A God of Compassion
and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and bricks and at all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which they rigorously imposed on them. Exodus 1:14 NASB
Bitter – The biblical world is a world intoxicated with God. Our usual subject-object dichotomy evaporates. We are no longer the neutral observers cataloging and calculating the behavior of the world “outside” us. The biblical world is a world where everything is object, including us, because there is only one subject—God. In this world, God’s involvement with His creation is a manifestation of His voluntary engagement in all things. Every moment in time, action in the animate and inanimate world, involves God. This perspective has a significant implication for our experience of evil and for the way that we handle the biblical text regarding God’s interaction with the world. Rather than seeing evil as an independent force opposing God, the Bible expresses calamity with the idiomatic phrase, “hiding His face.” It is not the case that some super powerful, divine being challenges God’s sovereignty in a cosmic battle between good and evil. That idea evolves much later in theological constructions. In the early biblical texts, God Himself is sovereign even during “evil” experiences. As Zornberg writes: “‘hiding of His face’—conveys most powerfully the human experience of being abandoned by God. To suffer grinding, senseless labor, to lose one’s babies to the river, is to know the world as one where God indeed seems blind and deaf and unknowing. . . When He no longer hides His face, history changes; redemption becomes possible.”[1]
In the God-intoxicated world, the issue is never overcoming the Devil. It is rather pleading for God to turn His face toward us. When that happens, amazing things occur, both miraculous and natural, both saturated with God. The Bible describes this relationship between God and His world in emotional terms, like sorrow, regret, joy, laughter, anger, hope, frustration and love. Since we also experience these emotions, we recognize them when they are applied to God. But this kind of vocabulary created a serious difficulty for theologies based on Greek philosophy. Once theologians adopted the Greek idea of perfection as an attribute of God, all of this kind of language became impossible.
“The notion of a God of pathos whose chief characteristic is concern for and participation in the lives of his creatures is diametrically opposed to the main stream of Jewish, Moslem, and Christian metaphysical theology throughout the last two millennia. The ‘dogma of the philosophers,’ as Sextus Empiricus calls the idea that the Deity is impassible, was taken over by the speculative theologians, who, since Philo of Alexandria, endeavored to show by means of allegorization and various other exegetical devices that the anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Hebrew Bible have to be reinterpreted so as to make him identical with the self-sufficient, impassible Deity of the philosophers. The difference between the Biblical and the Greek concepts of the Deity can largely be traced back to the fact that Greek philosophy takes its rise from the experience of reality as an ordered cosmos, while the Biblical mind begins with the experience of a divine subject whose creative act is the ground of all reality.”[2]
Anthropomorphism is a necessary component of any theology, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, that begins from Greek philosophy, because in that system, God cannot feel. Feelings are transitory. They change. And a God of absolute perfection is an immutable God, a God who cannot change (or He would no longer be God), a God who is impassible (logically without passions), a God who is diametrically opposite of the god portrayed in the Bible.
When the text tells us that God “hides His face,” we are not to take this as merely a human way of expressing our spiritual experience, unconnected to the actual transcendent Being of God. No, the Bible clearly wants us to recognize God’s emotions because those emotions intimately express His unwavering involvement with His creation. And we do recognize this fact—until we pick up a theological text and discover that the God of the Bible really isn’t God at all.
Topical Index: impassible, perfection, emotion, hiding the face, anthropomorphism, Exodus 1:14
[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Schocken Books, New York: 2001), p. 31.
[2] Fritz A. Rothschild, “Introduction,” in Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 27.
