Chapter 2:
Divine Persuasion in
the Old Testament
This differentiation
between persuasive and coercive power moves somewhat beyond the Old
Testament context which rarely addresses itself to this particular
contrast. Nonetheless its dominant experience of divine power seems to
emphasize coercive elements, with the symbols for power drawn heavily
from the military and political spheres. Its roots are found in the
very early tradition that Yahweh is a God of war:
Sing to the Lord, for
he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into
the sea. (Ex. 15:21)
In the greatness of
thy majesty thou overthrowest thy adversaries; thou sendest forth thy
fury, it consumes them like stubble. (Ex. 15:7)
Throughout its
history Israel relied upon the military prowess of Yahweh, first in the
prosecution of holy war in defense of the tribal amphictyony, then
against the enemies of the Lord’s anointed (Psalm 2), and finally in
expectation of the destruction of all powers oppressing Israel in the
last day. ‘‘Does evil befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?’’
(Amos 3:6b). He has all power, both to create and to destroy, and that
destructive power could also be turned against
Israel itself. The entire prophetic corpus ends on that note of dire
warning, “lest I come and smite the land with a curse” (Mal. 4:6).
Exclusive concern
with divine power, however, distorts the texture of biblical experience,
which does not systematically articulate a series of doctrines carefully
correlated with one another, such that each may safely be considered on
its own merits. Rather,
Israel bore witness to that action of God directly impinging upon the
situation at hand, letting the total cumulative context make the
necessary adjustments and modifications. God is free to act as he wills
(Ex. 33:19), so the experience of what God is now doing is neither
determined by nor could it possibly repudiate what God has already
done. But by his covenant with
Israel all of God’s actions could be accepted and understood as expressions
of his age-long struggle and personal confrontation with his people and
not as mere displays of raw, naked force. Divine power was interfused
with moral purity, as witnessed, for example, in the experience of
Isaiah the year King Uzziah died (Isaiah 6). Yet no matter how august,
how holy, or how destructive God’s power might be, it was always
experienced as the expression of a divine will in personal interaction
with his people.
That context,
however, is no longer our context. The history of God’s dealings with
Israel can no longer serve as the all-embracing horizon for our understanding
of God, which must now be correlated with a greatly expanded world
history, a scientific understanding of nature and man, and a drastically
altered social and ethical situation. It would appear that only a
philosophical structure can provide a sufficiently inclusive context
suitable to our needs. Therefore the hermeneutical task calls for the
translation of
Israel’s experience into a contemporary systematic and conceptual framework,
one that can do justice to its historical concerns. Much hermeneutical
discussion today centers upon options within existential thought.
Without question existential emphases upon risk, subjective
appropriation, and decision must be affirmed, and the call to authentic
openness may be appreciated as a protest against impersonal ethical
norms. But as a total context existential philosophy is
methodologically too restrictive. If faith can only be expressed in
terms of human encounter, such that we are precluded from using any
cosmological framework in expressing our understanding of God, then we
have no way of appreciating God’s activity and manifestation of concern
toward the rest of the created order. We are in danger of succumbing to
a global anthropocentricity in our existential preoccupation, precisely
at a time when members of the scientific community are reckoning with
the strong probability of intelligent life inhabiting other worlds
within our universe.
It is no accident,
however, that the present hermeneutical concern in biblical circles
received its impetus from existential concerns. For the problem was not
so much how to update a first-century world view, as how to express the
biblical experience within any systematic, cosmological
framework. Insofar as a cosmology was able to articulate the biblical
sense of divine sovereign power, it seemed destined to minimize any
creaturely contribution to creation and to transform providence into
determinism. In the official formulation of Christian doctrine,
Whitehead complains, “the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in
the image of the Egyptian. Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was
retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belong
exclusively to Caesar.” 3
Process theism
involves the persistent effort to conceive God’s activity primarily in
terms of persuasion. It firmly opposes those views which from its
perspective imply certain kinds of coercion within divine power. Here
it is necessary to be precise as to what we mean by coercion. Not every
cause which is not persuasive is therefore coercive. Nor is every
efficient cause coercive, and every final cause persuasive. Coercion is
readily understood on the experiential level of social or physical
behavior, but its proper metaphysical definition is difficult to
ascertain.
Not every limitation
is coercive. The laws of logic, metaphysics, and nature (causal
uniformities) in one sense limit what is possible, but they also
structure it. I am not coerced by demands of consistency, nor by the
law of gravity, nor by my inability to fly. Even within the realm of
possibility so structured by logic, metaphysics, and causal regularity
there is the further limitation that my present possibilities conform to
the particular causal conditions of my past. What I can now become must
emerge out of the totality of those past conditions impinging upon me.
These dictate the overwhelming improbability of my becoming the next
astronaut, or the next president. These past conditions may sometimes
be felt as coercive, but they are not coercive as such. They are
also the enabling conditions where I am presently able to actualize
myself, since I can only actualize myself as the outcome of the past.
We may define
coercion generally as any restriction upon the range of real
possibility which would otherwise be available. This definition
cannot be made fully precise, for it is impossible for the same event to
have other causal conditions or actualizable possibilities than it in
fact has. If they were different, that would be a different event. The
event can only be compared with contrary-to-fact conditions, and then
only in terms of those properties we intuitively feel would “ordinarily”
or “normally” apply. A judgment about coercion is thus always
comparative and relative.
In general, there are
two ways in which effective real possibility can be restricted. The
first way concerns what is usually thought of as efficient causation,
the way in which past causal conditions affect present decisions. The
nature, variety, and complexity of these conditions may either expand or
restrict the range of alternative possibility open to us. Any external
alteration of these past causal conditions which restricts the range of
possibility otherwise available acts as a restraint, and is thus
coercive.
On its own terms,
classical theism is hardly coercive. God’s efficient causality is that
which creates each being as it is, enabling it to exercise whatever
freedom it is capable of. If, however, freedom is precisely that which
cannot be derived from any external agency, including God, because it is
the intrinsic self-creativity of each occasion, then divine efficient
causality may be perceived to be coercive. Here we are comparing
alternative metaphysical frameworks. If, in terms of process theism,
God acts fundamentally through final causation, and the range of real
possibility is correlated solely to finite past causal conditions, then
the addition of some divine efficient causality may act as a restraint.
Suppose God’s
efficient causality acts as one causal condition among the others. Then
there is an additional factor the occasion must conform to. This
additional factor cannot be an enabling factor, since the totality of
finite causal factors was sufficient in itself to allow the occasion to
actualize itself. It can only be a restricting factor.
Suppose the divine
efficient causality unifies all the other causal conditions. If it does
no more than simply transmit the totality of past finite conditions, it
would not itself be peculiarly coercive, but then it would be difficult
to see how God’s causality made any difference. If this divine
efficient causality transcends the past conditions in some unlimited
way, then the occasion would be completely determined by its past, and
could not exercise its own selfcreativity. Such absolute determination
would be coercive.
This consequence is
usually mitigated in classical theism by the supposition that when I
act, it is also God acting through me. Finite and ultimate causation
coincide. This identification is not possible in process theism, which
sees self-decision and divine persuasion, along with the multiplicity of
past causal conditions, as distinct but indispensable and complementary
aspects of every act of freedom. Moreover, if efficient causation is
identified with past causation, then if God exercises complete
efficient causation, the past usurps all the space for present
self-determination. Strictly speaking, if God is omnipotent, having
all power, we can have none.
There is also a
second form of coercion which primarily affects final causation. The
range of real possibility relative to past causal conditions may remain
constant, but the effective options within this range may be curtailed
by threat. Such threats disturb the evaluation of future
possibilities for their own sakes by attaching to these possibilities
further consequences which are so undesirable as to eliminate them from
serious consideration. While threats are generally most effective in
restricting our options, promises of rewards may also work in this way.
A possibility may no longer be judged on its own merits, but in terms of
the reward it promises. In the absence of such coercive measures,
however, the evaluation of real possibilities is genuinely persuasive,
and influences purposively creaturely decision. The absence of complete
causal determination is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for
persuasion; there must also be the evaluation of alternative
possibility. For process theism, this evaluation ultimately stems from
God and constitutes the way he acts in the world by divine persuasion.
Both Plato and
Aristotle proposed that God acts upon the world by persuasion, but this
suggestion was not picked up by the early church. Christian theology
would be vastly different if the church fathers had done so instead of
adhering closely to the Greek ideal of perfection as immutability. As a
result the biblical tradition has rarely been interpreted in terms of
divine persuasion. Yet there are a good many biblical themes that the
concept of divine persuasion can appropriate and illuminate,
particularly themes which are a source of embarrassment to exponents of
classical omnipotence. In the remainder of this chapter we shall
isolate features that illustrate divine persuasion drawn from the areas
of creation, providence, and biblical authority, reserving for the next
chapter the difficult theme of the interaction of persuasive and
coercive elements within the biblical image of God as king.
Quite apart from
biblical precedents, the temptation to interpret God’s role in creation
in terms of efficient power is extremely great. If the entire created
order is dependent for its existence upon his will, then it must be
subject to his full control. Such control of the creative process
entails efficient causality, for the divine initiative must be prior to
the outcome, and the effect must conform to its cause. Since this
divine efficient causality was essentially unlimited, it was
preeminently conceived as calling forth being from nothing. Man, like
his fellow creatures, was a created substance ultimately brought into
being solely through divine power. Yet once in being, man is capable of
exercising his own freedom to the extent that God is willing to
relinquish some areas within his complete control.
This basic model of
divine creative control through efficient causality, however, is
seriously defective in confronting the problem of evil, for then God
ought to reduce the amount of unnecessary evil to a minimum and to
curtail that exercise of human freedom which he foresees will go
astray. Insofar as God controls the world, he is responsible for evil:
directly in terms of the natural order, and indirectly in the case of
man.
Divine persuasion
responds to the problem of evil radically, simply denying that God
exercises full control over the world. Plato sought to express this by
saying that God does the best job he can in trying to persuade a
recalcitrant matter to receive the impress of the divine forms. But the
early church rejected this solution on the grounds that it establishes a
cosmic dualism between God and evil which undercuts human responsibility
for sin and denies the biblical witness to the essential goodness of
creation. Process theism therefore faces the double task of making
creation without control credible and of overcoming these objections to
Plato’s doctrine.
The notion of divine
persuasion entails a twofold expansion of our traditional understanding
of freedom. It cannot be limited solely to man as an exceptional
privilege to be enjoyed on divine sufferance, but some degree of freedom
or spontaneity must be accorded to all of God’s creatures, even the
lowly atom. Secondly, it is not so much that a being is first treated
and then acts, as that its responsive activity in actualizing its own
potentiality is part of the creative process itself. Divine persuasion
maximizes creaturely freedom by respecting the creature’s own integrity
in the very act of guiding its development toward greater freedom. God
is not the cosmic watchmaker, but the husbandman in the vineyard of the
world, fostering and nurturing its continuous growth throughout the
ages; he is the companion and friend who inspires us to achieve the very
best that is within us.
God’s dialogue with
his creation is not limited to man, but is manifest in the entire
evolutionary process. The world’s general advance toward increased
complexity does not emerge by chance, but calls for a transcendent
directing power constantly introducing richer possibilities of order as
the occasion arises. God proposes and the world disposes. The creature
may or may not embody that divine urge toward greater complexity, but
insofar as that ideal is actualized, an evolutionary advance has been
achieved. This process is directed but not controlled, for the
necessary self-activity of the creature requires spontaneity of
response. This spontaneity may be extremely minimal for elementary
particles but it increases with every gain in complexity. Spontaneity
matures as freedom. On the level of human freedom it becomes possible
for this divine urge to leave the biological sphere and be directed
toward the achievement of civilization, and for the means of divine
persuasion now to be consciously felt in terms of ethical and religious
aspiration.4 Not only we ourselves but the entire created
order, whether consciously or unconsciously, is open to this divine
persuasion, each in its own way.
Conceived in terms of
persuasion, creation is the emergence of that which is genuinely new,
requiring the new initiatives God is constantly introducing. It is not
simply the recombination of the old, but depends upon novel structuring
possibilities hitherto unrealized in the temporal world. The emergence
of life is perhaps the single most dramatic example on this planet, yet
even life also requires a material substratum of organic macromolecules
out of which this radically novel form of existence could emerge.
Creation is the fusion of novel form with inherited matter by the
self-creative decision of the emergent creature. It cannot be simply
conceived in terms of a creation out of nothing. In themselves the Old
Testament traditions concerning creation, whether in the Priestly
(Genesis 1) or Yahwistic (Genesis 2) accounts, or in Second Isaiah, Job,
or the Psalms, do not insist upon this. Creation out of nothing is
first mentioned in the Apocrypha: 2 Macc. 7:28.
Basically this
doctrine was designed as a protective measure against Greek speculation
designed to safeguard the essential goodness of God’s creation and man’s
responsibility in the fall. It affirms that there is no recalcitrant
evil external to man and the other creatures out of which the world must
be made. Process theism can certainly agree with the intent behind this
safeguard. God’s creative persuasion is wholly good, and the symbol of
the fall may be generalized to apply to the gap between divine purpose
and creaturely actualization in every creature. This is the point of
identity between creation and fall to which Tillich has alluded.5
Evil enters the world through creaturely response, not from some
preexistent chaos God is forced to work with.
Divine persuasion
illuminates our understanding of the creative Word. Classically, the
divine Word in John’s prologue is the Logos, that basic structuring
principle whereby the world is a cosmos and not a chaos. While true,
this suggests a certain static character inconsistent with the emergent,
improvisatory, evolutionary nature of our universe. God speaks in
creation to each of his creatures, according to its particular
situation, persuading it to bring forth the best that is within it; this
speech is continuously being uttered anew. Here the consecutive acts,
“And God said, let there be
. . .” of the
Priestly creation story, more adequately symbolize the dynamic character
of the Word. Eight acts of divine speech schematically represent the
untold multiplicity of divine urgings whereby God shaped this world,
originally without form and void, into that which we may celebrate as a
fit habitation for man.
The Word once spoken
calls for a hearer, one capable of responding, whether on the human or
subhuman level. If God says, “Let the earth put forth vegetation,” we
may understand the earth’s bringing forth vegetation as its response to
that divinely evoked aim (Gen. 1:11-12). As king of the universe, God’s commands deserve such response.
Speaking of the sun and the moon and the shining stars, the Psalmist
writes: “For he commanded and they were created” (Ps. 148:5). It is
not the case that he who commands our allegiance and obedience merely
happens to be the creator of the world. It is the same Word spoken in
creation that addresses us now, for the same purpose, which is the
evocation of ever-increasing fulfillment of creaturely possibility.
That Word spoken in the creation of the natural order also brought
Israel into existence, and that Word incarnate in Jesus of
Nazareth
became the means whereby the church, the body of Christ, was created.
Israel itself was profoundly aware of the continuity of God’s activity in the
formation of the natural order and in the emergence of
Israel. Psalms 135 and 136 directly juxtapose these two events in successive
stanzas, while Second Isaiah fuses God’s assault against the primeval
waters of chaos with his assault against the waters of the Red Sea:
Was it not thou that didst cut Rahab in pieces,
that didst pierce the dragon?
Was it not thou that didst dry up the sea,
the waters of the great deep;
that didst make the depths of the sea a way
for the redeemed to pass over? (Isa. 51:9b-10)
The collective memory
of Israel concerning its own creation in the total Exodus event places
the emphasis upon the intervening power of Yahweh, who “with a mighty
hand and an outstretched arm, with great tenor, with signs and wonders”
(Deut. 26:8) brought them out of
Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. At the same time, however,
this memory preserves traditions concerning the utterance of a divine
Word calling forth obedient response: the commission to Moses at the
burning bush, and the commandments of Yahweh at Sinai. The covenant
between Yahweh and
Israel clearly symbolized the reciprocal character of effective creative
activity: divine initiative and creaturely response. Israel’s emergence
and continued existence depended upon the conjoint presence of the
divine Word and its own faithfulness to that Word, and this may serve as
the paradigm for understanding creation.
From the standpoint
of divine persuasion, providence is simply another way of looking at
God’s guidance of the historical process already manifest in creation.
Classical omnipotence, however, in affirming God’s sovereign control
over the future, must look for a final break with the ambiguities of
history in which God’s goodness is unambiguously made manifest.
Whatever the historical causes for the apocalyptic world view might be,
its logical basis is a belief in God’s full control of that which is to
come. If God’s activity is not readily apparent within the present
vicissitudes of good and evil, that is because his hand is now stayed,
but if God has the power to actualize the good unambiguously, then his
goodness requires that he do so, and that right early. The more we feel
the tension between God’s sovereign omnipotence and the wickedness of
the world, the greater will be our sense of expectation that the end
must come quickly; any delay becomes increasingly intolerable.
Moreover, since it is God alone who can bring about this good,
independently of the course of creaturely activity, it can be determined
“from the foundations of the world” when and how this should be brought
about.
Process theism cannot
share this apocalyptic expectation because it sees the future as
organically growing out of its past. All such actualization depends
upon the vicissitudes of creaturely response. This does not preclude
faith and hope, but such faith is a trusting and loyal devotion to God’s
purposes in the face of a risky and uncertain future, not belief in a
divine timetable. Insofar as the whole creation trusts God to realize
the purposes he proposes to us, then the good will triumph. The
continued presence of evil, both in man and in the natural order,
testifies to the very fragmentary realization of creaturely faith in
God. Nonetheless, we may hope that the grace of God may be received and
permeate all beings and in that hope do our part in the great task.
Such hope prohibits other-worldly withdrawal, but calls upon us to
redouble our efforts to achieve the good in the world.
Divine providence
cannot be understood as the unfolding of a predetermined course of
events. Prophecy is not prediction, but the proclamation of divine
intent, dependent for its realization upon the continued presence of
those conditions which called forth that intent and upon the emergence
of the means whereby that intent may be realized. Isaiah’s proclamation
of the destruction of
Judah was dependent upon the further, persistent opposition of
Israel to God’s commandments and upon the power of
Assyria.
For the prophets, then, God becomes the great improvisor and opportunist
seeking at every turn to elicit his purpose from every situation: if not
by the hand of Sennacherib, then by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. If the
nation of Israel will not actualize his redeeming purpose for man, then the task must
be reserved for the faithful remnant. If that faithful remnant fails,
we may then confess that God’s aim becomes focused upon a single
carpenter from
Nazareth.
This history is quite contingent and open-ended in its making, but it
becomes the way in which God achieves his purposes in one way or
another.
God’s general,
everlasting purpose is everywhere one and the same: the elicitation of
the maximum richness of existence in every situation. Yet because
creaturely response varies, the achievement of this good is highly
uneven and follows many different routes. In biological evolution many
other lines were tried—amphibians, reptiles, marsupials—before mammals
emerged, and of the mammals only certain primates were responsive to the
call to become human. Among men the response to God varied
considerably, and even when that response was intense, God’s address
must be radically different depending upon their particular
circumstances. The Word addressed to Abraham was not the same as the
Word addressed to Ikhnaton or Gautama or Lao-Tzu.
Once that response
has been made, it establishes a new situation permitting the
intensification of divine purpose. Now God has increased potentialities
with which to work. Abraham’s journey establishes the nomadic
conditions favorable to the emergence of a patriarchal cult whose God is
no longer tied down to one particular locale. The cherished memory of a
promised land then forms the background for the possibility contained
within the call of Moses, while the traditions of the Exodus and Sinai
in turn provide the framework in which the struggle between the prophets
and the kings could occur. This enabled the prophets to declare their
higher patriotism in proclaiming the destruction of their own land. It
is the contingent character of this human response to the divine Word
which generates the particularities that God then uses in the
furtherance of his general aim at the intensification of value. The
history of
Israel assumes such religious importance because it proved to be the arena of
a very dramatic intensification of divine purposes, generating both the
expectation of the Lord’s anointed and the awareness of God’s
involvement in the suffering of the world.
In addition to these
themes of creation and providence, let us look briefly at the problem of
biblical authority. As we all know, the God of the philosophers is not
the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But why is this so?
I think that classical theism found no really satisfactory answer to
this question insofar as it maintained that all of God’s attributes are
strictly necessary. If God’s control over the world is absolute in that
it is independent of all creaturely contingencies, then God’s activity
may flow directly from his unchanging nature which was deemed wholly
necessary and self-sufficient. But it is the business of philosophy to
ascertain that which is purely necessary and universal, and any
limitation placed upon philosophical reason ultimately appears to be
arbitrary. If God’s nature and activity are wholly necessary, then
Hegel is right in supposing the biblical God to be an historically
conditioned, concrete guise of that which finds its purest expression in
the philosophical Absolute.
Classical theism has
a penchant for universality, thus encroaching upon the proper dominion
of philosophy, which has its own specific procedures and canons for
evidence. Yet classical theism is acutely aware of its divergence from
most philosophies. We are urged to believe various doctrines concerning
the incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection of Christ for which
philosophical evidence or argument is quite inadequate, on the grounds
that in these religious matters human knowledge can never suffice. Yet
as Brand Blanshard has recently written:
The world seemed to
me one whole, and reason [meaning in this context our natural cognitive
faculties] the only instrument we had with which to explore it. But if
so, could the standards of belief that we applied in philosophy and
science be dropped when we turned to religion? . . . There seemed to
me to be an ethics of belief whose clear mandate was ‘‘Adjust your
belief to the evidence,” and I could not see why, if this was valid for
common sense and science, it should not be valid for religion also.6
It is no accident
that the leading exponents of process theism have shied away from
revelatory or kerygmatic theology. Even Charles Hartshorne, whose
“metaphysics of love” seeks to portray the salient features of Christian
faith, establishes his conclusions solely upon philosophical and even
rationalistic criteria. There is an unspoken skepticism of traditional
beliefs which lack sufficient philosophical justification. Yet this
need not be so. The logic of divine persuasion, moreover, requires us
to recognize the limitation of the philosophical approach to God, not
within its proper domain, to be sure, but with respect to the totality
of divine activity. Process theism recognizes that God possesses both
necessary and contingent features, while philosophy can only
satisfactorily examine the necessary ones. Regarding these contingent
features, we must resort to other methods, and here respect the evidence
of historical testimony. Only because classical theism tended to
conceive of all of God’s attributes as universal and necessary, and thus
properly within the scope of philosophical scrutiny, did such a problem
ever arise.
God’s generic
attributes are necessary, and his steadfast purpose is everlasting, but
his experience and activity are dependent upon the contingencies of the
world. God’s total experience of the world is constantly growing and
being enriched by the world’s growth. God’s concrete response to the
world in evoking the maximum value from every situation must be
constantly shifting with new circumstances and can only be fully
relevant to the world insofar as it is sensitive to these contingent
developments. But if philosophical inquiry thus discovers contingent
aspects in God’s full actuality, it also discovers the intrinsic limits
of its own inquiry into the mystery of God, for no amount of ingenious
argument can deduce the concrete, historical character of that which
happens to be, but which could have been otherwise.
Process is the
abstract, necessary matrix whose contingent actualization is history.
It is quite appropriate to speak of the history of God’s activity if
this is bound up with concrete response to creaturely activity, as both
biblical traditions and process theism can affirm. The Old Testament is
above all a theological document, although we often fail to appreciate
this in supposing that all theology must express itself in systematic,
universal concepts. Its medium of expression is historical recital,
which concentrates not on what God necessarily is but on what he has
contingently done.
Process philosophy
can complement this biblical recital by providing a description of the
necessary conditions whereby such contingent divine activity is
possible, just as the biblical recital can complement this abstract
philosophical outline by giving it specific, concrete historical
contours. This historical development is completely open-ended, for
process thought does not impose any particular pattern of historical
development upon history, since God is ever resourceful in finding new
perfections for creation to strive for. The perfections aimed at are
concrete and particular, arising out of the historical contingencies: a
promised land and a long-awaited Messiah for
Israel. Process theism need not dissolve these particularities into symbolic
manifestations of universal truth, since it can proclaim a God vitally
interested in precisely these particularities whose activity is shaped
by their peculiar character. These aims do not lose their particularity
in being broadened to embrace all mankind, since from the divine
perspective man is only one particular form of creation.
Our justification for
the appeal of divine persuasion is broadly philosophical: its inherent
reasonableness, its applicability to all we know about the world we live
in, and its consonance with our best ethical and religious insights. As
such, it is at least a partially alien criterion by which to appreciate
biblical traditions, since their understanding of divine power is rather
different, a subject we shall turn to in the next chapter. We can
recommend process theism, however, for the hermeneutical task of
translating these traditions into a systematic context appropriate to
our contemporary situation, without thereby losing Israel’s peculiar
witness to the action of God in its history.
History need not be
solely an immanent process which can at best point only symbolically to
the divine, for that historical involvement may also shape the concrete
actuality of God himself. Since it is in the particular, historical way
that God was able to intensify his purposes through the agency of Israel
that we experience our salvation, the Bible as the historical record of
that way possesses authority for our lives. That authority cannot be
found in its particular concepts of the divine nature, for these
concepts must be open to correction and revision from whatever source is
open to us. Yet in the absence of any comparable witness to the
intensification of divine purpose for man this historical recital is
indispensable. We may perhaps want to explain and understand Isaiah’s
experience somewhat differently, but that Isaiah did experience God’s
glory can only be discovered from the historical record. We can best
proclaim God’s saving acts for us by retelling Israel’s history. If our retelling is selective, being told in systematic
terms appropriate to our own age, we are only following the practice of
the judges and the prophets themselves.7
Notes
1. RM, p. 55.
2. AI, p. 213.
3. PR, p. 520.
4. See RM,
p. 119.
5. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 39-44.
6. Brand Blanshard, “Rationalism in Ethics and Religion” in Peter A.
Bertocci, ed., Mid-Twentieth Century American Philosophy: Personal
Statements (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 40.
7. Two such examples
of this selective retelling of
Israel’s past may be found in Joshua 24 and Ezekiel 20.
Posted June 13,
2007
Back to
Chapter 1: Whitehead’s Pilgrimage to Process Theism
Forward to
Chapter 3: Divine Sovereignty
Back to Ford Page