Speed Limit
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 NASB
In the beginning – Abraham Heschel’s two volume work, The Prophets, is undoubtedly one of the most important theological texts you can read. It’s not simply an analysis of the message of the prophets like you would find in commentaries. It is a tour de force of why the Bible is a prophetic religion. It conclusively demonstrates how Greek philosophical ideas penetrated Western thought, producing a religion that is neither biblical nor internally consistent. With the scalpel of the intellect, Heschel demolishes the idea that God can be described according to rational attributes. Greek categories of thinking are not applicable to a prophetic awareness of God’s presence.
Why is this important? Why should you care about the history of Plato’s influence on religious thought? After all, few of us are really philosophers or theologians. We are just ordinary believers. We read the Bible in order to find hope, comfort, and direction. We don’t worry about things like immutability, impassibility, or infinity. We aren’t academics. We just love God.
But then we discover that the meaning of even the simplest texts of Scripture are significantly influenced by our cultural assumptions; assumptions that have evolved from the ancient foundations of the West. We are philosophically dependenteven if we are unaware of our dependence. Our concepts of justice, law, mercy, person, time, obligation, even prayer have been formed in the cauldron of the West, not in the frying pan of the prophet. We think we know what the Bible says because we think that the vocabulary of the Bible is the same as our vocabulary. The truth is that the words look the same but what they mean is not the same. As an example, let’s take this first verse, so familiar that we never thought we could be mistaken about what it means.
“ . . . the Bible does not begin by saying, ‘God created heaven and earth’; it begins by saying ‘In the beginning.’ The essential message is not that the world had a cause, but rather that the world is not the ultimate. The phrase ‘in the beginning’ is decisive. It sets a limit to being, as it sets a limit to the mind. The supreme question is not, ‘Who made the world?’ but rather ‘Who transcends the world?’ The biblical answer is ‘He Who created heaven and earth transcends the world.’”[1]
Do you understand what Heschel wrote? Did you think that Genesis 1 was about cause, i.e., how the world came into existence? Have you debated whether or not creationism or evolution is true (because if you have you took Genesis as a causal explanation)? Have you read this little verse over and over and never really understood that it is the speed limit of thinking, not the beginning of everything? Heschel’s warning should cause rational panic: “It is of extreme importance that theology should endeavor to operate with categories indigenous to the insights of depth-theology instead of borrowing its categories from speculative philosophy or science. What is regarded as the ultimate in philosophy must not be regarded as the ultimate in theology.”[2]
We’ve made a mistake—a very big mistake. We thought the Bible was just naïve philosophy. We applied Greek categories of thought and person to biblical texts, and we ended up with Greek-based systematic theology. We never heard what the prophets said because we made them speak our thinking. As one more example, consider this:
“The notion of God as a perfect being is not of biblical origin. It is not the product of prophetic religion, but of Greek philosophy; a postulate of reason rather than a direct, compelling, initial answer to man to His reality. In the Decalogue, God does not speak of His perfection, but of His having made free men out of slaves.”[3]
Maybe we need to start over. What do you think?
Topical Index: theology, Greek, prophets, limit, Genesis 1:1
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 45.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 54.
