The Un-theology
In the beginning God created (various translations)
God – I have often remarked that there is no Jewish systematic theology, but the importance of that fact is perhaps lost on an audience of Western thinkers. Most likely the subliminal explanation is simply that the ancient Hebrews were not intellectually or morally equipped to construct a real theology, or that, like all ancient people, they simply didn’t think about God as an object of thought bur rather as a divine law-giver. Or perhaps you’ve heard this expression and simply passed it off as one of those odd facts about a strange ancient people. You look at modern Judaism and conclude that contemporary Jews must have a theology. After all, they are so religious.
All of this thinking merely displays a basic misunderstanding of the Bible, or should we say, a basic transformation of the Bible into a Western religious document. The truth is much more powerful. There is no Jewish systematic theology because in Jewish thought God is not a thing. He is not the object of study about things (including God). In his introduction of Heschel’s Between God and Man, Fritz Rothschild makes this distinction clear:
“An adequate Biblical ontology . . . must be based on . . . the divine concern. God and the world in relation, and not God in isolation, is the subject matter of human experience and thought. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as theology(the logos about God). Heschel calls the Bible ‘God’s anthropology’ rather than ‘man’s theology’ since it deals with man as standing in relation to God and under his demand and not with the divine nature or essence. And just as Biblical ontology cannot deal with God apart from the world, it is also unable to look at the world in isolation from God. The divine concern is, therefore, a more basic category than being.”[1]
What this means for us, those who grew up with Luther, Calvin, Aquinas and Augustine, not to mention Millard Erickson or Norman Geisler, is that all of these systematic theologies that are so influential in our thinking about God are fundamentally misdirected. That’s why, for just one small example, they must introduce the category of anthropomorphism in order to maintain the ontological distance between the transcendent God and His creation. That’s why Christian theology depends so heavily on Greek categories like perfection, because the Greeks establish the radical dichotomy between the subject and the object, us and the rest of everything that exists, including God. But this ontology is not biblical. It reveals an incredible error in our basic thinking about the meaning of the Bible. As Rothschild notes:
“The idea of pathos, which forms the main theme of Heschel’s penetrating study of prophetic consciousness . . . expresses the conviction that the Deity cannot be understood through a knowledge of timeless qualities of goodness and perfection, but only by sensing the living acts of God’s concern and his dynamic attentiveness in relation to man, who is the passionate object of his interest. [God} is moved and affected by the actions of men and reacts to them in joy and sorrow, pleasure and wrath.”[2]
The Bible is God’s recording of His emotional involvement with His creation. It is God’s passionate narrative to us and about us. Try reading it that way instead of reading it as if it were nothing more than a collection of timeless truths for theological tabloids.
Topical Index: Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man, theology, concern, Genesis 1:1
[1] Fritz A. Rothschild, “Introduction,” in Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 24.
[2] Fritz A. Rothschild, “Introduction,” in Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 24.
