Transcendental Texts

I will not act in My blazing wrath, I will no more destroy Ephraim.  For I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I do not desire to root out.  Hosea 11:9  Robert Alter

Not a man – Christian theology employs texts like this one to support its view of the transcendental nature of God.  Let me say this another way.  Orthodox Christian theology claims that God is essentially transcendent (and, by the way, so does orthodox Judaism).  This means that God is utterly different than human beings.  Aquinas’ via negativa expands this claim.  We are finite; God is infinite.  We are mortal; God is immortal.  We are imperfect; God is perfect.  We are temporal; God is atemporal.  We are limited; God is unlimited.  You get the idea.  A transcendent God is everything we aren’t.  When Hosea speaks on God’s behalf, stating that God is not a man, theologians use this sort of claim to bolster the idea that God is somehow totally removed from anything human.  Of course, Genesis 1:26-27 presents a problem.  How can we be in God’s image if He is totally different from us?  The usual answer is that we only share by analogy what God’s image actually is.  This means that God’s image in us is really about our spiritual nature, our free-choice constitution, and our responsibility.  Everything else in us is merely human.

There are serious consequences to this view of the nature of Man, not least of which is that we have nothing positive in our essence.  We’re defined by the opposite of God’s nature.  Even the best of us is essentially unlike God.  And we can never really be anything else.  You can see how easily the idea of original sin slips into this theology.  We were created less than the original so it’s not surprising that we act in ways that oppose God.

But does this verse and verses like it really say that God and man are essentially different?  I don’t think so.  The context of this verse is about one emotional response, and one response only, namely, revenge!  Hosea decries Israel’s rejection of God.  YHVH has done everything a loving parent can do to create, nourish, train, and care for Israel, yet the “son” has rejected the Father.  Worse yet, the “son” has attached himself to another “parent,” a pagan culture.  How would a normal, human father respond?  You don’t have to look far to find the answer.  In the ancient world, if a servant rejected the king, the punishment was swift and sure.  The same goes for family.  There might be more regret, but execution or banishment was the usual response.  How does God respond?

This is why God says that He is not a man.  It has nothing to do with transcendence.  It’s all about God’s choice not to seek revenge!  Context defeats the theological claim.  In fact, in this regard we can behave exactly like God.  We, too, can forgo revenge.  With this in mind, we need to reread the Genesis passage.  How are we created in God’s image?  Not in essence (as Greek philosophical influence suggests) but in acts.  God’s image in us is seen in our actions.  God is a verb in human thought.  Yeshua says as much.  “If you have seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”  What did he mean?  That God is a corporeal being?  Of course not.  What he meant is to look at his behavior and see God the verb.  So, are you a divinely inspired verb?

Topical Index:  image, transcendence, God, Man, essence, Hosea 11:9