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God

© Peter Ochs 2000

In Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. D.Novak, P. Ochs, D. Sandmel M. Signer, T. Frymer-Kensky (Westview

Press/Perseus: 2000):49-69.

1. God and Jewish Tradition

The title of this chapter represents the ultimate reason why we would compile a book like this. We

speak and write as members of a people pulled apart from the world, and to a degree apart from other

peoples, only because of our relationship to the one we call creator of the world (bore olam), master of the

world (ribono shel olam), almighty (el shadai), holy one blessed be he (ha kadosh boruch hu), the place

(hamakom), the presence (hashekhina), merciful father – or “womb-like father!” (av harachamim), the

name YHVH who cannot be spoken, our God (elohenu). In the words of the traditional morning sabbath

service,

The soul of all life blesses your name, YHVH, our God. The spirit of all

flesh glorifies and exalts your memory, our leader, always. From

eternity to eternity you are God. Beside you, we have no leader who

redeems and saves, ransoms, rescues and sustains, and shows us mercy

in all times of suffering and want.

Living still in the shadow of Holocaust, we remember, nevertheless, that we are a people of God,

and we write to share with fellow Jews our sense of the meaning, joys, and challenges of being such a

people in our day. One of the striking features of contemporary Jewish life is that, outside of the more

traditional circles of observant Jews, Jews do not often speak and write openly about their God, even those

who privately acknowledge their continued faith. This does not appear to be a matter of mere protest

against a God who would be God in this awful century. It seems to be more a sign of unfamiliarity: a

consequence of two hundred years of adjusting to the modern habit of segregating “religion” to the sphere

of the “private” and “individual” and “confessional.” As if speaking to and of God were too immodest a

matter to share publicly! Well, I hope readers will not consider the authors of this book to be immodest. I

hope, instead, that readers will consider us markedly ordinary. The cross-cultural evidence is that, by far,

most people in the world, from children to old folks, feel rather comfortable talking about and even talking

to the one(s) they call “God,” or a linguistic equivalent. Speaking of and to God is, most of all, a

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traditional practice. It is something people learn to do from childhood, because their parents and

grandparents and teachers do it, and because it is the way they speak from the heart in a language that is

intimate to them. It may therefore require more chutzpah for a human being to claim to have no need for

such a God than to admit to participating in the everyday faiths and beliefs of ordinary traditional people!

So, then, this book begins with a traditional belief: that we creatures are neither alone in the

universe nor accompanied by strictly impersonal or malevolent spirits. This Jewish traditional belief has, to

be sure, changed over the millennia. The Israelites appear to have once peopled the spirit world with many

spirits and gods. Through the days of the First Temple, however, belief in the unique power of one God

seems to have become a commonplace, and this became belief in the unique One as the only God: Lord

God creator of heaven and earth. Other beliefs remained, to be sure, and some of them in competition with

belief in the one God, but what we, rather loosely, call “monotheism” appears to have guided the everyday

beliefs from the Second Temple period on.

The best way to learn about the God of traditional Jewish belief is to examine the language of

prayer that is recorded in the Bible and in the literature of the rabbinic sages who canonized the Bible in the

1st century and who have since interpreted the meaning of the Bible for everyday Jewish life. Traditional

prayer may be characterized most simply as the way ordinary Jews opens their hearts most deeply; the God

of Israel may be characterized most simply as the one to whom ordinary Jews pray.

Of the many kinds of prayer in Jewish tradition, I will mention three that illustrate vividly how

Jews have traditionally opened their hearts to God: what we call prayers of petition, of praise, and of

blessing.

Petition -- bakasha or techina -- could be called the open heart’s simplest call for help, When his

sister Miriam turned ill, Moses prayed simply, ‘el na refa na la, “God, please heal her!” Elemental prayers

of petition are addressed to God as bore olam, Creator of the Universe, who is Savior, moshia, and

Redeemer, goel, when one’s prayers are heard: “O God, save me by Your name (Ps. 54); “May the words

of my mouth and the prayer of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Ps. 19).

To learn to pray in the fashion of the psalmist is not to acquire esoteric knowledge and technical skill, but

to open the heart. The kind of knowledge that one acquires like a possession may, in fact, do more to close

the heart than open it. To re-open a heart covered over by such learning may require un-learning that kind

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of knowledge in favor of another. This “learning how to unlearn” is what we call religious study. This is

not about “gaining knowledge” in the usual sense. Since Jewish learning is a means of relating all aspects

of one’s life to God, it requires careful study of what all those aspects are and of how previous generations

have succeeded or failed in relating them to God. But the ultimate goal of this study is simply to open a

path in the student’s heart, so that the words of the heart can be voiced to God. This is the path of prayer,

which includes prayerful living.

Praise – hallel – is the Psalmist’s most frequently uttered form of prayer: “Praise Him with loud

clashing cymbals… Halleluya!” The God addressed through prayers of praise is the Creator whose world

we inhabit, the Sustainer whose gifts keep us in life, and the Redeemer and Healer who answers our

petitions. When the rabbinic sages standardized the siddur, or Jewish prayer book, they filled it with

Biblical psalms and, thus, with many prayers of praise to the One who has the tenderness to hear our

petitions and the power to respond to them.

The blessing – berakhah – is the prayer that makes almost every moment of the day an occasion

for addressing God. To utter a berakhah is neither “to bless God,” per se, nor to “be blessed by God.” It is,

instead, to declare of every event of everyday life that this is an occasion in which I sense the direct

consequence of God’s acting in the world. The most well known example accompanies the most ordinary

daily act, eating a piece of bread. After washing the hands and breaking a morsel of bread, the traditional

Jew utters the words, barukh ata hashem eloheinu melech haolam hamotsi lechem min ha-arets, “Blessed

are you, Hashem our God, leader of the world, who brings forth bread from the earth.” With the words still

resounding in the mind, the individual then consumes the bread. The words of the blessing and the taste and

substance of the bread are conjoined in the act of eating. One scholar calls this joining an act of “normal

mysticism,” in which the simple act of eating something from this earth is literally transformed into an

experience – and acknowledgement – of that which is not of this earth: the gift of God.1 This is the God

whose words create this world and whose words, or Torah, also bring us to acknowledge and even taste his

creative actions. By uttering such blessings, the individual transforms any thing (dabar) on this earth into a

created-word (dibbur) of God.

But some readers may be uneasy with the anthropomorphism of what I have just reported. Here, in

an age of science and technology, I am writing about a God who is not of this earth but whose presence can

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be experienced through the simple act of eating bread! I hope I am sympathetic to the unease some readers

may have with this claim. I too belong to this age of science. I too think that Darwin makes sense of

animal development. But the Judaism I study is not at odds with the science I study, as long as the science

is not merely Newtonian, but belongs to the age of relativity theory. Judaism teaches me of a God I

encounter through his consequences, and this teaching -- about something that can be known only through

its effects -- is also an appropriate teaching for the contemporary logic of science. Physicists do not see

electrons. Yet, observing certain otherwise unrecognizable phenomena on their instruments, they assign

the name “electron” to recurring features of these phenomena. And they find that assigning such a name

helps them successfully predict when and how they will observe phenomena of this kind again. On one

level, we may say that the names of God function in a similar way for Judaism’s sages. They do not see

God, but the names of God help them successfully refer to that one, on the other side of their experiences

and relations, for whom there are no other names.

This analogy between scientific and religious ways of naming the invisible may also be extended

further. Scientists do not encounter and name phenomena out of nothing, but bring to their observations

habits of perception that belong to age-old traditions of studying the natural world. These traditions train

scientists to see what they see and also define the parameters of what they cannot see. When scientists

encounter and name the invisible, they therefore extend the limits of a received scientific tradition. Jewish

sages receive and reshape Biblical and rabbinic traditions in an analogous way. No Jew has an original

experience of God. In the Biblical account, even Moses at the burning bush encountered a God who named

Himself “the God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Ex 3). This God then disclosed to Moses

a name “through which He was not previously known” (Ex 3), but the Name remains a new way of naming

the One that was already known to Moses’ people. What applies to the names of God also applies to His

teachings. According to a rabbinic story in the Talmud, God brought Moses to visit the school of Akiva, the

rabbinic sage, who was on that day expounding the Torah. Moses was astonished that he was unable to

understand any of Akiva’s complex teachings. But then he heard the students ask, “Rabbi, where is this

from?” Akiva replied, “ It is a law of Moses from Sinai.”2 I do not take the lesson to be that Akiva was

claiming Mosaic authority for his own views, nor that he added nothing to what Moses already said. I

learn, instead, that every Jewish sage’s wisdom is a way of relearning and reforming the wisdom of his or

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her teachers, and that every sages’ learning is pregnant with more than he or she understands. The scientist

and the religious sage both encounter a world that hides from them as much as it reveals, and both are

accompanied in their encounter by a community and tradition of fellow scientists or fellow sages.

To speak of God is thus both to reiterate the words of one’s religious tradition and to introduce

into that tradition the results of yet another encounter with the unknown. The unknown can never be

encountered nakedly, outside the terms of some inherited language; nor can it ever be encountered fully

within the terms of such a language: something unnameable always makes an appearance. In our finitude,

however, we individual humans – and in this case, we individual Jews – tend to feel more secure in either

one of the two sides of theological encounter. Some of us prefer to approach the unknown dressed in as

many words of the received tradition as we can acquire. But some of us prefer to encounter the unknown

more nakedly, examining our tradition’s moments of change, questioning the limits of our knowledge, and

speculating imaginatively about what may lie beyond our received systems of language. Readers who share

the latter preference may be uncomfortable with the rabbinic terms I have used to talk about God; but

readers who share the former preference may be uncomfortable with the speculations that will come later in

this essay. To serve both kinds of reader, I will begin now to address our topic from three different, yet

complementary perspectives. These are the perspectives of received tradition, of new encounters and the

questions they raise, and of something in Judaism that always keeps the new and the old in constructive

relation.

The perspective of received tradition. “The God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is

the God we learn about from our ancestors. This is not a God whose modes of existence are to be proved or

disproved, but a God whose name belongs to our natural language. The same way we learn to use the

words “please” and “thank you,” this language teaches us to use the words “God created the world” and

“God’s justice.” While different Jews may picture what these words say in many different ways, the main

point of the words is not to deliver a specific picture of something out there. The point is, instead, to

provide all Jews with adequate vocabularies for engaging all their ancestors, as it were, in earnest

discussions about all the details of everyday life. According to the biblical account, Judaism’s received

tradition begins with the Torah that Moses received on Mt. Sinai. In the rabbis’ account, “Moses received

the Torah on Mt. Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, who transmitted it to the elders, who transmitted it to

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the prophets, who transmitted it to the “Men of the Great Assembly” (the legislative body in early Second

Temple days), who transmitted to the Pairs (the early, protorabbinic sages),” and on to the rabbinic sages

themselves (Mishnah Avot).

The perspective of new encounters. Moses was, however, not just a passive recipient of God’s

words. In the Biblical account, when God appeared to him out of the burning bush, his response was to

question as well as obey. God said he would send him to Pharoah; Moses replies “who am I that I should

go to Pharoah?” God told him to bring his people out; Moses asked, “When the Israelites ask me “What is

His name?” What shall I say?” And later, “what if they do not believe me?” (Ex 3). Moses asked questions

before he enacted God’s commands. According to the biblical account, however, when Moses read the

Tablets to the community of Israel, they declared naaseh v’nishmah, “[what you have commanded] we will

faithfully do”(Ex 24:7); in the Talmud’s gloss, “they committed themselves to doing (naaseh) before

hearing (v’nishmah, or pondering the meaning of what they were to do).”3 Unlike the people, Moses’

response to God is to question and and ponder before doing. This is the prototype of the philosopher’s

response, rather than the traditionalist’s, since the traditionalist receives, but the philosopher asks why?

what? and how?

Throughout Jewish history, philosopher-sages posed questions both about the nature of God and

God’s word and about the justice of God’s actions and the ethical meaning of God’s word. The Book of

Proverbs asked the first kind of question, “where can Wisdom be found?” Similarly, Philo asked about the

relation of God’s word to God’s own being, and Maimonides asked about the conditions of intellect that are

present in prophecy. Examining God’s intention to destroy Sodom, Abraham offered a prototype of the

second kind of question: “Shall not the judge of all earth act justly?” (Gen. 18:25). In the face of personal

and national loss, the Psalmist cried, “Why have You forsaken me?” And the rabbinic sages cried, “When

Rabbi Akiva was executed [by the Romans,] …the ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be

He: ‘Such Torah, and such a reward?’”4 In response to the pogroms in the Ukraine, the Yiddish poet Peretz

Markish wrote, “… I yearn to merge with you in prayer. And yet my heart, my lips are moved only to

blasphemies and curses.”5 The Talmudist and Auschwitz survivor, David Halivni composed his own

midrash: “The sword and the book came down from heaven tied to each other. Said the Almighty, ‘If you

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keep what is written in this book, you will be spared this sword; if not, you will be consumed by it’6 We

clung to the book, yet we were consumed by the sword.” 7

Does this mean that Jews have lost faith in God because of the Shoa? Eugene Borowitz argues

that, for modern Jews, loss of faith in God came long before the Shoa, through the work of Enlightenment,

Emancipation, rationalism, and assimilation. What Jews lost in the Shoa, he says, was their faith in

humanity.8 They lost faith in a utopian humanism that promised, “Give up your superstitions! Abandon the

ethnic and religious traditions that separate us one from the other! Subject all aspects of life to rational

scrutiny and the disciplines of science! This is how we will be saved.” It didn’t work. Not that science and

rationality are unworthy, but what failed was the effort to abstract these from their setting in the ethics and

wisdoms of received tradition.

The perspective that mediates between tradition and new encounters. If the Jewish scientist

contemplates the limits of the universe directly, without the support of religious tradition, then what can

mediate today between secular and traditional Jewish inquiries into the unknown? Judaism’s age-old

dialogue between the voices of tradition and of new encounter already mediates between ancient religious

beliefs and even the most modern practices of reason. It is simply a matter of bringing the dialogue up to

date. In the language of rabbinic Judaism, the mediation comes in the practice of “Oral Torah,” but we

may now find other terms useful as well. We may say simply that the questions and doubts raised in every

age change the shape and modify the language of Jewish religious tradition. These changes arise from both

philosophic questions about the nature of God and ethical questions about the justice of God’s actions.

Consider, for example, how traditions of Jewish philosophy emerge in response to questions about

Moses’ dialogue with God. According to the Biblical account, when Moses asked God’s name, God replied

“Tell the people ehyeh, ‘I will be,’ sent you … ehyeh imach, ‘ I will be with you.’” And further, “ Tell them

ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I will be what I will be,” is My name for everlasting” (Ex 3). Whenever these names

entered Israelite religion, they added something new, deep, and mysterious to traditional language about

God. For the rabbinic sages, these names remained a source of perennial dialogue, but no single dogma.

R. Abba b. Mammel said: God said to Moses, “You want to know My

Name? Well, I am called according to My work.… When I am judging

created beings, I am called elohim (God) … When I suspend judgment

…, I am called el shaddai (God Almighty). … and when I am merciful

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toward my world, I am called YHVH, which refers to the attribute of

Mercy. .. Thus ehyeh asher ehyeh in virtue of my deeds.

R. Isaac said: God said to Moses: “Tell them that I am now what I

always was and always will be; for this reason, the word ehyeh is written

three times.

…. R. Jacob b. Abina in the name of R. Huna of Sepphoris: God said to

Moses: “Tell them that I will be with them in this servitude, and in

servitude will they always continue, but I will be with them!”9

In the context of the philosophic and mystical inquiries of medieval Jewish scholars, Maimonides and

Nachmanides opened up yet another level of debate. Maimonides offered a philosophic interpretation. He

read ehyeh asher ehyeh as a proof of God’s essential attribute of necessary being: “God made known [to

Moses] the knowledge … through which [Israel] would acquire a true notion of the existence of God: …

There is a necessarily existent thing that has never been or ever will be, non-existent.”10

Nachmanides

offered a mystical interpretation. He argued that Maimonides’ reading violates the narrative context in

Exodus: Moses and Israel needed no rational proofs, for they knew God. “Moses asked only by what divine

attribute he was being sent…. God told him he was being sent “with the attribute of justice, which is within

the attribute of mercy.”11

Such discussions of God’s action tend to be technical; traditions of Jewish philosophy tend

therefore to be esoteric. Questions about Israel’s suffering, however, engender more general discussions,

giving rise to more public traditions of Jewish ethics. After the First Destruction, for example, the latter

chapters of the Book of Isaiah characterized Israel as God’s “Suffering Servant”: one whose suffering did

not necessarily reflect her own sins, as in the earlier traditions of Deuteronomy, but the sins of an

unrepentant humanity at large. The Second Destruction stimulated even more radical questions. The Book

of Exodus taught that God is “with Israel,” and the Psalmist interpreted this to mean that God is “with

Israel in her suffering” –imo anokhi be-tsarah (Ps. 91:15). After the Destruction, the rabbis interpreted this

to mean that “God is with Israel sufferingly” – hu btsarah.12

Later, there were some esoteric groups who

taught that God Himself suffered for humanity’s sins,13

and others who taught that God’s own name was

divided in two at the creation and that the end of history is not merely to redeem humanity, but also,

through that redemption, to repair God’s very name.14

Through the years of pogrom, there were poets who

taught that the very words we use to pray are now broken, and only silence can express our grief. And in

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the years since the Shoa, there are philosophers who teach that God can no longer touch us, but shows

Himself only through bare traces: our task is not now to look for Him, but only to seek out the faces of

those who suffer and bring care and consolation. However burdened, these are not mere plaints, but

teachings of religious change.

According to the Jewish theologians who conceived this book, Judaism is now changing in

another way as well. From sad experience, our recent forebears learned to assume that our religion is

despised by its host nations. They grew accustomed to acting on this assumption, either by joining the

despisers, or by despising them in turn: redefining Judaism as a religion that survives only if set entirely

apart. While compassionate toward our forebears and their suffering, we conclude nevertheless that their

assumptions belong to the past of Judaism, not to its future. Our students gain strength and confidence from

the way Judaism teaches its truths to its neighbors. And our Judaism has gained the strength and confidence

to teach our students, in Jewish terms, about who these neighbors are and what they believe. In this book,

we begin by teaching about our Christian neighbors and what they believe about the God of Israel.

2. The God of Christian Religious Tradition

Introducing Christianity the way we have introduced Judaism, we may begin by distinguishing the

received traditions of Christianity from the new encounters that stimulate Christian philosophers and

theologians to reflect in new ways on what they believe. Studying Christian belief in Jewish terms, this is

to ask, first, how Christians practice their traditions and, only then, asking how their sages may speak about

God in ways that may sound more abstract and technical to us. As with Judaism, we assume that

Christianity must ultimately be studied in ways that integrate these two perspectives; but we must be

content for now with an introductory study.

The Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas offers support for our first approaching Christianity

through the perspective of everyday practice. “One of the most important questions you can ask

theologians is where they go to church. . . . Theology can too easily begin to appear as ‘ideas,’ rather than

the kind of discourse that must, if it is to be truthful, be embedded in the practices of actual lived

community.”15

The best place to hear the beliefs that are shaping Christian desires is in the local churches,

in congregational prayer and in the sermons of local ministers and priests. With space for one illustration,

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let us consider Hauerwas’ own description of the Methodist church he attends weekly, Aldersgate United

Methodist Church, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After each part of his description, I will comment on

features of traditional Christian belief he has illustrated and on how they compare with traditional Jewish

beliefs.

Our worship area is … not an attractive sanctuary, but at least its

simplicity insures there is no ugliness. … Given the simplicity of our

space it makes all the difference who is and is not present on any Sunday

morning. We need everyone we can get…. I assume Aldersgate is a very

typical example of a mainline Christian church.16

Comment: There is a communal space for communicating with God. At least in this Protestant, Methodist

illustration, the Christian church compares well with the synagogue as a space for communal, rather than

merely individual, communication with God. The unit of traditional Christian belief in God is the Church,

embodied in local Christian community, just as the unit of traditional Jewish belief ought to be the people

Israel, embodied in the local Jewish community.

One of the highest points of our liturgy is always the prayers of the

people. … This person is having an operation, or their mother has just

died…. Through our prayers, we learn to have our lives lifted up to God

and thus to one another.

Comment: Prayer is not just about God, but also about one another. The Christian, like the Jewish

community is a gathering of people who care about one another, pray for each other’s welfare, and receive

together the blessings and summons of their tradition’s scriptural witness. God first appears on the scene as

the one to whom congregants pray.

Reverend Allred begins her sermon by citing … both Hebrew scripture

and New Testament. The God to whom she appeals is the one God of

Israel’s scripture reinterpreted now to be also the one God of the

scriptures of the early Christian community.17

Comment: God is the God of Israel whose word is made known through Hebrew Scripture. The God to

whom Christian pray at Aldersgate is not just the God of the people Israel, but specifically the God

personified in the words of Hebrew Scripture, the psalms in particular.

The God who anointed King David (I Sam.) is now seen to have

anointed the Christian community, as well, by way of baptism. “But you

are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people”

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(1 Peter); in Rev. Allred’s reading, this means that “when God called us

Gentiles to be grafted into God’s family he made of us a royal nation”

(169). The consequence is that the Gentiles, and not only the Jews, are

obliged to do God’s work in the world: “there are also ‘risks of baptism.’

Comment: The Church is grafted onto the people Israel and to its covenant with God.

[Rev. Allred continues,] “We want to support our missionary family in

Liberia, to support our ministries at the Shelter for the Homeless,

Willow Springs Nursing Home….”

Comment: To share in the covenant with God is to do God’s work in the world, from care for the homeless

down to the need to raise money for the Church and its missions.

The God of Israel is also the God of Jesus Christ. The title of the

sermon, in fact, is “Christ’s Body at Aldersgate,” and it is offered at

Lent, a time of “the church’s pilgrimage again to Jerusalem to

experience again Christ’s death and resurrection.”18

Comment: Christians know the God of Israel through the body of one Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, known to the

Church as the Christ. Christians retrace and reenact the life of Christ the way we Jews retrace and reenact

the life of Israel. But the very fact that the Christian story is so close to the Jewish story leads Jews to

respond to Christianity as more than just another religion. It seems, instead, to be a misunderstanding of

our own religion, the same way Christians may claim that the Jews misunderstood the coming of Christ in

the person of Jesus. This is, consequently, the point at which Christian traditional belief is a challenge and

irritant to Jewish traditional belief.

The claim that God is incarnate in Jesus is also the basis of Christianity’s Trinitarian doctrine,

classically enunciated in the Nicene Creed. Here is a central excerpt from the Creed:

We believe in one God the Father all powerful, maker of all things both seen

and unseen. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten

from the Father, that is from the substance [Gr. ousias, Lat. substantia] of the

Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten

[Gr. gennethenta, Lat. natum] not made, consubstantial [Gr. homoousion, Lat.

unius substantiae] with the Father, through whom all things came to

be, both those in heaven and those in earth; for us humans and for our

salvation he came down and became incarnate, became human, suffered and rose

up on the third day, went up into the heavens, is coming to judge the living

and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit.

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For the Church, the God of Israel is thus also God the Son, the one who lived as a human, was crucified and

resurrected. God is thirdly God the Holy Spirit, the identity of the one who brings Father to Son and Son to

Father: “ Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise

of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2: 32-33). The one God of Israel

is thus known by Christians as the unity of relationship among these three identities of the one divine being.

There are two main challenges to traditional Jewish study of these doctrines. One challenge is that

the narrative of God’s incarnation in one Jew belongs to a history that Jews do not share and cannot accept

as part of their story. In this case, the Christian doctrine appears comprehensible but simply wrong: the

event did not occur. A second challenge is that the doctrine of God’s having three identities appears

incomprehensible: the Jewish biblical record does not speak of God in a way that allows us either to speak

of His nature, per se, or to characterize it as a relation among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. From this

perspective, like the Kabbalah, Trinitarian doctrine appears incomprehensible and alien even before it

appears wrong. The traditional Jewish response is therefore to walk away from any discussion of such

things. For this third epoch of Judaism, however, Jews are called to do more than throw up our hands in

the face of Christian doctrines; we must, instead, find a way to reason Jewishly about them. As a first step,

it may be helpful to identify aspects of the doctrine that can be explained within the terms of a biblical

tradition that is recognizable to us. We may then search for other resources within Judaism for

commenting on aspects of the doctrine that do not appear in explicitly biblical terms.

The Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson offers a way to introduce Trinitarian doctrine in precisely

this fashion, as a doctrine that emerges directly from traditional Christian readings of the Bible.” Jenson is

noted for resituating Christian theology within the biblical tradition and for reaffirming the Jewishness of

Jesus and the identity of Jesus’ God as the God of Israel. His approach is therefore of particular interest to

us. It illustrates how contemporary Christian theologians may, in one stroke, reaffirm biblical Christianity

for Christians and reaffirm the Jewish people’s enduring covenant with the God of Israel. There is a

surprising lesson here for contemporary Jews. Their most loyal friends in the Christian community may be

those who maintain the faith of the early Christian communities, not those who replace that faith with

something detached from the Bible’s story of Israel – whether that something calls itself “Christian” or

“secular.”

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Jenson reasons that Trinitarian belief is not, ultimately, about some number of divine persons. It is

fundamentally the Christian belief that God is incarnate in the Jew, Jesus Christ, which is fundamentally

the Christian belief that God has no qualities that we know apart from what both the Old and New

Testaments say God does. “God is whoever raised Jesus from the dead, having before raised Israel from

Egypt . . . . The doctrine of Trinity only explicates Israel’s faith in a situation in which it is believed that the

God of Israel has, prior to the general resurrection, raised one of his servants from the dead.”19

God is,

thus, not 1, 2, and 3, but the One whose word enters the world, and the word suffers there among a

humanity that resists it, but those true to the word follow it and bring about its life on earth. Jenson’s

formulation does not make Christian doctrine truer for Jews, but it makes Jewish-Christian differences into

matters of Biblical interpretation and history rather than of more ineffable mystery. But what, then, of

those aspects of the doctrine that do not sound biblical to our ears? How do we evaluate this aspects in

terms of Jewish religious tradition?

First, we should observe that Jewish and Christian religious traditions tend to overlap in the

following doctrines: that the one God of Israel created the universe through His word; makes humans in His

image; speaks to humanity through His word, commanding them to imitate him; speaks to each nation

through its own language; sends Israel the Torah and makes a special covenant with Israel to serve as light

to the nation; will send his Messiah to redeem Israel and the nations in the end of days.

Second, we should note that Christian tradition adds to Jewish traditions the claims that the God

of Israel is incarnate in one Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered and died for the sins of all humanity, who

was resurrected and appeared again to his disciples, and who is the Messiah in whom Israel and the nations

are redeemed.

Third, we should note that Jewish religious tradition does not accept these additions for itself.

They belong to a religion other than Judaism and are incompatible with what it means for a Jew to live

acccording to the dictates of Jewish religious tradition. At the same time, these additions derive from and

retain recognizable elements of Biblical and rabbinic Jewish belief -- which are, in fact, the elements

examined in the central chapters of this book. To render Christian beliefs about God comprehensible in

Jewish terms, Jews need only identify these elemental beliefs and observe how Christian tradition retains

and also re-interprets and extends them.

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Fourth, we should ask, what is the legitimacy of these additions for non-Jews? In this third epoch

of Jewish religious tradition, Jews should learn how to judge the specifically Christian beliefs “by their

fruits” (to use a phrase of Jesus’ from the Gospel according to Matthew). Such learning is based on five

guidelines:

1) As God’s spoken-words for Israel, the words of Torah must be clarified, anew, for each

generation, within the life of each community. In themselves, therefore, these spoken-words

always remain incompletely defined. It is best for us to assume that, as interpretations of the

words of Israel’s Torah, the scriptures of the early Church are also defined only within the life

of each Christian community. We therefore assume that there is no single, clear meaning of

the basic doctrines of the Christian scriptures, such as Incarnation and Trinity.

2) We assume, instead, that the meaning of these doctrines is clarified, anew, within the concrete

life of each Christian community: that is, through the fruits of these doctrines for each

generation of Christians.20

3) Since they are incompletely defined in themselves, the Christian doctrines would be

illegitimate on our terms only if all possible meanings and behavioral consequences of these

doctrines would violate Jewish beliefs or the Noahide laws. This is not the case: Christian

beliefs that the end of days is here and that God is incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth do not

necessarily lead Christians to act in ways that violate the conduct rabbinic Judaism expects of

non-Jews.21

4) One task for Jews in this third epoch is therefore to judge, for each specific Christian

community, whether or not its understandings of basic Christian doctrine violate these

expectations. Regarding any community that does not violate these expectations, a second

task is to evaluate to what degree that community’s beliefs may enhance or retard Israel’s own

mission to be a light to nations. A new obligation for Jews may be to support those Christian

communities that enhance Israel’s mission and to criticize, or at least withhold explicit

support, for those communities that do not. If these guidelines seem presumptuous, we must

remember that, living still in the shadow of the Shoa, we have unusual obligations to work

15

against the corrosive influences of supersessionism in the forms of both religious anti-

Semitism and radical secularism.

5) A new generation of Jewish scholars must delineate criteria for making these evaluations.

This is a painstaking and technical task to be undertaken by Jewish scholars in philosophic

theology, mysticism, and the history and sociology of religion. In the following section, I will

illustrate only two sets of criteria. a) The first set renders Christian doctrines more

comprehensible in Jewish terms by distinguishing doctrines that can be taught in terms of

Judaism’s more public, biblical traditions from those that can be clarified only in terms of

Jewish philosophy. Jews trained in their religious tradition may have more to say about

biblically-based Christian teachings, while more secular or rationalist Jews may actually have

more to say about the extra-biblical or apparently esoteric approaches to Christian belief.

This distinction is not at all a Christian one; Christian theology often stands, in fact, on the

claim that what Jewish thinkers might call “esoteric truth” is the most public truth for all the

world to know. I suggest, nevertheless, that the Christian effort to make such claims public is

itself a stumbling block to Jewish understanding; for the sake of Jewish understanding, we

should therefore begin by re-reading Christian claims in terms of a Jewish distinction.

b) The second set includes criteria for criticizing overly-rationalistic and supersessionist forms

of Christian belief and for praising Christian communities that reject such forms.

3) Jewish philosophic approaches to the God of more abstract Christian theology

It is time, finally, to address Jewish readers who may be uncomfortable with Jewish religious

tradition, let alone Christian religious tradition! We suggested earlier that such readers may find it odd of

the rabbis to speak of God anthropomorphically and immodest of us contemporary Jewish theologians to

speak to and of God at all! We responded that talking about God is a traditional, everyday practice and that

it might be even more immodest of the modern secular West to think that it had outgrown the ordinary

beliefs and practices of our ancestors. For the first part of this essay, we therefore adopted an either/or

dichotomy between beliefs that come only from religious tradition and those that come only from the direct

experiences of individuals. We introduced Judaism and Christianity only from the perspective of religious

16

tradition, leaving the doubts and speculations of modern thinkers outside the pale of religious belief. In

these terms, modern Jews, along with modern scientists and philosophers, appear to believe only in what

they see or sense directly; religious Jews and Christians appear to believe only what they learn from the

mouths of sages and the words of sacred texts.

It is time, however, to adopt the third perspective of Judaism, which mediates between tradition

and new encounters. It is therefore time to place modern thinking back into the dialogue as itself a

dimension – albeit only one dimension – of biblical monotheism. As illustrated in Moses’ challenges to

God, this is the dimension that challenges Jewish tradition from within: the Jewish voice that complains

about problems within the tradition and that summons Jews to think not only within but also beyond the

limits of this tradition in order to raise imaginative hypotheses about how to repair its problems. Scientists

and philosophers who challenge tradition actually fall into a category that also includes Israelite prophets

and scribes and rabbinic sages and mystics. The main difference is that the modern West has tended to

promote the claims of its science and philosophy as if they applied to the everyday lives of its citizens and

could replace the tradition-based wisdoms that guided those lives. This is the only aspect of modern

intellectual culture we need to reject altogether: the failure to distinguish between everyday wisdoms and

the specialized inquiries whose purpose is only to identify failures in those wisdoms and to raise

imaginative hypotheses about how to repair them. All we ask scientifically oriented modern Jews,

therefore, is to define themselves as specialists, who augment our understanding of the non-ordinary, but

whose thinking can reform, but never replace our traditions of everyday wisdom.

For this concluding section of the essay, we invite such Jewish rationalists into our dialogue. We

suggest, in fact, that their own rationalism, as non-religious as it seems, may offer Jews the most helpful

entrée into the study of the more abstract, or seemingly extra-biblical aspects of Christian theology. To see

why, let us try another exercise.

a) Speculating on the Infinite: a learning exercise

Addressing skeptical Jews – or what I am calling “Jewish rationalists” – as if they (I’ll now say

“you”) were here talking with me, I would like now to imagine that I am engaging you directly in an

intellectual exercise. The goal of the exercise is to suggest a way that your discomfort with talk about God

may actually help us introduce Jews to abstract Christian theology. The rule governing this exercise is that

17

you have to pretend, at least, that you are of a philosophic bent (which means, to repeat, that your doubts

about tradition lead you to speculate about alternatives).

The first step in the exercise is my claim that, as a Jewish theologian, I believe that I am a finite

creature of God and that God alone is Infinite. The exercise unfolds as you claim, in response, that it would

be immodest for a finite creature to know about the Infinite! (Of course, the exercise requires my putting

words in your mouth, and I trust you will play along with this.) I then respond that you apparently do not

object to using the words “finite” and “infinite.” You nod in agreement, but you add that a finite creature

knows only finite things: you don’t know anything about “The Infinite,” and you use the term “infinite” to

refer only to “whatever falls outside your knowledge.” I then persuade you, through the force of, say, an

hour’s debate, to acknowledge the following. Your use of these two terms – “finite and infinite” – carries

with it certain implications that, you have to admit, contradict your initial assumptions. One implication is

that you could not know that you were “finite” if you did not have some encounter with what is more than

finite, that is, infinite. To think about yourself as finite is to think from the perspective of this infinite. A

second implication is that the terms “finite” and “infinite” are correlative: to think either one is to imply the

other. The belief that “you are a finite creature” implies the belief that “your existence is limited by what is

infinite.” If you grant that some theologians employ the word “God” as a name for “what is infinite,” then

you should acknowledge that is reasonable for these theologians to believe that it is only their “knowledge”

of God that leads them to regard themselves as finite.22

It is thus reasonable for theologians to claim that

our knowledge of God/the Infinite is the source of our knowledge that we are finite. A third implication is

that the only way you could now insist that we cannot know about God is for you also to disclaim

knowledge of our finitude. But if we did not know whether or not we were finite, we could not criticize

those who claimed that we humans are more than finite! Assuming that you object, above all, to the

presumptuous of such a claim, I trust that you would now agree that it is safest for us conclude that we

know both that we are finite and that God is Infinite.

We are now half way through our exercise. At this point, you needn’t believe that our reasoning

must be correct (there are other ways to argue about “finite” and “infinite”). You should acknowledge only

that our reasoning is reasonable and that religious Christians and Jews need not be unreasonable when they

claim knowledge of God as Infinite. The next step is to see how our exercise has made you into a kind of

18

abstract Jewish philosopher. From there, you should be able to enter into intelligent conversations with

abstract Christian theologians.

The first half of our exercise left open the question of how you could know about God/the Infinite

in the first place. The most modest hypothesis would be that knowledge of this God is not simply “inside

you” (this notion would jeopardize your belief in our finitude) but comes to or is brought to you. Looking

at the history of how your language actually inherited the terms “finite” and “infinite,” I find it simplest to

hypothesize that this knowledge comes to you through the literature you have studied. The ultimate

antecedent of this literature is, most likely, the Bible, since the Bible correlates the notions of “finite

creature” and “Infinite (Creator/God)” just the way you do. This leaves us with one more question to ask. If

the Bible brings you knowledge of God, is the Bible itself finite or infinite: that is, does it have the

character of a finite creature or of the divine? I believe that, if we debated this question for another hour,

you would come to agree that is reasonable (albeit not necessary) to conclude that the Bible must somehow

share in both finitude and divinity. It must somehow share in the finitude of the human being who studies it

and the infinity of the God encountered through this study.

Our exercise therefore ends with the claim that, as mediator between God and humanity, the Bible

could reasonably be considered both human-and-divine. This is the kind of claim we might expect from an

abstract Jewish philosopher, but not from a Jewish traditionalist. Learning about God directly from the

scriptural texts and their rabbinic commentaries, the traditionalist has no reason to question how such

learning is possible and, therefore, no reason to entertain the kinds of speculative answer we have

considered in this exercise. Like the contemporary Jewish rationalist or unbeliever, however, the

philosopher begins as a skeptic, whose questions stimulate speculations, and whose speculations could

reasonably end where we have ended. For better or worse, in other words (depending on your perspective),

it takes doubt to produce the kinds of abstract or philosophic beliefs we have illustrated.

So, why have I brought you through all these speculations? Because Jews who entertain

speculative claims like these may feel more prepared than other Jews to engage in mutually intelligible

exchanges with more abstract Trinitarian theologians. Speaking, for example, of the “word of God” that

mediates between the human and the divine, these theologians will likely claim that this Word is both finite

and infinite, human-and-divine. This is not the same claim we just entertained about the Bible, since the

19

Christian theologians identify this Word with Christ, but the claims are sufficiently analogous that Jewish

philosophers and Christian theologians could discuss them in mutually intelligible ways.

b) An exercise in dialogue between Jewish philosophy and Trinitarian theology

Once transformed into Jewish philosophers, Jewish rationalists might engage Trinitarian

theologians in fruitful dialogue. The following exercise illustrates how we could reconnect our rationalist

discussion of Infinity, first, to the biblical sources, then to Jewish philosophies of God’s Infinity, and

finally to Christian Trinitarian theologies. For the sake of illustration, I will return to the work of the

Trinitarian theologian, Robert Jenson.

a) Human finitude: Humans are finite creatures.

Here, Jewish and Christian theologians share common, Biblical source texts, for example, “male

and female He created the human being” (Gen 1).

b) Reference to the Infinite: Our finitude is judged with respect to the Infinite, which we may name

“God.”

Common Biblical sources include Gen. 1 and also the text of Job: “Who then can stand up to Me?

Whoever confronts Me I will requite” (Job, 41:2-3). From the perspective of the finite creature, God is

infinitely distant and, in that sense, unknowable except for the property of being that one who is not finite

as I am. Infinity is here a negative character: as the one who is utterly other, God is kadosh, “holy,” literally

“separate,” and thus never known as He is, but only through his acts or effects. In Jewish mystical

literature, this is to refer to God as Eyn Sof, the one “without end,” or Infinite.

Jewish thinkers are often uncomfortable with Christian tendencies to read scripture as a full

disclosure of God’s way of being and to claim that “God is this or that.” Jenson writes in the form of this

tradition (stating what “God is”), but in an effort to say something different: that we only know as much

about God as is displayed in God’s acts, and among these acts are the biblical narratives. Thus, Jenson

writes, “There is not God, who then happens to love Israel. There is the One who raises Israel from Egypt;

and the ultimacy of this election, to be demonstrated finally only when all nations flow to Zion, is the fact

that there is God.”23

“God in himself is not other than He is in his history with us,” as disclosed through the

dramas of the scriptural narrative.”24

As if to disclaim any effort to disclose more than is disclosed, Jenson

also writes of God’s hiddenness in the very world that discloses His being: “If then God’s history with us

20

hides him, God must be hidden precisely by his trinity.”25

This simultaneity of presence and hiddenness is

analogous to the claims of Jewish mysticism.26

c) Knowledge of the Infinite: We cannot know the Infinite merely by pointing to it. We know the

Infinite only by way of the Infinite, knowing God by encountering God. Otherwise, we could not know that

we are finite.

Here again, Jewish and Christian theologians share common sources in the Biblical narrative of

God’s intimate relation to the people Israel. The Hebrew term for this knowledge is yidia, a word that also

carries sexual connotations and, in the Biblical record, refers to the intimacy of human intercourse with

God, who says, “ I fell in love with Israel when he was still a child” (Hosea 11:1. In the New Testament,

the intimacy is extended to God’s relation to the one Jew, Jesus: “His beloved Son” (Colos. 1:13),

d) Knowledge by the Infinite. As finite creatures, we cannot be agents who actively “know” the

Infinite, since our acts are finite. We therefore cannot construct a conception of the Infinite, but we can

discover ourselves as those who may belong to an infinite. To represent this quality of belonging,

theologians often use passive verbs to portray our relation to the Infinite: for example, we are “known by”

God or we “discover ourselves to be images of God.”

In his description of the religious mind’s discovering that “I am what is not mine,” Abraham

Heschel captures the biblical tradition’s portrayal of humanity’s passively being brought into God’s

presence, rather than initiating the relationship.27

One meaning of the English word “suffer” is to be

brought passively into an experience or relation; in this sense, “suffering” is the condition of the finite

creature’s knowledge of God. For us, this will sound like an earlier era’s use of the word, as in “she

suffered his coming,” meaning “she tolerated the experience of his coming.” There are many strong images

in the Bible of Israel’s suffering in the more obvious, physical sense. “They cried out their suffering and

God heard their cry and came down” (Ex 2-3). God’s presence here is as zroa netuya, His “outstretched

arm” that comes directly to Israel – “ I even I alone, and not a fiery angel.”28

Each account of suffering,

however, may also be interpreted on a second level, as an illustration of Israel’s “being brought into”

relation with God, rather than initiating the relation.

21

In Christian tradition, it is Jesus who suffers, on behalf of all humanity. For Robert Jenson, this is

not to supplant Israel, but to represent it: the Israel that dies and is resurrected in Egypt.29

Jenson is saying,

in other words, that, in Israel’s suffering and in Jesus’suffering, humanity is known by God.

e) The Infinite as a subject who knows. Describing the finite creature as “being known by” the

Infinite is to personify the Infinite, as if it were an active agent and we knew what “it does.” This is a

troubling case of anthropomorphism, but the alternative appears to be worse. To portray the Infinite as

being passively known by the finite creature would be to claim that we could subject “the Infinite” to our

finite rules of knowledge. Secular rationalists appear to make presumptuous claims of this kind.

For both Jewish and Christian sources, “God’s act of knowing us” is disclosed, for one, in “God’s

speech to Israel.” “God spoke to Moses, saying ….” When Israel is portrayed as suffering, God’s speech

brings means of redemption, primarily through instructions. “Torah” is the primary term used to portray

God’s word to Israel as instruction.

The rabbinic sages write that, when God gives instructions to bring justice to earth, He displays

middat hadin, His attribute of justice, of which one name is elohim. They write that, when God gives

instructions to redeem Israel, He displays middat harachamim, His attribute of mercy, of which one name

is YHVH. As God of mercy, God is often addressed as av harachamim, “Merciful Father.” “You, YHVH,

are our Father; from eternity Your name is ‘Our Redeemer’” (Isaiah 63:17). In Jewish tradition, God’s

speech brings God’s word (dibbur) into the world, through which God creates the things of the world

(devarim) and through which Israel and the nations are brought to obey God and imitate His actions.

For some Christian Trinitarian theologians, God tends to be named “God the Father” when He is

addressed as the author of his spoken-word. 30

In classical terms, “Father” is one of the “persons” of God;

in Jenson’s more helpful phrase, it is one of God’s “identities.” To be Father is, however, to have one’s

identity in relation to another, whom Trinitarian theologians call “The Son” and consider a second identity

of God: “the Father sees Himself and his works in the Son.”31

God’s being author of the divine Speech is

therefore analogous in Trinitarian theology to the Father’s begetting his Divine Son. Articulating his

biblical Judaism in the terms of Hellenistic philosophy, Philo ( ) reasoned, in fact, that, for God to offer us

his Word (logos, in Greek, referring at once to word and thought), God must “beget” the Word. In Philo’s

Judaism, “giving birth” is a trope both for the production of speech and also for rational implication. This

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is not the source, per se, of Trinitarian language, but philonic theology provides Jewish thinkers a means of

discussing Trinitarian notions with Christian theologians.

Another means is provided by our previous discussion of suffering. Trinitarian theologians

identify God the Son also with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah: “This is My servant, whom I uphold; My

chosen one…. He was despised, we held him of no account. Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,

our suffering that he endured…. He was wounded because of our sins, … and by his bruises we were

healed” (Is. 42:1, 53: 3-5). For Jenson, this Servant refers both to the people Israel and to the one Jew,

Jesus. “The only Logos or Son we… may reckon with is the Suffering Servant…. The Logos that God

speaks to command heaven and earth into being is no other Word than the Word of the cross, the Word the

Father speaks by the mission, death and resurrection of Israel [in Egypt, and in each destruction] and this

Israelite.”32

This Christian notion is perplexing. But a bridge to discussion can be found both in the biblical

analogy of Israel’s own suffering for humanity and in the theological reflection that Israel knows God the

Infinite only by “suffering” (that is, receiving) God’s presence. In Jewish terms, the Christian claim that

Jesus is the Suffering Servant means that Christians believe, on one level, that the end of days has come

and that the Messiah who takes on Israel’s burden is Jesus. On a second level, it means they believe that

being Messiah means not only receiving but also fully embodying God’s Torah, for redeeming all human

suffering. On a third level, it means they believe that fully embodying God’s word is to be an identity of

God.

f) Perhaps the Infinite “suffers” finitude in some way. Within the limits of this exercise, to speak

of the Infinite’s “acting” in anyway in relation to us would, ironically, also imply it’s “suffering” – in the

sense of “tolerating” – such a relationship. Some rationalist Jewish philosophers, in medieval and modern

times, have for this very reason refused to write even of God’s acting. To “give us a Torah” or even

“punish us” means to suffer relationship with us, and these rationalists refuse to imagine that the Infinite

can suffer being bound to any such relation to the finite. For them, “Infinite is infinite,” “finite is finite” and

the two definitions admit of no admixture. For this reason, these rationalists also conclude that the Bible is

strictly metaphorical; there is no sense in which God can give to or take from us. To them, we may

therefore apply the lesson of our speculations about the Infinite: if there is no relation at all between Infinite

and finite, then you rationalists have no basis for speaking about the Infinite or about the finite that is

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limited by the Infinite! We, however, who speak of the difference between our finitude and God’s Infinity

must, if we reason consistently, also talk about our “suffering” (sharing in) a relation to God and God’s

suffering a relation to us, however mysterious this suffering may remain to us.

The study of Infinity leads eventually to the notion of mystery. In Christian theology, reflection

on mystery leads, for one, to reflections on the Trinitarian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Jenson cites the most

characteristic Gospel source: “The pneuma[spirit] blows where it will, and you hear the sounds of it, but

you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.”

The Spirit, says Jenson, is the identity of “God’s freedom, God’s openness to the future.”33

According to

the early sages of the Eastern Church, “the whole divine life begins with the Father and is actual through

the Son and is perfected with the Holy Spirit.” This implies, for Jenson, that “the Spirit receives his

existence from the Father, but lives eternally with and in the Son.”34

How will Jewish thinkers possibly

make sense of such a claim?

In rabbinic literature, the terms ruach hakodesh, “holy spirit” and shekhina, “divine Presence,” are

employed at times in overlapping ways: as, for example, in the phrases “the holy spirit rests on them; if

they are not prophets, they are sons of prophets”35

and “Hillel … had eighty disciples, thirty of whom were

worthy of having the divine Presence rest on them”36

In these cases, the terms refer to that which brings

prophecy or, when applied to rabbinic sages, to what we might call touches of divine wisdom or mystical

experience. There is some bridge here to understanding the Trinitarian usage, since Holy Spirit also

concerns the direct touch of God. But a bridge to fuller discussion of this Trinitarian notion needs

something less overt: a study of how the community of Israel transmits and reinterprets the Oral Torah.

[Rabbi Yose said,] “Had the Torah not been revealed to Moses, it would have been revealed to

Ezra. (TB Sanhedrin 21b)…. The Torah was revealed to Moses, but received, hundreds of years

later, under Ezra. Yet the two prophetic figures are not entirely analogous. Whereas Moses must

be seen as a passive conduit, the recipient of a perfect, divine Torah, Ezra must be seen as a

prophet whose task was to rebuild that Torah … after centuries of neglect.37

These words introduce the interpretation of David Halivni ( ), for whom Ezra’s work is a prototype for all

sages of the Oral Torah. The Torah is not fully disclosed to Israel all at once, but only through the entire

history of Israel’s reception and retransmission of the divine word. The infinite word suffers being

24

delivered to a finite people, among whom its meaning and identity is fully disclosed only at the end of its

infinite history with them: “when God will be one and His name will be one.” We have not referred here to

the Spirit or to the Divine Presence. Nevertheless, by comparing Halivni’s and Jenson’s accounts, the

reader may observe some parallels and some significant differences between Jewish and Christian

theologies of how God’s word and purpose moves through history.

4) Concluding with Caution

a) Abstract Christian theology and secularism

There is no “general” way to present biblical theology. The biblical word is not disclosed to us

“once and for all,” but only in its relation to the specific contexts of our life and study. Through the

preceding exercise, we examined biblical texts and concepts only in their relation to Jewish rationalism and

only as a means of addressing Jewish secularism. We have seen that, while Jewish rationalists might have

limited tolerance for biblical religion, they also ask questions that open avenues of dialogue with abstract

theologians. This surprising fact suggests that there are ways of drawing philosophically minded secularists

into theological inquiry. At the same time, this fact also leads us to wonder if the study of abstract

Trinitarian theology may stimulate rationalistic ways of thinking. We will conclude, for now, that it is a

question of which kind of Trinitarian theology.

b) Secularism, totalistic thinking, and the problem of “timeless being”

In modern times, we may be accustomed to associating “secularism” with a kind of tolerance:

secularists are humble about their ability to know more than we can know, so they are tolerant of whatever

their neighbor wants to believe, as long as the belief isn’t imposed on others. This essay is guided by

another hypothesis: that a greater sign of humility is to accept (“suffer”) the wisdoms one has inherited

from age-old traditions, except where those traditions have proved themselves, explicitly, to be wrong or

unjust or oppressive. If “secularism” refers to the wholesale dismissal of age-old Jewish and Christian

traditions about humanity’s relation to God, then we should not identify secularism with a tolerant or

humble position. What if, however, there are individuals who call themselves “secular” because they are

not prepared to identify themselves, uncautiously, with traditions that they believe are now practiced

dogmatically and oppressively? We must answer that “secularism” of this kind, or what I have been calling

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“rationalism,” should be welcomed into Jewish and Christian communities as representatives of the Bible’s

own prophetic voice. Judaism and Christianity are both called to perennial self-critique. One challenge for

Jews and Christians today is to identify forces that muffle such self-criticism both inside and outside the

religious communities.

The Christian theologian Jenson and the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas appear to offer

overlapping criticisms of one of these forces: the tendency to “totalistic thinking” that affects secularists as

well as religious Christians and Jews. This is thinking that claims to identify the one set of clear principles

upon which all human life should be based. Secular examples include efforts to adopt some one “ism” as an

exclusive program for social organization (such as Communism) or to promote one academic discipline as

the ultimate source of our knowledge of the world. Jewish examples include efforts to identify one aspect

of Judaism as defining the purpose of all the others (such as “the halakhah,” or “prophetic ethics,” or

Zionism). The Christian example most pertinent to this book is supersessionism.

Jenson argues that a major source of this tendency is an admixture of biblical religion with the

Greek philosophic concept of “timeless being.” He writes that the Greek thinkers tended to identify deity

with the quality of “timelessness: immunity to time’s contingencies,”38

so that, for something to exist truly

and perfectly, it must be immune to change and to relationship with whatever changes. The God portrayed

in the biblical narratives appears to wield absolute authority over all creation, to declare His intentions to

humanity, but also to enter into close relations with His creatures, as well as to change His opinions about

them. When this God is assimilated, however, to the Greek philosophic concept of deity, what often results

is the portrayal of an absolute deity whose intentions are unchangeable but knowable. This is a god whose

ultimate intentions for the entire world may be known by at least a select portion of humanity. This portion

of humanity may be elected to comprehend the entire world and also to rule over it. For Levinas, worship

of “timeless being” in this way is a source of modern totalitarianism, secular as well as religious. Extreme

efforts to supplant this worship carry their own dangers: promoting radical skepticism among those who

trace the problem to the mere claim “to know something,” and radical secularism among those who trace

the problem to the worship of the biblical God.

The biblical God is not to be confused, however, with the deity conceived out of philosophic

reflections on the biblical narratives. While Jewish thinkers have also been tempted by this error, the

26

profound influence of Greco-Roman philosophic culture on European Christianity has rendered this a more

typically Christian temptation. The temptation is strongest among Christian thinkers whose reasoning is

furthest removed from the plain sense of the Biblical sources. Among them are theologians who interpret

the Trinity as an account only of the eternal, unchanging self-relation of God as Father, Son, and Holy

Spirit, unmoved by the temporal life of His people.

Jewish thinkers who share Levinas’ concerns may therefore find an ally in Jenson and his

colleagues.39

This does not mean there is no place for philosophy in Judaism: Moses, too, and his fellow

prophets, questioned, reasoned, and wondered like philosophers. But their philosophy began with the

scriptural word and the questions it raised in them. There were questions of being, as well, but about the

being of God’s word and its relation to the world, to their lives, and to what we suffered in it. In the Exodus

account, God said to Moses “ I will be what I will be” and “I will be with you in your suffering.” This third

epoch of Jewish theology may be a time for Jewish thinkers to remember the God who is with us in our

suffering – “for I am with you, declares YHVH, in your suffering” (Jer. 1:19)-- and a time to lend support

to others who remember Him, too.

1 See Max Kadushin, Worship and Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63-96.

2 TB Menachot 29b.

3 TB Shabbat 88a-b.

4 TB Berachot 61b.

5 Peretz Markish, “The Mound.”

6 Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy 4:2.

7 David Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword, A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (Boulder,

co: Westview Press, 1998), frontspiece. 8 See Eugene Borowitz Renewing the Covenant, A Theology for the Postmodern Jew (Philadephia: Jewish

Publication Society, 1991), Ch 2. 9 Exodus Rabbah on Ex 3.

10 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University Press of

Chicago, 1963), I. 63. 11

Moses Nahmanides, Commentary on Exodus 3:13. 12

Ex. Rabbah 30:24. Cited in Michael Fishbane, The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 27-28. 13

See the discussion of the “Mourners of Zion” in Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On

Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 77ff. 14

The Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. 15

Stanley Hauerwas, “In Defense of,” 157-8. 16

Ibid., 162-3. 17

Ibid., 168. 18

Ibid, 168.

27

19

Robert Jenson, The Triune God: Systematic Theology Vol. I (Oxford and New York: Oxford University

Press, 1997), p. 63. 20

See George Lindbeck, “Grammar and Doctrine, Continuity and Change,” in his The Nature of Doctrine,

Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 79ff. 21

See David Novak’s discussion of the “noahide laws,” the rabbinic effort to identify what conduct would

be expected, within rabbinic jurisdiction, of persons from any faith whatsoever: David Novak, The Image

of the Non-Jew in Judaism (New York and Toronto, 1983). 22

For this exercise, we may assume that there are different kinds of “knowledge” and that we are referring

only to one kind, which may remain undefined for our purposes. 23

Robert Jenson, “The Hidden and Triune God,” unpublished lecture, p. 5. 24

Ibid. 25

Ibid. 26

See Eliot Wolfson, Chapter 8 in this book. 27

Abraham Heschel, Between God and Man, edited by Fritz Rothschild (New York: The Free Press,

1959), p. 61-63. 28

(FN Passover Haggadah). 29

Jenson, “Hidden,” 7. 30

Jenson notes that, in the early Church (before the Antiochenes) “’Christ is the word of God’ meant that

the Father speaks and Christ is the speech.” for example, argued that “’Christ is the Word of God’ meant

that the Father speaks and Christ is the speech” [Triune God, 126]. 31

Jenson “ Hidden,” 3. 32

Ibid., 7. 33

Ibid., 8. 34

Ibid, 9. 35

Tosefta Pesachim IV.13. 36

TB Sukka 28a. 37

David Weiss Halivni, Revelation RestoredDivine Writ and Critical Responses (Boulder, Co: Westview

Press, 1997), 4. 38

Jenson, The Triune God, 94. 39

These include the “postliberal” theologians such as Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas and

their students; related interpreters of Karl Barth, such as Peter von der Osten-Sacken and Friedrich

Marquardt; and a complementary but different variety of Anglican postcritical theologians, such as Daniel

Hardy, David Ford and their colleagues.