[from Conservative Judaism, XXXIII, No. 1 (Fall, 1968), pp. 25-39]
Edmond La B. Cherbonnier
Dr. Cherbonnier is chairman of the Religion Department at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. His present article is based on an address he delivered to the Rabbinical Assembly at its Convention in March, 1968.
In ancient times, when a philosopher said revolutionary things, the authorities would reach for the hemlock. Today we are more civilized. We neutralize the philosopher’s message by enveloping him with flattery and applause. We dutifully read his hooks; we grant him status; we call him a profound interpreter of modern times; in short, we do everything but take his message seriously.
There is some danger that this might happen to Professor Heschel. His achievements are so many, and his life so impressive, that we can find innumerable grounds for praise and admiration, without ever coming to terms with the main thrust of his thought. We can recognize his spiritual sensitivity, savor his poetic gifts, marvel at his erudition, endorse his fearless stand. against racial bigotry and self-righteous militarism. But we can do all this in such a way as to divert attention from the unifying principle which underlies all his writings: namely, the conviction that the Bible contains a coherent philosophical outlook, without which both Judaism and its two offspring are imperfectly understood.
biblical philosophy
This idea of a biblical philosophy, once its implications are developed, has some disturbing consequences. If taken seriously, it would revolutionize religious thought much as the message of the prophets revolutionized religious life. It requires a drastic revision of many a hallowed tradition, and of many a cliché which has acquired the force of an axiom. In Heschel’s own words, the biblical philosophy requires us to “unthink many thoughts,” thoughts which we had imagined were integral to Ju-
25
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
daism and Christianity, but which actually have no place there. Such a proposal is radical enough to evoke in some quarters a moment’s regret for the passing of hemlock!
My aim in this paper is to pursue some of the revolutionary implications of biblical philosophy as Heschel has developed it. First, however, a brief glance at the kind of opposition which it frequently encounters. For the most part, this opposition reasons a priori instead of considering evidence. It argues that there could not be a biblical philosophy, or even that there should not - and so avoids asking whether in fact there is. The first objection, that there could not be a biblical philosophy, points to the Bible’s many inconsistencies. For example, did Methuselah really live 969 years? If so, he could not have died until after the flood. And since he was not aboard Noah’s Ark, he must have been the champion swimmer of all time. The Bible, it is argued, contains too many such discrepancies to allow any sort of consistent philosophy.
Such an objection, however, confuses philosophical with historical propositions. The latter concern time, place, and person. The former apply to everyone, always, everywhere. Whether Moses received the ten commandments, for example, is an important question. But precisely when and where he received them is philosophically neutral. Persons could disagree about the exact place and date, and still share the same philosophical premises.
The reason for this confusion probably lies in the original motivation for biblical research. The scholar’s aim was to challenge the fundamentalist, who maintains that the Bible, by definition, is infallible throughout. By finding historical discrepancies, biblical research struck a blow for free inquiry. Like most single-minded crusaders, however, the biblical scholar claimed too much. He imagined that historical inconsistencies preclude a biblical philosophy. It is this claim which Heschel proposes to re-examine. His proposal would not only extend still further the realm of free inquiry; it might also establish the Bible’s philosophical credibility, just as historical research has already attested, in the main, to its historical reliability. For few of its factual inaccuracies are significant enough to upset anyone but a fundamentalist.
The second objection to biblical philosophy holds not merely that it could not exist, but that it should not. This is the familiar argument that divine revelation must shatter the norms of human reason. If the biblical message could be assimilated into a philosophical system, it would not be divine but human. Properly understood, the Bible’s inconsistencies are profound paradoxes, the credentials of a super-human origin. To try
26
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
to make them philosophically respectable is therefore not only impossible, but idolatrous and even blasphemous.
This persuasive objection is not so straightforward as it appears. When divested of its pious overtones, it is not an argument at all, but a scare tactic. It declares, in effect, that the Bible is out of bounds to the philosopher in search of consistency. Anyone who trespasses will be accused of intellectual arrogance. But has not intellectual arrogance been the favorite deterrent to free inquiry, from Galileo on? And has it not been established in the meantime that the truly arrogant person is the censor? One may therefore pay scant regard to this vestige of thought-control. Either the Bible contains a coherent philosophy, or it does not. If it does, we may have to revise the cliché that revelation contradicts reason.
On the face of it, the prospect is admittedly not promising. The biblical authors are not detached observers, but active participants, more interested in facts than in principles, more concerned with the variables of history than with timeless truths. They are innocent of dialectical subtlety, and often indifferent to logical niceties. As it stands the Bible is obviously not a system of interlocking propositions arranged according to their logical relationships. It is rather a collection of fragments arranged at random, whose philosophical implications remain largely implicit. The business of the philosopher, however, is to expose the latent philosophical implications in all discourse, even the most commonplace. This is what Socrates did in the marketplace of Athens. It is also what Heschel does to the Bible. He inquires whether, when the Bible’s tacit philosophical assumptions have been spelled out and juxtaposed, they fall into a single, coherent, world-view, or whether instead they fly centrifugally into incompatible clusters.
Nor is one hundred per cent consistency required. There are, after all, “unplatonic” passages in Plato. If the vast majority of biblical texts do share the same philosophical premises, and if these premises fall into a coherent pattern, the result may legitimately be called biblical. Deviations, provided they are rare, may be called “unbiblical”; that is, points at which a given author strays from the logic of his own position. Whether such deviations are sufficiently few in number is precisely the question Heschel poses.
His aim is to get the motion on the floor, so as to open debate on a subject which is too often prejudged.
Heschel’s own interim report is positive. The biblical philosophy, as he develops it, is not an authoritative mental strait-jacket handed down from on high, to be enforced by ecclesiastical authority. Like any other philosophy, it stands or falls on its merits, by appeal to reason and ex-
27
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
perience. It is therefore not the kind of system that commits Jew or Christian to an out-dated world-view, nor does it preclude the possibility of novelty and surprise. Most philosophies have failed because they have tried to foreclose the future. Unlike them, the biblical philosophy is open-ended.
Nor does it entail the primacy of theory over practice, of the eternal over the temporal, or of the immutable over the changing. It is one of the few philosophies in which the oat of thinking, however important, is subordinate to everyday living.
Nor is the biblical philosophy confined to the Bible. Hints and suggestions of it occur in the common sense of mankind throughout the world. To avoid misunderstanding on this score, it might be more prudent to call it by some neutral term, like “philosophy X.” However, since the Bible does remain its principal source, there is something to be said for calling a spade a spade, even at the risk of raising old ghosts.
Admittedly, the burden of proof rests upon the person who contends that there is in fact such a philosophy. Perhaps this is why so many people instinctively recoil from it. They fear that if the Bible is examined philosophically and found defective, it will stand discredited. To them it seems safer to avoid the company of the philosopher, for they that live by logic shall also perish by it.
Such timidity, however, is foreign to the Bible itself. Its God is more at home when the odds are against Him. Those who try to shield Him from philosophy are being overprotective. He does not need a privileged sanctuary. He should at least be given a chance to meet the philosopher on his own ground. However improbable, it is still conceivable that the Bible’s scattered fragments can be correlated, and that the resulting world-view deserves the attention of philosopher and theologian alike. Pending the final outcome, the reader is asked to perform a “willing suspension of disbelief’ to grant, far the sake of argument, that there is a biblical philosophy, so as to pursue some of its implications for religious thought, and particularly Christian thought, far at many points Heschel’s contribution is, if anything, even more significant to Christian than to Jewish theology.
faith and reason
The biblical philosophy opens up a fresh approach to the vexed problem of “faith and reason.” Jewish thinkers have generally eschewed this question, no doubt from a sound instinct that, as Christians have formulated it, it is insoluble. However, the concept of a biblical philosophy
28
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
puts the problem in a new perspective, one which could satisfy Jew and Christian alike.
According to the old perspective, shared by all schools of Christian thought, the way to reconcile faith and reason was to go shopping in the philosophical market place, in search of some secular philosophy which could accommodate the insights of the Bible. Within the limits of this perspective, three different strategies are possible, represented respectively by Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich, and Karl Barth. Aquinas set out to show that the Christian revelation was of a piece with the reigning philosophy of his day, that of Aristotle. Instead of reconciling philosophy and theology, however, he only managed to conceal the cleavage between them. For despite its architectonic grandeur, his summa is not a system at all. Inconsistencies are not eliminated; they are only camouflaged with ambiguous terms and dialectical subtlety. There they lie, like structural flaws in an outwardly imposing building, until a too inquisitive philosopher exposes them. Aquinas’ failure is not due to want of skill, but to the inherent impossibility of his task.
The second approach is Paul Tillich’s. Determined to eliminate the contradictions from Christian thinking, he allied himself with fine philosophy of Plotinus. But it was a mésalliance. In pursuit of consistency, he distilled off everything that the system could not assimilate. The residue was more consistent than Aquinas, but at the expense of biblical substance. The more consistent Tillich became, the less his thought resembled the gospel, until finally little of Christianity remained but the name.
The third approach is that of Karl Barth. Determined not to repeat the failure of the other two, he concludes that their enterprise was misconceived. The Bible, he declares, cannot be assimilated into any philosophical system because divine revelation bursts the limits of human reason. The theologian should therefore never try to appease the logician, but should throw reason to the winds and let the inconsistencies fall where they may. The result is the famous dialectical theology, which flouts reason to make room for faith.
There the matter stands, at an impasse. On the one hand, it seems that the Bible resists assimilation to any alien philosophy. But the alternative appears to be sheer irrationalism which, as Heschel points out, is contrary to the biblical spirit. “Without reason,” he declares, “faith is blind .... The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.”
The contemporary Christian appears not only to tolerate the impasse, but to find a curious kind of satisfaction in it. Taken together, Aquinas,
29
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tillich and Barth constitute for him a sort of paradigm of the human condition. The latter reminds us that we can never bridge the gulf between God and man, while the other two remind us that we should never stop trying. This, according to many Christians, is precisely the existential situation: man stands under a divine imperative which he can never obey, doomed to fail but damned for giving up. This sophisticated doctrine affects the believer like an intoxicant. At first draught, it induces a hyperactivity, born of despair, like that of a rat in a maze. In time, however, it leaves him in a stupor, mesmerized by the spectacle of his own futility.
A biblical philosophy points the way out of the maze. In the first place, it sees no virtue in existential wallowing in despair. As Heschel puts it, “Man is endowed with the ability to fulfill what God demands... Despair is alien to the Jewish faith.” This applies not only to action but to thought as well. The biblical philosophy therefore provides a perspective from which the blind alleys of Christian theology are neither inevitable nor desirable. They are inevitable only if one assumes in advance that the Bible has no philosophic import. Having made this assumption, Aquinas, Tillich and Barth are like persons trying to construct a single picture from the pieces of several different jigsaw puzzles. Aquinas struggles manfully to combine the pieces of two different puzzles, the one Aristotelian, the other biblical. Tillich starts over again with a picture which is complete, but pagan. And Barth impatiently hurls all the pieces to the floor.
Heschel argues that the Bible itself has yet to be taken seriously as an independent philosophical alternative. The business of the theologian is to work with the clues and fragments which it contains, drawing out their implications and fitting them together until he reconstructs the complete picture. At the end of the process he finds coherent answers to such philosophical questions as the nature of man, the origin and status of the world, the knowledge of God, the interpretation of time and history, and the good life.
The biblical answers to these questions need not exclude insights from other sources, nor are they exempt from rational criticism. By investigating them, Christian thought could be delivered from the catatonic state into which it has fallen.
god-talk
One problem which the Bible illumines is that of religious language: What is the meaning and function of propositions about God? Is it inevitably symbolic? Must it resort to paradox? Does it appeal to analogy?
30
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Or can it be taken literally? The answer depends upon how God is conceived. Different “gods” require different modes of speech.
On this score, the Bible comes through loud and clear. Whatever doubts there may be about its consistency on other points, here its testimony is unanimous: God is a personal agent, active and purposeful, conceived analogously to a human being. He is characterized by precisely those things which differentiate men from animals: free will, emotion, intelligence, concern, the capacity for speech and self-
expression, and for responsible and purposeful action. What His purposes are may be legitimately debated. But the prior issue is clear. The biblical God is, in the Bible’s phrase, a living God; or, as Heschel puts it, He is “endowed with will and freedom.”
Such a God is often said to be a philosophic liability. He may be adequate to the sphere of religion, which deals with intimate personal concerns. But philosophy deals with the highest principles of reality, which transcend the merely personal. Its god is impassive, self-sufficient, timeless, inactive, without purpose, unrelated to anything else. It is the very opposite of a personal God, not known by a proper name, but by such terms as the One, the Absolute, or the Ground of Being. Judged by this standard, the biblical understanding of God is a vestige of primitive superstition. It can be tolerated as an accommodation to the naive mind, untrained in philosophical concepts. But if taken literally, it is a gross error, a projection of human frailties upon the face of heaven.
Heschel, however, is not intimidated by philosophical panoply. When the rhetoric has ceased, he proposes a philosophical contest. There are, he points out, only two ways to think of God: “in terms of a free and spontaneous being or in terms of inanimate being; either He is alive or devoid of life.” He challenges the philosopher in the spirit of Elijah on Mt. Carmel: “If the Ground of Being be God, then follow him; but if the Lord be God, then follow him.”
The philosopher’s argument, he charges, is really circular. It reels off a long list of divine attributes and then searches for a God which will fit them. But this is to reverse the logical order. Logically, the divine attributes depend upon who God is, and not vice versa. To brandish a list of attributes before establishing God’s identity is to beg the question. Until the prior question is settled, the philosopher has no right to assume that the abstract is “more divine” than the concrete, the universal than the particular, the impersonal than the personal. For it might just turn out that the living God of the Bible is not only superior religiously but philosophically as well. Since the Ground-of-Being transcends all finite
31
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
categories, there can be no reason for calling it good rather than bad, creative rather than destructive, divine rather than demonic, wise rather than foolish. One solution is to declare that “he” is both at once, in the name of “profound paradox.” But by philosophical standards, at least, paradox remains synonymous with nonsense.
Another alternative is symbolism. The divine attributes, it is held, are to be taken symbolically, not literally. But then the question arises, are all statements about God of equal symbolic value? If so, then they cancel each other out. But if not, then what determines that one symbolic statement is more valid than another? Any answer puts the philosopher in trouble. For if God is infinite, then He is equally remote from all finite expressions. To choose one symbolic statement over another therefore compromises God’s infinity.
Religious language is consequently one point where the biblical God halls a definite advantage. For language about the philosopher’s God must always be guesswork, at best. Charitable critics have been willing to grant that religious symbolism is a special kind of language game. In fact, however, it is a game without rules. The players always smuggle in some covert criterion which contradicts their reason for resorting to symbols in the first place.
Heschel would seem to be more candid when he flatly declares, “Symbolism is quackery.” Words either mean what they say, or they do not. They may be used poetically, of course, for rhetorical effect. But unless poetry can be transposed into prose (however emasculated), it is meaningless.
This is the philosophical strength of the biblical position. God can be described in the language of ordinary, temporal experience, without the equivocation which symbolic language involves. He is not timeless, but everlasting; not omnipresent, but wherever He wants to be; not omniscient, but cognizant of what He chooses to know; not inherently inscrutable, but capable of withholding or revealing Himself, like any other person. In short, God and man belong to the same universe of discourse. Of course God far exceeds man in creative power, in lordship aver life, in holiness, in majesty. But He is not in principle ineffable or incomprehensible. If men do not know God, it is not because they cannot. It is, as the prophets testify, because of their hardness of heart: “Do ye not perceive, neither understand? Are your hearts yet hardened?” ( Mark 8:17)
Such a God differs from man in being more personal, not less. What this involves becomes more evident with the advances in psychiatry. The
32
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
splayed personality is irresolute, ambivalent, inclined to divide his loyal ties and to hedge his bets. If he would become whole, he must follow the example of the biblical God, who is steadfast, trustworthy, and consistent. As Heschel says, “It is constancy that sanctifies.” God alone can claim to be fully personal.
Personal wholeness is also incompatible with another of man’s favorite virtues. Man aspires to be self-sufficient, autonomous, invulnerable. But psychiatry provides mounting evidence that the healthy personality is open and vulnerable, willing to take risks and able to bear the hurt. This describes the biblical God par excellence. He loves - literally. He feels and cares - literally. This may be Heschel’s most significant contribution to religious thought: to emphasize the “divine pathos,” God’s willingness to endure frustration and contempt in His quest for man’s response. It is just possible that our resistance to the idea of divine pathos, deeply entrenched in the philosophic tradition, is in fact a rationalization. It may be motivated by the fear of taking the same risks that God takes. But we shall never become fully human until we give up the rationalization and follow His example.
Biblical language about God is therefore unequivocal and straightforward. This means that statements about God might, upon inquiry, turn out to be false. Philosophically, however, this is not a weakness, but a prerequisite of honesty. Unless a statement can be falsified, it is mere arbitrary dogma. And if it is ambiguous, it can never be tested. The Bible does not appeal to some privileged sanctuary of mystical intuition, beyond the reach of criticism. Its God does not need that kind of help. He invites men to test His reputation for themselves-which they can only do by giving God a chance.
interpreting the bible
The problem of Biblical interpretation is also illumined by the biblical philosophy. For the meaning of a passage will often depend, not merely upon its historical and literary context, but upon its philosophical context as well. An analogy may be drawn from geometry. The meaning of the word “triangle” depends upon which axioms are presupposed: those of plane geometry, or those of spherical geometry. The axioms determine the definition. Similarly, the meaning of religious terms will vary from one philosophical context to another. A correct interpretation of scriptural terms therefore requires an understanding of the biblical philosophy.
An example is the familiar text, “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.” What is the meaning of silence
33
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
in this passage? What is the function of silence in the presence of God? Literary and historical analysis alone cannot supply the answer. It depends upon the biblical understanding of the relation between God and man. If this biblical philosophy is ignored, the passage will unconsciously be interpreted in the light of some other philosophy. For, as Heschel says, “There is no one who has no theology.”
The commonest source of misinterpretation is the philosophy of neo-platonism, which has infiltrated most religious thinking. In the context of this philosophy, prayer is a prelude to a withdrawal from the outer world to “the God within.” Though it may begin with words, this kind of prayer culminates in silence, for at the point of identity between man and God there is nothing left to say.
The biblical context, however, imparts a wholly different meaning to prayer. In the first place, it does not take a man out of the world and into himself, but vice versa. Of the many prayers recorded in the Bible, is there a single one which does not refer directly to external circumstances? Human history, in Heschel’s phrase, is God’s ultimate concern. Prayer therefore properly concerns the individual’s role in his contemporary situation.
Nor is biblical prayer a solitary matter, best conducted in private. On the contrary, as Heschel points out, the Jew does not stand alone before God. He only discovers the biblical God as a member of his community. When Samuel first heard the voice of the Lord, he did not know who it was until Eli told him. Private prayer does occur in the Bible, but it is derivative and secondary to corporate worship. And where it does occur, it always has reference to the community, as when Moses pleads with the Lord not to destroy his people. Private prayer, as Heschel says, cannot even survive unless it is continually inspired by public prayer. Hence Heschel’s conclusion that “piety in isolation from the community is a kind of impiety.”
Moreover, since prayer is a relation between persons, it cannot dispense with words. Were it simply a matter of feeling, then words would be unnecessary. Feelings can be conveyed by inarticulate sound and gestures, as they are by animals. But biblical religion, as Heschel points out, is “not a feeling for something that is, but an answer to Him who is asking us to live in a certain way.” Prayer is primarily about action - God commissioning men to action (“Here am I - send me”), or men asking God’s help. This kind of communication cannot get very far without words.
No one has written more eloquently than Heschel about prayer as
34
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
empathy, and about the need for a sense of the ineffable, which can never be exhaustively expressed in words. But neither can it do without them. In fact, the best way to express mutual empathy is through deeds (mitsvoth), and deeds require interpretation. Granted that in a close relationship between two people the significance of such acts becomes self-evident; nevertheless, in case of misunderstanding, the meaning can always be put into words. Hence, as Heschel says, “One becomes a praying man by means of the word.” If one eventually makes less use of words, it is only because he can confidently take them for granted.
This conception of prayer, which follows from the biblical conception of man and God, provides the context for interpreting “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.” This is not the silence in which each individual plumbs the depths of his own subjectivity. It is the hush which falls over the courtroom when the bailiff declares, “Silence in the court.” Men must be quiet if they are to hear what the judge has to say. Biblical silence is listening silence. It is pregnant with the word of God.
Silence in a biblical context is therefore completely different from silence in a neo-platonic context. Apart from the biblical philosophy, it is inevitably misinterpreted. The same is true of numerous other biblical terms, such as sin, faith, revelation, righteousness, grace, love, or idolatry. Literary and historical analysis alone cannot prevent their misinterpretation. The only corrective is the biblical philosophy. The exegete will therefore have to become enough of a philosopher to spell out, by implication and inference, the Bible’s implied philosophy, so that his own interpretations will not be unwittingly controlled by alien philosophic premises.
This kind of “philosophical exegesis” has a special lesson for Christians. It means that the New Testament cannot be interpreted apart from the Tanach and its implied philosophy. For the authors of the New Testament never repudiate the Tanach. Rather, they take it for granted. In the case of Jesus himself, this is too obvious to need repeating. He constantly interprets himself and his mission in the categories of the Tanach; and not just the servant passages of Deutero-Isaiah, but also the Psalmist and Deuteronomy. His constant refrain was, “I come not to destroy but to fulfill,” and he died with the twenty- second Psalm on his lips. The same applies to Saul of Tarsus, often thought to be antagonistic to the Torah, but on his own showing a Hebrew born of Hebrews. If allowed to speak for himself, and not read in the light of platonic philosophy, his attitude toward the Torah is identical with that of the prophets: no law
35
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
is an end in itself; every mitsvah is a means to an end. To what end? Heschel gives the answer. “All observance is training in the art of love.”
The New Testament therefore depends upon the Tanach for its proper interpretation. Without the Tanach, it is construed in the light of some other philosophy, and consequently distorted. To take one example, compare the RSV with the NEB translation of Romans 8:26, which also concerns the function of words in prayer. The RSV reads: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) The implication is that the truly spiritual prayer cannot be expressed in words, but only “sighs too deep for words.” In that case, there is a flat contradiction with the understanding of prayer in the Tanach, as developed above.
Before jumping to conclusions, however, note the translation of the same passage in the New English Bible, which gives a completely different impression: “The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness. We do not even know how we ought to pray, but through our inarticulate groans the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the spirit means.” Here the implication is completely consistent with the philosophy of the Tanach: in our spiritual poverty we do not know what words to use. The best we can manage are inarticulate groans. But even these are acceptable to God until we become mature enough to find the right words.
Which of these two translations is correct? Assuming that each is grammatically possible, literary and historical criticism alone cannot decide. When these other considerations are equal, the right translation, the one which preserves the author’s intention, is the one which fits logically into the rest of his thought. In the present instance, the RSV translation, which reflects platonic assumptions, is overruled by the NEB, which is consistent with biblical thought as a whole.
The NEB translation also illumines an additional aspect of biblical silence. In addition to listening silence, there can also be the silence of sheer trepidation, like that of a person who finds himself tongue- tied in the presence of royalty. This was Isaiah’s reaction in the presence of the Lord: “Woe is me, for I am undone; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” Only after the live coal touched his lips could he find words. In the same spirit, the disciples of Jesus ask him, “Teach us to pray.” Their silence is a mark of their inability to pray. It is not words that are inadequate. It is they who are inadequate. As Heschel puts it, “The words which tell of it (the divine) exceed the power of the soul.”
36
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thus silence is not a sign of “deep spirituality” but of spiritual immaturity.
Without the philosophy of the Tanach, the exegete is thus at the mercy of philosophic premises of which he may not even be aware. Or he may, like Rudolf Bultmann, imagine that he must supply some alien philosophy to make good the Bible’s deficiency. Instead of letting the Bible supply its own philosophy, Bultmann superimposes upon it the philosophy of existentialism, and so misunderstands the Tanach as well as the New Testament.
Though Heschel is too tactful to say so directly, he is well aware of this Christian tendency. He examines terms which have played a decisive role in Christian thought, such as sin and faith, and shows that their biblical meaning is quite different from what many Christians, under the influence of alien and unconscious assumptions, have imagined. Faith is a person-to-person relation of mutual trust. Sin is a betrayal of such trust. How remote this is from an Augustine or a Luther is all too obvious.
The idea of a biblical philosophy may thus hold the key to refuting one of the commonest clichés about the Bible: that the individual is entitled to read into it whatever he pleases. This maxim may have been a useful antidote to official interpretations, enforced by ecclesiastical decree. But with that danger a thing of the past, the new threat to the Bible is relativism, the doctrine that we can never know what it means. No other book is regarded with such a defeatist attitude. Nor need the Bible be. Once it is interpreted in the light of its own philosophy, it will be possible to adjudicate between rival interpretations. Honest differences may not be eliminated altogether; but they can be greatly reduced. The devil will no doubt continue to quote scripture to his own purpose - but with the help of the biblical philosophy, it may become possible to catch him in the act.
in a world come of age
In conclusion, what is the relevance of biblical philosophy to the secularism which characterizes contemporary life? Up to a point, the two have a great deal in common. If the secularist is preoccupied with human problems, so is the Bible: “No other book so loves and respects the life of man.” If the secularist is this-worldly rather than other-worldly, the Bible is too; its concern is with the here and now, not with far away heavenly mansions. If he relies on human reason, the Bible agrees: “Without reason faith becomes blind.” If he prefers pragmatism to ethical absolutes, so does the Bible: “The law is a means, not an end; the way,
37
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
not the goal.” If he is more interested in time and history than in eternity, Heschel replies that Judaism is in fact a religion of time.
These “secular” aspects of the Bible have led some theologians to an alarming conclusion. They concede, with the secularist, that God has now become superfluous. Concern for God, they say, has in fact prevented men from realizing that the proper study of mankind is man. The Bible’s real message, they hold, is to teach men to get along without Gad. Secularization is therefore the final stage of biblical “religion.” Man cannot fulfill his destiny until, like a good Freudian, he can throw off his bondage to the Father and declare triumphantly that God is dead.
At this point the biblical philosophy is urgently needed to correct a tragic mistake. For the god now declared dead is not the biblical God at all, but the god of neo-platonism. This dead god did indeed teach that human existence is a misfortune; that reason must give way to “the cloud of unknowing”; that time is an obstacle to the knowledge of God. The goals of the Bible could never be fulfilled until man could get this deity off his back. Its death is long overdue. But in celebrating its demise, secularists and theologians alike have imagined that they are dancing on the grave of the living God.
This confusion underlies the contention by one prominent theologian that the central thrust of the Bible is to remove God from human affairs. The Bible, he writes, desanctifies nature, desacralizes politics, and relativizes ethics. Otherwise man is not free. Secularization is consequently the logical outcome of biblical faith, and is in fact long overdue.
Though there is an element of truth in this point of view, it is obscured by the failure to make a crucial distinction. The Bible does indeed liberate man by neutralizing nature, dethroning the state, and challenging absolute ethical principles. But it does not banish God from these three realms. On the contrary, it discloses their relation to Him. Nature is not to be worshipped, because God created it for men’s enjoyment; the state is not the final authority, because politics must serve God’s historical purpose; ethical absolutes are false, because no static principles impede the active intentions of the living God. It is therefore misleading to say that the Bible desanctifies the world. Rather, as Heschel says, it calls upon man to sanctify the world.
Can the humanistic goals which the Bible shares with secularism be accomplished without the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Man is not alone, says Heschel; what happens when he tries to go it alone? Without God, what happens to humanism? What happens when pragmatic ethics are secularized? When concern for this world becomes a self-evident
38
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
truth? When the rational faculty becomes autonomous? These are the burning questions which the biblical philosophy puts to modern man.
To answer is to engage in prophecy, which the biblical philosophy equips us to do. Without God’s steadfast purpose as its final criterion, secular pragmatism becomes cynical relativism. Without God’s own concern for the world, man quickly turns into its plunderer, on the one hand, or a disciple of other- worldly yogis, on the other. Without the biblical emphasis upon self-criticism, the rational faculty becomes an ingenious instrument for self-justification.
In short, if the Bible is correct, secular humanism is a contradiction in terms. “The greatest sin of man,” declares Heschel, “is to forget that he is a prince.” But a prince must have a King for his father. Otherwise he sinks to the level of the vulgar, no matter how loudly he protests his own worth. Contemporary evidence supports the prophecy. The humanistic ideals of secular man are mocked by his actual situation. Where is the dignity of man in contemporary literature, or art, or theater, in the ghetto, or in Viet Nam? In Heschel’s words, “The man of our time has fallen so low that he is not even capable of being ashamed.”
Biblical philosophy is consequently not just an academic plaything. It contains an urgent warning to a world that boasts about coming of age. It predicts that humanism apart from God is a vain cry in a hostile world, and must eventually come to grief. The prediction is already coming true before our eyes. The only question is whether men will wake up in time. To the extent that biblical philosophy can help awaken them, it is indispensable, not only to the Jewish people, and not just to Christians, but to all men everywhere. It offers them, in Heschel’s words, one last chance to remain human.
39