- Theology and Identity
- Season 1
- Episode 11
- Airdate: 29 March 2024
- Please note this is a script, and not a transcript. There may be slight differences between this text and the actual broadcast.
- All Bible quotations taken from the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016)
Audio Links:
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The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is a God of pathos. His emotional world is very real. Unfortunately, many Christians read the Old Testament through a doctrinal lens that ultimately denies this idea. In this episode, we engage with Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel to better understand God’s nature and character as presented by the Hebrew prophets.
Introduction
Does God have feelings? Does he get angry? Does he feel sadness? Does he have moments of joy? Is there anything that catches him by surprise?
As we read through the Hebrew scriptures I would say that the answer to these questions is obvious. Of course God has feelings. In our last episode, for example, we looked at a passage in the book of Ezekiel that puts the fulness of Gods emotional world on display. In the prophetic allegory of Exekiel 16, YHWH is trying to communicate to the people of Israel that the love he feels for them is the same kind of love that a husband feels for a wife whom he cherishes. His emotional well-being is deeply tied up with his relationship with them. He feels surprised, betrayed and angered by their sin. The graphic language used in that pasage, which seems uncharacteristic of Israel’s God, serves to illuminate the incredible depth of pain that he feels.
So of course, as we read through the OT, its clear that YHWH has feelings. He is a god of pathos, of heart felt emotion.
But interestingly, many Christians over the course of history have challenged this idea. Heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, some theologians in the patristic era argued that the emotional life of God that seen in the OT does not reflect his true nature and character. They would argue that when God displays emotion , he is simply taking on human form – anthropomorphism. Or to be more precise, anthropopathism.
What these Greek-influenced theologians believed is that in reality, God is impassible. He lives outside of time. He sees everything, everywhere, all at once. He doesn’t really have emotions, because emotions change. If God is to be understood as perfect, then of course he cannot change. So he can’t really have feelings.
In this episode, we want to look at the Hellenised view of God which later became so influential in Christian theology – over against the picture of God that clearly emerges from the Hebrew prophetic texts. We will begin with a brief exploration of what some Greek philosophers thought about the possibility of God having emotions. And then we’ll engage with a Jewish scholar named Abraham Heschel, who helps us better understand how the prophetic texts of the OT reveal a God of feeling, of pathos.
So we start with Greek philosophy.
As I have already noted, the Greek philosophers were uncomfortable with the idea that God could change. In Plato’s reasoning, change means that you either get better or you get worse; you get stronger or you get weaker; you get smarter or you start slipping. But if God is already perfect in every way, how could anyone say that He can become more perfect? And how could anyone suggest that He might in some way diminish? In his work the Republic, Plato thus concluded that, “it is impossible that God should ever be willing to change; being, as it is supposed, the fairest and the best that is conceivable, every God remains absolutely and for ever in his own form.”
In book 12 of his work Metaphysics, Aristotle presents God as the “unmoved mover,” the ultimate power that acts upon all things but is affected by nothing. He is unchangeable, unmovable, unpersuadable, and self-sufficient in all ways. God is pure activity, and everything that humanity perceives as reality is simply the projection of his thought.
God is the one who makes all things happen and nothing happens apart from Him. Every thought, every movement and every word proceeds from Him and is determined by Him. Thus, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus could say that human history is an “unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded . . . by fate (i.e. God) all things are forced and linked by a necessary and dominant reason.” (Stoics Reader, 110)
For the Greek philosophers, God is the cause of all things. Everything that happens in time is ultimately caused by him. He sits outside of time, and reigns as supreme over the world that was made by him and in which everything happens exactly according to his design.
And again, God cannot experience emotion, because emotions so often involve surprise and change. We feel joy when someone brings us a gift that we weren’t expecting. We feel anger when we hoped something would happen and it didn’t. These events affect us. They change our mood, our disposition. We have good days and we have bad days. This is the emotional world of humans. But according to the Greeks, God is above all of this. He is impassible. Nothing surprises him, nothing affects him. Nothing that happens in our lives or in the world alters him, because ultimately, he is above and beyond the human experience.
So in this worldview, religion is really a one -directional affair. We practice religion because we have a felt need for God. But God, in his absolute transcendence, has no need of anyone or anything. . Plato argued:
One who is self-sufficient can have no need of the service of others, nor of their affection, nor of relationship, since he is capable of living in complete isolation. God is in need of nothing,
This all is very different than the picture of God that we find in the Hebrew Scriptures.
In his classic work the prophets, Abraham Heschel takes the Greek worldview head on.
In response to the idea that God is self-sufficient and has no need of relationship with humanity, Heschel argues that
To the prophets, the relationship of the world to the transcendent is signified by the participation of God (pathos) in the world. Not self-sufficiency, but concern and involvement characterize His relation to the world. Biblical religion begins with God addressing man, with His entering into covenant with man. God is in need of man. A Supreme being, apathetic and indifferent to man, may denote an idea, but not the living God of Israel.
Heschel argues passionately for a God who is engaged who is entirely in touch with our experience, and who experiences emotions himself.
With regard to Greek thought, he observes:
The God of the philosophers is . . . unknown and indifferent to man; He thinks, but does not speak; He is conscious of Himself, but oblivious of the world
But for the biblical, the understanding of God is completely different:
To the prophet, God does not reveal himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow. Pleasure or wrath. He is not conceived as judging the world in detachment. He reacts in an intimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events. Quite obviously in the biblical view, man’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, sadden and please Him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that He possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, basically defines the prophetic consciousness of God. 289
Heschel goes on to say:
The predicament of man is a predicament of God Who has a stake in the human situation. Sin, guilt, suffering, cannot be separated from the divine situation. The life of sin is more than a failure of man; it is a frustration to God. Thus, man’s alienation from God is not the ultimate fact by which to measure man s situation. The divine pathos, the fact of God’s participation in the predicament of man, is the elemental fact. 291
Now let’s unpack this:
The predicament of God – the situation in which God finds himself -is driven by the predicament of humanity. Because he has a stake a stake in this world. His emotional well-being is deeply affected by what’s going on in our lives.
Sin isn’t just about man falling short of the glory of God. Sin affects him emotionally.
The separation that exists between humanity and God isn’t just a theological assertion. The separation that exists between humanity and God, above all else, tells us about how the God of the Bible feels. And what we conclude is that because he is a God of pathos – his heart is broken.
That is the God of whom the Hebrew scriptures speak.
So let’s reflect on what all of this means in light of the narrative of the Old Testament. Over the past several episodes we’ve talked about the covenant that YHWH had made with the people of Israel. God loves not just Israel, but the entire world. He has given the people of Israel the task of revealing to the nations his love and his righteous character. As they walk in obedience to the covenant, as they live in love relationship with him- they will become an example to all the world, and they will draw all nations to worship the one true God.
So the Mosaic covenant is really about two things. First -it is the marriage contract that exists between YHWH and the people of Israel. It is the way they express their love to one another. But the covenant is also about YHWH’s love for the nations. He is counting on them to do their part, so that his promise to bless all nations through the seed of Abraham can be fulfilled.
There is a lot riding on the people of Israel. Both emotionally for YHWH, and teleologically with regard to his plans for human history.
So reading through the OT narrative, we can imagine the incredible pain and disappointment that YHWH feels, time and time again as the people of Israel betray him. They don’t honour the covenant. They completely ignore the laws and commandments they gave him. The kings and the people alike live like common pagans. They worship other gods in their homes, at shrines across the land, they abuse and oppress one another, and they even go so far as to offer up their children in human sacrifice.
Now in the Greek worldview, and that of some later Christian theologians, this is all according to plan. God is the source of all that happens. He is the unmoved mover. He is absolutely impassible. He is not in any way affected by what happens in the world or among the people of Israel. If the OT Scriptures show him as having emotion, this is just anthropopathism.
But once again, this is very different than the picture of God that emerges from the prophetic texts.
As we conclude, the question that I want to address is this: How did this understanding of God affect the way the Hebrew people understood themselves. How would this theology around the nature and character of YHWH shape the concept of Hebrew identity that the prophets longed for the people to embrace?
For me, the key idea lies here: the God who has revealed himself as engaged with human lives, and who has revealed himself as emotionally vulnerable to their thoughts, feelings and actions - needs love relationship with his people. On one hand, he needs love relationship in order to fulfill his purposes on earth. But he also needs love relationship because he has a heart, he has feelings. He wants intimacy.
For me, this flips religion on its on head. And it helps me to better understand why the Hebrew Scriptures have had such a powerful impact on human history over the past 3000 years.
The religion of the Hebrew Bible is not about humanity’s quest for God. It’s not about people creating rituals and practices and doctrines in order to attain something for themselves. At its heart, the religion of the Hebrew Scriptures is about God’s quest for humanity. He is searching for us because he wants us, he needs us.
When we realize that our primary task is not to earn God’s approval or to win reward – but simply allow ourselves to found and embraced by Him – everything about the way we see ourselves, and the way we see the world changes.