necessity of treating the agricultural fertility gods with proper respect; and the new power position of the monarchy had compelled respect, as well as official cult establishments, for foreign gods as a matter of diplomatic necessity. Hence, the Prophets, when they voiced the dissatisfaction with the new order, were in a peculiar position. They certainly had plenty of targets to attack. But the attack had to be made in the name of something; and wherever they looked for a basis from which to launch the attack, they found that the basis was already encumbered with a mortgage that had to be removed in its turn. (180f; Fs)
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66/6 The retreat to nomad civilization, however, was difficult for more than one reason. In the first place, the people at large had no intention of returning to nomad existence. As a matter of fact, nomad life had become so distant to the settlers in Canaan that only a few traces of its memory are left in the Bible, ... The ethics of nomad life, thus, could not be held up with any hope of success in opposition to the mores of the Kingdom. One could not undo the history of Israel and return to the desert. Worse, however, was that the Yahwism of the desert period apparently did not provide the spiritual symbols that could be evoked authoritatively against the evils of the time. What the exact nature of the difficulty was we do not know, as the original symbols of the Mosaic period cannot be disengaged with certainty from the context created by the postprophetic redactions. But we do know that it required the efforts of a whole galaxy of Prophets to differentiate the spiritual meaning of Yahwism from a symbolism that enclosed it compactly in the ordering instructions for an association of nomad clans. And once these efforts had achieved a certain measure of success, the oppositional character of Prophetism had become doubly futile. For, pragmatically, the opposition had lost its target with the destruction of the Kingdoms; and, spiritually, it became obvious that the existence or nonexistence of a Kingdom of Israel was irrelevant for the fundamental problems of a life in righteousness before the Lord. (181f; Fs)
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68/6 The relationship between the life of the spirit and life in the world is the problem that lies unresolved at the bottom of the Israelite difficulties. Let us hasten to say that the problem by its nature is not capable of a solution valid for all times. Balances that work for a while can be found and have been found. But habituation, institutionalization, and ritualization inevitably, by their finiteness, degenerate sooner or later into a captivity of the spirit that is infinite; and then the time has come for the spirit to break a balance that has become demonic imprisonment. Hence, no criticism is implied when the problem is characterized as unresolved. But precisely because the problem is unsolvable on principle, an inestimable importance attaches to its historically specific states of irresolution. In the Israelite case, the problem is unresolved in so far as it is on the point of emergence from the compactness of the Mosaic period into the Prophetic differentiation. And the foundation of the Kingdom was, furthermore, the specific crisis that revealed the demonic derailment of the Mosaic foundation. Here we witness the interplay of experiences in the struggle of the spirit for its freedom from encasement in a particular social organization. That struggle of truly world-historic importance has, by its experiential phases, determined the unique structure of the Biblical narrative as a literary work. (183; Fs)