the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us

AS IS TRUE EVERY YEAR RMJ does the best Advent posts.   I'll leave what I was writing aside with the recommendation to read his, today and go with a few provocative quotes from, who else, Walter Brueggemann's An Unsettled God - he quotes, Jurgen Moltmann in this place and I'll riff off of that with other passages from other things:

God in Pathos

We may take one further step in articulating the categories through which we will understand "God as partner."  The general dialogic, relational quality of covenantal faith was given special and focused attention by Abraham Heschel in his exposition of YHWH's pathos.  While the notion of pathos, especially lined out by Heschel, may be taken specifically in the capacity of God to suffer, in fact the implication of Heschel's work is much broader.  It concerns the engagement of YHWH with Israel and with the world, and therefore YHWH's vulnerability and readiness to be impinged upon.  The particular focus of Heschel on God's hurt in the traditions of Hosea and Jeremiah makes abundantly clear that the God of Israel is unlike the God of any scholastic theology and unlike any of the forces imagined in any of the vague spritualities available among us.  The particular character of this God is as available agent who is not only able to act but is available to be acted upon.

I may mention two derivative studies that are primally informed by the work of Heschel.  On the one hand, Kazo Kitamori has poignantly written of God's pain.  Special attention may be given to his appendix concerning Jeremiah 31:20 QNE Isaiah 63:15.  Kitamori notes how discerningly both Luther and Calvin, without any sentimentality, were able to take  notice of God's pain.  The articulation of that pain, moreover, required the poetic imagination of ancient Israel to speak in terms of bodily upset and consternation, resisting any attempt to permit this God to float off as an ephmeral spirit.  The God of dialogic engagement is fully exposed to the realities of life in the world that we might most readily term "creaturely,"  except that those reatlies are, on the lips of the poets, the realities of the Creator as well.

It is obvious that this line of reasoning, so characteristically Jewish, has immense implications for Christian theology.  Jurgen Moltmann, informed by the work of Heschel,  has forcefully carried the issue of God's vulnerability in Christian theology:

"It was Abraham Heschel who, in controversy with Hellenism and the Jewish philosophy of religion of Jehuda Malevi, Maimonides and Spinoza which was influenced by it, first described the prophets' proclamation of God as pathetic theology.  The prophets had no "idea" of God, but understood themselves and the people in the situation of God.  Heschel called this situation of God the pathos of God.  It has nothing to do with the irrational human emotions like desire, anger, anxiety, envy or sympathy, but describes the way in which God is affected by events and human actions and suffering in history.  He is affected by them because he is interested in his creation, his people and his right.  The pathos of God is intentional and transitive, not related to itself but to the history of the covenant people.  God already emerged from himself at the creation of the world "in the beginning."  In the covenant he enters into the world and the people of his choice.  The "history" of God cannot therefore be separated from the history of his people.  The history of the divine pathos is embedded in this history of men. . . .

Abraham Heschel has developed his theology of the divine pathos as a dipolar theology.  God is free in himself and at the same time interested in his covenant relationship and affected by human history.  In this covenant relationship he has spoken of the pathos of God and the sympatheia of man, and in doing so has introduced a second bipolarity."

Moltmann has considered the way in which classical Christian theology has asserted the apatheia of God.  It has done so by acknowledging the suffering of the Son in which the Father does not participate.  Moltmann has shown, against this propensity, that in Trinitarian thought the Father as well as the Son suffers:

"To understand what happened between Jesus and his God and Father on the cross, it is necessary to talk in trinitarian terms.  The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.  The Fartherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father, and if God has constituted himself as the Father of Jesus Christ, then he also suffers the death of his Fatherhood in the death of the Son."

Moltmann's statement is completely congruent, in the categories of Christian theology, with what Heschel had already discerned in Israel's prophets.  The God of Christians, understood in the midst of God's revelation to ancient Israel, is a God deeply at risk in the drama of fidelity and infidelity in the world.  

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Which leads me to this passage from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James in which Spinoza's mathematical materialism as an assumed oracle of what it cannot be shown to be relevant to comes into play.  

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which the thing originates. Spinoza says: “I will analyze the actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids.” And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English literature, has written: “Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.” When we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel—quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform — menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life. Such cold‐blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to undo our soul’s vital secrets, as if the same breath which should succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain away their significance, and make them appear of no more preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine speaks.

No doubt there are more to the point passages in Spinoza to oppose against the Scriptural presentation of the pathos of God and our more banal reality but that's what I had available here on this Sunday morning.  

This footnote by William James, though not attached to this part of his text comes to mind, as well.

When I read in a religious paper words like these: “Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_,” I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? Original religious men, like Saint Francis, Luther, Behmen, have usually been enemies of the intellect’s pretension to meddle with religious things. Yet the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect. See how the ancient spirit of Methodism evaporates under those wonderfully able rationalistic booklets (which every one should read) of a philosopher like Professor Bowne (The Christian Revelation, The Christian Life, The Atonement: Cincinnati and New York, 1898, 1899, 1900).

I attempted to read Bowne, struggling with his "Personalism" for a few weeks and found it to be entirely arid and pointless.   I had problems with the later and quite different personalism of the French Catholic tradition but it wasn't as bad as that.   That school of personalism is relevant to the theology of JPII and Benedict XVI which I touched on here last week, which might be why I remembered the footnote. 

There's probably more to be found in listening to any setting of the Canticle of Mary than in such religion under the yoke of philosophy.