Too Much for Our Own Good

“Who is like You among the gods, O Lord? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders?”   Exodus 15:11  NASB

Awesome – The Greek heritage of the West is focused on one fundamental goal: to rationally understand.  The method is examination of phenomena in the world in order to discover causal connections.  Once discovered, the purpose is to predict and control future occurrences.  In layman’s terms, the West is all about answering the question, “How?”  This paradigm has resulted in amazing progress.  Technology, medicine, physical sciences, mathematics, social systems—virtually every aspect of our lives has been enhanced by following this Greek goal.  Even religion has been significantly influenced by the Greek paradigm.  This is quite startling because religion is really thinking about God and God is the quintessential example of something beyond the scope of rational investigation.  Nevertheless, theology approaches God, through the texts of the Bible and the experience of believers, with the same approach used to explain electricity or atomic particles.

Because of this paradigm commitment, biblical texts are often treated as proto-science or they are subjected to historiographic analysis or psychological investigation.  This would be appropriate if the Bible were a book about God, but it isn’t.

“What?” you might exclaim.  “Of course, the Bible is a book about God.  It’s God’s word!  How can it not be about God?”

Abraham Heschel provides a discomforting perspective:

“It is improper to employ the term ‘self-revelation’ in regard to biblical prophecy.  God never reveals Himself.  He is above and beyond all revelation.  He discloses only a word.  He never unveils His essence; He communicates only His pathos, His will.”[1]

Did you think that you can know the true essence of God by reading the Bible or by studying systematic theology?  Aquinas thought so.  So did Augustine, Jerome, Luther, Calvin and the modern theologians like Erickson, Geisler, Piper, and F. F. Bruce.  But Heschel’s study of the prophetic tradition suggests something else.  The Bible is God’s view of Man, not Man’s view of God.  Insofar as the Bible speaks about God, it reveals only God’s will and interaction with and for Man.  It doesn’t tell us anything about the essence of God.  Western theology, committed to Greek principles, treats the Bible as if it speaks about the essential nature and character of God.  But this approach has potentially dangerous consequences:

“Focused upon the Beyond, the mind begins to disregard the demands and values of here and now, sliding into resignation and withdrawal from action, moral indifferentism, and world denial.”[2]

Heschel’s comment about the Bible as God’s anthropology has interesting implications for us:

“As a rule, God is silent; His intentions and design remain hidden from the mind of man.  What comes to pass is a departure from the state of silence and aloofness, God’s turning from the conditions of concealment to an act of revealment.  This change brings about the transition from a state or condition which seems permanent and timeless to a moment of encounter which is always unique in time.  Eternity enters a moment.  The uniqueness of the latter interrupts what at a distance seems to be uninterrupted uniformity.  Timeless silence we can only conceive in the image of impersonality.  It is an order, perhaps a principle, unrelated; it has no face and no regard.”[3]

God as an idea, a principle of order, is the result of speculative systematic theology.  The conflict between the God who cares and the God who reigns beyond human comprehension occupies countless theological pages.  Most believers opt for the caring God, oblivious of the fact that their own theology contains contradictory trajectories.  They don’t think of God as an idea despite what the theological pundits write.  They don’t worship a principle (the Uncaused Cause) regardless of the fact that Western theology begins with such assertions.  They believe their experience, not their teachers.  Perhaps it’s worth asking why such discrepancies are even part of faith.  Maybe the Bible just doesn’t fit a Western paradigm at all.

Topical Index:  theology, essence, God, Bible, awesome, Exodus 15:11

[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 215.

[2] Ibid., p. 223.

[3] Ibid., p. 216.