In The Natural History of
Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on
to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to
apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e.,
anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed
or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly
other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our
world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that
God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility
(i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry
with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing
them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so
far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming
that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories).
Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I
want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable
with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of
eternity.
In the Book of Exodus, the anthropomorphism
as a narrative device in myth is not problem-free, so it is important to emphasize
the leitmotif of distance between God and humans. “Out of the slavery their cry
for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his
covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and
God took notice of them.”[1]
God remembers, which is an interesting anthropomorphism considering that
omniscience is a divine attribute. That God remembers the covenant seems to
imply that God had not been paying attention when the “Egyptians became
ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with
hard service.”[2] So
as to avoid the obvious incompatibility of omniscience and needing to remember,
one commentator claims that the word, “’remember,’ when used with God as
subject, typically means that God has determined to initiate action.”[3]
But perhaps the two things—recalling and deciding—merely occur together (i.e.,
positively correlated) rather than mean the same thing even when applied to God
as the subject. God is depicted nevertheless as being distant, moreover, looking
upon the Israelites rather than being among them, and coming “down to deliver”
the Israelites, which is a fundamental change from Genesis, where God is so
close that God makes clothes for Adam and Eve once they realize they are naked.[4]
“What was God doing, during
those years the Israelites suffered under the Egyptians?”[5]
It is as if the hands-on deity had gone up to attend to other business, and
turned back to the Israelites because their groans had reached a sufficient
volume or intensity. Then God would be with Moses as he returns to Pharaoh to
bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Alternatively, being omniscient and
omnipotent, God may have been allowing the increased subjugation of the chosen
people so they would experience their dependence on God, but the Israelites
could not fathom this divine plan and thought instead that their god had been
away. Such a divine plan is distinct from the infliction or permitting of
suffering by God as punishment for the Israelites having violated the covenant.
As one commentator admits, the Israelites in Egypt “are not accused of having
done anything wrong.”[6]
So the prophets’ association of the absence of God with “judgment for Israel’s
sins” cannot apply here.[7]
As in the Book of (righteous) Job, no “rationalization of the absence of God is
ever attempted, but the issue,” according to one commentator, “is resolved by
the coming of the God who saves.”[8]
I disagree that the issue of God’s absence in the midst of undeserved suffering
in the case of the Israelites in Egypt is resolved by the return of God, even
if only in terms of God’s attention, for unlike Job, no wager calling for the
slaves’ undeserved suffering to test their faith is mentioned in the text. In
my view, the absence of God when the Israelites’ servitude was especially harsh
is simply necessary for there to be the harshness, which in turn serves as the
reason why leaving Egypt makes sense. God is anthropomorphized by the author
here as God needing to remember, as a human does, for this narrative purpose. Were
it the case as in Wisdom of Solomon that “the souls of the righteous are in the
hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them,”[9]
then presumably there would be no need for the Israelites to leave Egypt, and
thus for God to save them.
In Exodus 3, there is also
distance, but here the reason is easily understood. God at the burning bush
tells Moses, ”Come no closer! . . . for the place on which you are standing is
holy ground.”[10]
Here it is not that God goes off as if on other business; rather, it is
humanity that should maintain a distance from God out of respect
for God’s inherent holiness. Indeed, as one commentator states, “’Holiness’ has
been identified as the quality of divinity itself . . .”[11]
The definitive quality in experiencing holiness as analyzed by Rudolf Otto in
his book, The Idea of the Holy, can be understood to be the numinous
quality in which a wholly other, or “supernatural,” presence is sensed or
inferred in the immediate context of liminality, as if the person were
momentarily suspended between two types of existence or fundamental modes of
reality. This core of holiness goes beyond what we can grasp as rationality or
moral goodness and even “defies language.”[12]
To use the term, “supernatural,” for instance, does not do the phenomenon
justice.
Furthermore, sensing of a
numen in a liminal situation is more fundamental than are the qualities of
being fascinated and terrified. The latter two can be considered to be reactions
rather than as primary. Projected outwards, God can be said to be
fascinating or angry, but more to the point is God’s transcendence tangent to
our realm. Put another way, something holy has sufficient deep significance to
be sensed as ontologically different, or “other,” in a fundamental way. God is the very definition, referent, or
epitome of holiness.
Mankind is already tainted by
the original sin of Adam and Eve by Exodus. Therefore, in Exodus, “Moses said
to the Lord, ‘The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you
yourself warned us, saying, ‘Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.’”[13]
So even though “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God,” they
“took their stand at the foot of the mountain.”[14]
Even the priests were to stand at that distance from God, who had “descended
upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”[15]
After God spoke to the people, who then said to Moses, “do not let God speak to
us, or we will die.”[16]
“Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick
darkness where God was.”[17]
Although “God’s appearance on the mountain is . . . described as both
frightening and attractive, daunting and fascinating,”[18]
the thick darkness, itself ontologically significant next to daylight, as the
experience of a full solar eclipse may intimate to a degree, suggests the
liminal presence of a numen—that something that is fundamentally other than
ordinary is now present in our world.
Drawing on Otto’s terminology,
the mysterium experienced from the sense of a transcendent, numinous
presence can be understood to be more fundamental than the tremendum (terrifying,
as daunting, as distinct from simply being afraid[19])
and fascinans (fascinating) qualities of a religious experience of the
holy. Including the presence of mystery is perhaps just another way of saying
that a religious experience, unlike experiences in other domains such as
science, politics, and even ethics, go beyond the limits of human cognition,
perception, and emotion. In this way, Otto can be situated with the Christian
theologian of the sixth century, (Pseudo) Dionysius.
One implication of the
Otto-Dionysius “synthesis” or “nexus” is that even the wisdom tradition in the
Hebrew Bible falls short, as evinced in the Book of Job. Job’s “friends,” who insist
rather harshly that Job must have been impious to suffer so, invite Yahweh’s
anger, for in the “repeated attempts to reinterpret Job’s situation against all
appearances in accordance with [Wisdom] teaching, they demonstrate that the
attempt to interpret human fate according to fixed rules can become deeply
inhuman.”[20]
Initially sympathetic, lying on the dirt with Job for seven days, the “friends”
essentially kick the guy when he’s down because they think they know God by building
“entirely on the [Wisdom] teaching and its infallibility.[21]
Thus, “God’s wrath burns against [Job’s friends] because,” God says, they have “’not
spoken of me what is right.’”[22]
God says to Eliphaz the Temanite, “’My wrath is kindled against you and against
your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant
Job has.’”[23]
Job’s three “friends” must “seek atonement” by performing a sacrifice to God;
paradoxically, the “friends” “have to rely on Job’s petition on their behalf.”[24]
In contrast, Job does not try
to “force God’s actions into any kind of theory,” then he recognizes the inappropriateness
of his attitude after a dressing-down by God.[25]
Job tells God, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye
sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”[26]
Job’s realization and repentance tells us that God’s initial claim that Job is
a righteous man is correct after all. Job is blameless, not perfect, for he calls
“God to account, indeed even accusing him” at one point, but he does so without
the assumption of infallibility because, unlike his friends, questions the traditional
human teaching that a “recognizable link” exists between what a person does and
how much one suffers.[27]
God rightly applies blame instead to Job’s self-righteous “friends,” for they
have spoken of God without understanding, as they presumed that they could not
be wrong about that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought
and thus of theories. Humans cannot “understand God’s actions in terms of
comprehensible and manageable rules.”[28]
Faith seeking understanding should not put the cart before the horse, lest Aristotle’s
notion of misordered concupiscence—putting a lower good above a higher one—apply.
Admittedly, it is tempting to stop at the anthropomorphist language of myth, or even to take that language literally, but God as wholly other necessitates mystery that goes with the inherent distance between us and a transcendent referent. Throughout the natural history of religion, the human proclivity to fixate on divine attributes at the expense of the distant mysterium of the divine, which relativizes even viewing it as a being (beings as entities being familiar to us in our realm), can at some point in a person’s experience of the divine compromise the sense of mystery and distance itself in yearning for that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought, senses, and feelings. It is thus important to keep in mind God’s command to stay off the mountain and the quality of mysterium in Otto’s theory, which, as a mere theory, does not exhaust God’s ways.
1. Ex
2:23-25
2. Ex
1:13-14
3. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary
(Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):5.
4. The quoted text is from Exodus 3:8.
5. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology
in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press,
1994):4.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. 3:1
10. Ex 3:5
11. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a
Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):26.
12. Ibid., p. 31.
13. Ex. 14:23
14. Ex. 14:17
15. Ex 14:20, italics added.
16. Ex 20:19
17. Ex 20:21
18. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a
Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):28.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Rolf
Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament,
David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
21. Ibid., italics added. Ignorance that presumes that it cannot be
wrong evinces the arrogance of false entitlement, as if the creature were above
its Creator.
22. Ibid., p. 354. God’s statement is
in Job 42:7.
23. Job
42:7.
24. Rolf
Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament,
David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
25. Ibid.
26. Job
42:5-6.
27. Rolf
Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament,
David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
28. Ibid., p. 357.
