PART IV

THE TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD VERSUS HUMAN ABSOLUTIZING

Ascribing to human groups -- families, tribes, ethnoi, states -- the transcendence that belongs only to God. Divine transcendence and ethnic or national religions. Scriptural faith, ethnocentrism, and ethnic conflict. Shalom and sadiq in the scriptural stories; the healing and reconciling import and energies of the scriptural faiths; their nurture and activation. Some examples, both of perversion and of healing initiatives.1

Editorial Introduction

"Syncretistic religions are more likely to foster tolerance than universalist faiths based on dogma."

                                                                                                                                    -Ian Buruma2

            Our human condition gives us the capacity, but also the need, to transcend in our imagination the immediacies of time and space within which we find ourselves. Consequently we are compelled in the final analysis to act intuitively on the best evidence as refracted by our ruling paradigms, rather than on the basis of clear cause-effect determinisms. Such is our relation to what we call the cosmos, the world or universe as an orderly though mysterious system. From the earliest times, humans in their imagination have personified the mysteries they thus perceive as spiritual beings, who, while resembling themselves, are thought to possess powers which they do not. These imaginings are represented not only ver-bally, but more powerfully in ritual and imagery.

            From the earliest times these proclivities were in evidence in the formation of families, households, clans, tribes, and confe-deracies. Each human group, it would appear, possessed its cor-responding deity. In effect, gods were created as needed. And on the surface, as it appeared to the surrounding peoples and to the Israelites themselves, the God of the Israelites was simply another tribal deity.

            At a certain level, that interpretation was justifiable. For whether the gods are humanly invented, that is, whether "religion" arises from the human search for God, or, as in the Abrahamic instance, in response to God’s search for the human, the response is humanly constructed. The social scientist or the visiting journa-list, acting in their respective capacities, cannot distinguish be-tween these two modes of religious expression. Both can only be regarded as human constructions, to be judged alike on their res-pective merits.

            The claim that Abrahamic faith rests on God’s search for man rather than the reverse is itself a "religious," not a scientific, claim. To act in faith as Abraham did, according to the story, did not auto-matically suspend the human propensity to tribalize the deity. Again as history demonstrates, the worship of hand-made idols is far more readily overcome than recourse to the "God and Country" idiom. While on the one hand, with advancing modernization, it is increasingly possible to exclude organized religion from the po-litical compact, "God" continues to be linked to the national cause.

            As the three papers here indicate, the matter is by no means resolved. God is One, transcendent and ineffable. Theologically all three argue for the equality of all humans, though they work at the matter in different ways. However, practical ambiguities persist, and these have to be engaged existentially, historically. Given the exalted vision of deity, how is the gulf to the human to be bridged? This problem remains a theological conundrum. Perhaps inevi-tably, the very modes of human response -- beliefs, dogma, ritual -- partake of the sacred. And when these become linked to ethnic or national interest, the mixture becomes explosive, as recent and current history in Bosnia demonstrates.

            In the Jewish instance, given the peculiarity of the Jewish vocation, a distinction between response to the ineffable and peo-plehood may not be directly feasible, despite it being implicit in the original Call, as we have just seen. Jack Luxemburg, appropriately enough, underscores the openness of "the blessing of covenantal living" to "every people, every person and every group." But we, "the heirs of Abraham . . . too often appear(ed) to be spiritually troubled descendants of Babel, lacking an adequately inspired means of expressing our religious heritage in terms that can be grasped and appreciated by another." As suggested elsewhere, calamities that again and again have befallen the original Abra-hamic people, make of their "ethnic" survival a particular case. In any event, the symposium did not address that particularity, nor was it competent to do so.

            The most vexing problem arises at the "interface" between the two covenantal modalities, creation and salvation (salvific inter-vention). Here Miroslav Volf, a native of former Yugoslavia, is well placed to wrestle with the resulting tension. Writing from within a "free church" stance, but situated within a Christendom framework, he draws on the "leaving" and "distancing" idioms in the primal Abrahamic Call. The problem is treated somewhat from the other side by Vigen Guroian (next section), but within another Christen-dom tradition, trying to create distance on the basis of that tra-dition’s own presuppositions rather than in terms of a "free church" alternative, as does Volf.

            Sulayman Nyang spells out the trans-ethnic vitality, in the messages of the Prophet, the texts of the Qur’an, and across important periods of Islamic history. Islam undoubtedly has been more accommodating to Jewish (minority) communities it its midst than was Christendom. At the other end of the Islamic continuum, as Nyang documents, Islam, like the other Abrahamic movements, has again and again been misused for political or military gain. As observed from the outside, perhaps the greatest vulnerability in the Islamic conception lies in its vision of the Umma as a universal historical community. This conception has been all too readily po-liticized where Muslims appeared in real or imagined majorities in political jurisdictions.

            It is not a matter here of comparing the several traditions as though the one or the other offered a final solution. Instead each of the historic developments illuminates particular dimensions and potentialities of Abrahamic story. We shall return to these issues in the final chapter below.

Paul Peachey

Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community

NOTES

            1. Original assignment to Luxemburg, Volf and Nyang.