Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Just As An Experiment Here is a passage from Hans Kung's Does God Exist?

from p. 622

Thus the God of the Fathers, who had borne no name, made known his proper name.  And perhaps no exegete could have paraphrased better its meaning also for our post-Marxist, post-Freudian society than the Jewish philosopher Ernst Bloch:  "The Exodus God is differently constituted'  he proved in the prophets his hostility to masters and to opium.  Above all, he is not statically constituted like all the pagan gods before him.  For the YWHW of Moses at the very beginning gave himself a definition, a continually breathtaking definition, which makes all staticism pointless:  'God spoke to Moses:  I will be who I will be' (Exodus 3:14) . . . In order to judge the singularity of this passage, we should compare it with another interpretation, the later commentary on another name of a god, that of Apollo.  Plutarch tells us (De EI apud Delphos, Maralia III) that over the door of the temple of Apollo at Delphi there is carved the sign EI:  he attempts to give the two letters the meaning of a mystic number, but in the end comes to the conclusion that EI grammatically and metaphysically means the same thing:  that is,  'Thou art' in the sense of timelessly unchanging divine existence.  Ehyeh asher ehyeh, on the other hand, on the very threshold of the YHWH manifest ion, sets up a God of the end of time, with the future as his state of being.   This End and Omega God would have been a nonsense in Delphi,  as in any religion where God is not a God of the Exodus."  

The God of the Bible is indeed a God of historical dynamism.  But can God be the end-and-omega God if he is not first of all the beginning-and-alpha God?  The Exodus God and the Creator God are not opposed to one another in the Old Testament, as Bloch thinks.  It is a question of one and the same living God in one and the same history of Israel. 

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I post this knowing what the childish might make of one word in it, Oh, well, you can't let the childish mind limit what you do or you'll end up doing nothing. 

Let me know if this is easier on your eyes.  I'm hoping not to have to go to a larger font for my everyday posting, scrolling is kind of annoying as it is. 

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