Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Erwartung des Messias, Erlöser, Christentum als Skandal: Rückkehr des transzendenten Gottes in die Welt

Kurzinhalt: erst Entdivinisierung, dann Rückkehr des transzendenten Gottes in die Welt

Textausschnitt: 37/8 With regard to the form a return of God into history would assume, the prayer is silent. And one should not read more into Trito-Isaiah than can actually be found there. Nevertheless, there is enough in the prayer to suggest the experiential mood in which men were receptive for the appearance of God on earth and to become the followers of the Christ. To be sure, there was a host of other symbols approximating the godman which would make the appearance of Christ intelligible to the civilizationally mixed humanity of the Roman Empire: there were Egyptian Pharaohs, Hellenistic god-kings, and Jewish expectations of a Davidic Messiah. Still, none of them contained the specific ingredient that made Christianity a scandal, the ingredient to be found in Trito-Isaiah: the return of the world-transcendent God into a cosmos which had become nondivine, and into a history which had become human. This gulf between God and the world, inherent in Yahwism from the Mosaic age, could be bridged through the Israelite centuries by the survivals of cosmological symbols, by the Canaanite agricultural gods, and by ancestor cults; but when the terrible implications of this separation of God from the world had been realized through the work of the prophets, and when the intramundane, political disasters had brought home the anguish of life in a god-forsaken world, the time was ripe for the return of God into a history from which the divine forces had been eliminated so drastically. (239f; Fs) (notabene)