Jewish Theism

Could you give me some examples of dogmatic God concepts in Judaism?

Can there be any doubt that theism permeates the Jewish religion, from the Shema of Deut. 6:4-5: " Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD: and thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." to the first of the Ten Commandments: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." Can there also be any doubt as well that a clear definition of God eludes Jewish people as it does Christians, at least to the precision that I can define Felis silvestris catus (house cat)?

I think that in some way we must be talking (writing) past one another. I don't deny that Judaism is definitely God-saturated. I've in the past participated in enough seders to know that. I also know that the various Jewish sages have harped on the impossibility of characterizing God, that only analogies can be used, etc. My point was only that overall Judaism is less tied to dogma in the way it views God, so that individual Jews, say in a given congregation, may have quite different concepts, one viewing God in an almost pantheistic way and another envisining God as more personal and involved in, and maybe another being in effect an atheist but still willing to engage in God-talk as part of the ritual. I'm sure too that in a large Christian congregation there are variations in how people view God, but probably less, because views of God are more determined by dogma. You are supposed to sign on to God being certain specific things, some of which I enumerated previously, so your god-concept is much more circumscribed by that dogma. Jesus enormously complicated things for Christians, who spent a lot of time and spilled a lot of blood hammering out how he was to be regarded. Is Jesus of one substance with the Father or is he separate? The Gnostic view that he wasn't real person but just a ghostly substitute got booted out. They got very nitpicking and very specific about all these things. Of course there were always differences that arose, new heresies to wipe out (e. g. Pelagianism), and the reformation and all those obstreperous Protestants, who split into a zillion sects, each with their own nitpicking differences.

Although I am an obstreperous Protestant, I hesitate to speak for all Protestants, obstreperous or otherwise. I think you are right that there may be more moving parts in Christianity as regards to the idea of God than Judiasm. The one distinctive with all Christian sects, no matter how liberal or orthodox, is that Jesus is some way figures in, as God, as the Son of God, a man/God, as once man now God, as a mythic figure or even as an entirely fictional symbol. But it isn't true that all Christians must be theists. However, it is true that some Christians sects such as the Catholics have an achitecture of dogma that you mention, even throwing in Mary as the mother of the triune God. On prima facie grounds, it all seems incoherent. But it may also have been this kind of deep deductive reasoning first by the scholastics and then by the reformationists that helped establish the foundations of the enlightenment, mass literacy, the industrial revolution, and the age of science.

You may be right that Jewish theology doesn't have much need to grapple with such questions. But the correllary must be that Christians theologians have consequently created a multiplicity of contradictory answers to what God is, some of which I include in the following essay that I wrote a few years ago, trying to sort out wht God is in disctiction to what God is assumed to do.

When I was going through my sesquipedalian phase as a teenager, my uncle Ray Johnson, wrote to me that “some of us enjoy big words because the little ones cause trouble. Consider the word “God.” That little monosyllable has probably given rise to more discussions, more speculations, more argumentations, more disputations, more publications, and certainly more sermons than any other word in the language. Perhaps the ancient Hebrews had a laudatory concept with their secret name for the Deity. Expressed only by four consonants, it technically could not be pronounced, and any attempt to add vowels (r vowel points, as Hebrew students would say), as strictly forbidden to the people under penalty of death. The high priest alone was permitted to add vowel points and thus pronounce the name, and that only on the annual occasion of the Day of Atonement. (See Leviticus 24:16) The four letters of the secret name transliterate out into English consonants as IHVH, JHVH, JHWH, YHVH, or YHWH, depending on who is doing the transliteration. And these four letters of the secret name have come to be known as the Tera grammaton. This means, quite literally, “the four-letter word.” Ray then suggested that “this linguistic peculiarity of our four-letter words may be some sort of cultural fallout.”

The word God is one of those words that everyone uses but no one really defines or
understands. When politicians say that we’re one nation “under God”, the question becomes exactly what is it that we are under? If the answer is: a supreme being, the question then becomes, what exactly is this supreme being and how do we know that it is interested in us or if it even exists? The Bible isn’t clear as to whether God is a “being” and if “supremacy” is a quality of God. It surely rejects the notion of the old man with the white beard and the deep voice, as God is defined as spirit (John 4:24), fire (Hebrews 12:29), light (1 John 1:5), love (1 John 4:8), and logos (John 1:1). The Church of England defines God as “living, without body, parts or passions” but I certainly have trouble picturing a life that is without body, parts, and passions, like an autistic the Friendly Ghost. If God is spirit, is God therefore emotion? Does God exist in the same way that my cat exists or in the same way that my love for my cat exists? Is God a metaphor for what we don’t know or cannot know? Is God real in the same way that Santa Claus is real? Is God a sewer that flushes away the waste and the worst of this world? Does God exist in the same way that a unicorn exists? What is it that distinguishes the reality of the Christian God from, for example, the unreality of Zeus? Can we believe in God if we cannot define or describe God? If God is consciousness, is that consciousness human consciousness, which would die when all humans die? Is God nature, as the Deists believe, or the sum of all natural laws, as Albert Einstein believed? Is God all that which is not—all that which is outside an imaginary circle drawn around all that exists? Is God localized in persons, places, or things—the Buddha, volcanoes, or money? Is God someone playing with her retarded sister in a playground while both giggle with delight? Are we, as some New Age religionists believe, God? Could God not be noun at all but a transitive verb— like the loving relationship of my boy to his worthless but comforting teddy bear? Does God care about us? Is our Father in Heaven a reflection of our fathers on earth—a cruel and distant father on earth makes us believe in a cruel and distant God, a loving and tender father lets us believe in a loving and tender God? Is God numinous—the awe we feel when we look at a sunset or a baby? Is the word God a mental bucket—a meaningless word that only gains meaning when we fill it with meaning? Is belief in God animated only by the fear of our death and the fires of hell? Is belief in God a utilitarian decision-- because the majority of people are theists, our lives will be easier if we are theists? Is belief in God a kind of celestial bet? Is God a projection of our hopes, a mass delusion, or a part of our biological wiring? Do we believe in God because our fathers and their fathers believed in God? Is God as Karl Barth said ganz Anders—wholly different? Is God the absolute, all matter and all force, swirls of atoms and hurricanes and galaxies, the first cause and the end of history, the alpha and the omega? Is God not here, not yet, evil, impotent, a crutch, a drug, a clown, asleep? And so the questions keep coming—some with answers but many without answers.

Well, obstreperous protestant,

Hey, that fits me!

I was away for a couple of days, and then I wanted to think about your essay. It is interesting that Christianity, at least some branches of it, is effectively polytheistic, despite protestations (!) to the contrary.

I agree that triniterianism is polytheism or, more accurately, tritheism.

God concepts are indeed amazing in their variety. It’s enough to make one resort to atheism. James Blish, the science fiction writer (at least, I think it was Blish), once had a character in a book (Cities in Flight?) who was capable of scientifically analyzing what someone had said or written. I’m kind of vague on the details, but I recall that great skill was atttributed to an ambassador, whose speech seemed very impressive, but the scientific analysis showed that it added up to exactly nothing. I think that is what the god concepts do. Then there is theological noncognitivism, an atheological approach that holds that statements about gods are simply meaningless. One cannot hold that they are potentially true or false; they are meaningless. Of course that makes it equally meaningless to say that God doesn’t exist. Ganz Anders and Ground-of-Being (not to be confused, with the hamburger god or ground-up being) seem essentially atheistic.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Into Wittgenstein’s silent category go statements such as “Jesus is the life, the way and the truth.” To whether or not there is a "last judgment", Wittgenstein writes that “I couldn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the statement that there will be such a thing. No ‘perhaps’ nor ‘I’m not sure’. It is a statement that does not allow for such an answer.” Thus, Wittgenstein is neither theistic, nor atheistic, nor agnostic but "acognostic." It is meaningless to affirm or deny that God exists or even to raise that question. It is not a meaningful question to raise, because God is in the realm of value, and the world is the realm of fact. This position, which seems to be based on logical positivism, is that the question of a god or gods is not meaningful.

I think Wittgenstein is correct in his repudiation that the spectrum of belief is merely theism or atheism, or theism, agnosticism, or atheism, as if these were all embracing and mutually exclusive categories. Consider the sentence: “Jesus is God.” Wittgenstein would say, I believe, that such a statement cannot be affirmed or denied or even addressed any more than we can evaluate the sentence “@#$ is %^&.” We cannot even suspend judgment on the question as we have no basis for any kind of a judgment. However, I don't think that acognsoticism is necesserily a kind of atheism. Rather, it can be a postulate for theism.

Can I prove that God exists? No and nor need I. I like apologetics and I think I’ve read most of the arguments, including the standard cosmological, moral, mental, experiential, teleological, and mathematical proofs. But, in my opinion, they are all flawed. There are many books that lay out the disproofs. Suffice it to say that they remind me of the children’s game, where you try to remove a log without the structure falling down. Proofs for the existence of God seem to reduce to talking in circles, and the elaborate intellectual architecture always collapses under scrutiny. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that intimations that there is something greater than all that I can conceive. You may recognize this as a paraphrase of Anselm of Canterbury's (1033-1109) ontological proof for the existence of God, except that I place the proposition into the subjunctive: If God is that which is greater than which nothing greater can be thought, then how then shall I live? This belief is comforting in that even while life and even all of existence has in the scheme of things the transience of a soap bubble, there is that which is not transient. I call this God, “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 12:2). Because I believe in this conception of God, I believe that there are also truths that are real, transcendent, and immutable, and that these truths have consequences-- axioms that inform both my epistomology-- that there are limits to reason and reason is integral to faith-- and my ethics-- that the search for truth-- is integral to ethics. It’s an a priori that is also not inconsistent with my other a priori that it is better to live rationally than irrationally, and from these two givens—God is and reason is-- much of life makes sense.

Given the enormous diversity of god concepts, how do you maintain your Protestantism? Are you an agnostic fideist?

On a paranormal forum, I chatted with a young lady who is convinced through the mediation of her "higher self" that she was reincarnated in Roman times and also lived in Victorian England and the roaring '20s. How, I wanted to know, do you know that you are not just imagining this? It doesn't matter, she replied. It works for me. To be honest, I suppose that's my answer as well. I'm as skeptical as they come, but not so skeptical that I want to abandon the communion of saints. As far as the question on theism, my view is that the more ambiguous the question is, the less important it is. So, while such metaphysical questions are interesting to reflect on, I'm not sure it's all that important either in terms of how ethically I live my life or how I distnguish truth from falsehod.

It seems to me that you are struggling to give voice something that is inchoate – and inconceivable. I would say inchoate because it is pretty formless, but I think it will remain ill-expressed, because you are struggling to put ideas to something that likely has no correspondence in reality. Theologians seem to struggle similarly and fail. They come up with fine sounding phrases, such as the ground of being, that really make no sense.

Some of us believe in the ground of being while others believe in a being of ground. But you're quite right that such a conception is inchoate and inconceivable. I sometimes feel I am chasing a receding cloud and possible a cloud that doesn't exist except in my mind. But I love the chase!

Yes, definitely better to live rationally, but by including faith aren’t you vitiating your rationality? Life makes sense because of things we’ve discovered scientifically. Following this, it will presumably make more sense as time goes on. But it may never make complete sense, and we should not erect gods to give us the false impression that everything makes sense all at once.

No. Living rationally to me means trying to grapple with that epistomological twilight zone where reason sometimes is profoundly irrational-- not in its means certainly but in its consequences.
We've spent many pleasant vacations at Sedona, Arizona, known around the world for its deep red mesas and mountains fringed in vibrant green under skies of Maxwell Parish azure. But it also attracts a spacey New Age element. They offer the credulous or the curious guided tours to vortex sites and also seminars on Yoga, Sufism, Zen, witchcraft, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, flying saucers, pyramidology, Kirlian photograph, astral projection, and psychic surgery. Such beliefs imply in my opinion intellectual carelessness and an absence of toughmindness, a need to replace experiments with desires, and the devising of occult and mystical beliefs in such a way that they are not subject to disproof and are impervious to rational discussion.

But my skepticism is a double-edged sword. And so it's to the glowingly optimistic view of science that I share with many New Agers reservations. The advent of science eroded man's fear of the unknown. As religious dogmas fade, the result often is not the absence of dogmas but the emergence of new dogmas. An especially pernicious dogma is that of scientism. It is pernicious because its epistemology is rooted solidly in rationality while its ethics are relativistic or power-based. The mantra of this age of relatativism, materialism, and positivism is that if it can be done, it must be done, despite whatever values those actions may contradict. We see this especially in the medical profession, with speculation and experimentation in such areas as sex selection, cloning, eugenics, and end-of-life choices. We also see it in the military with its creation of chemical, viruses, and fission that could one day allow roaches to inherit the earth. Quo vadis ("Where are you going?") from John 16:5 seems to be an appropriate question to present to the scientific establishment when questions of ethics are in play.

I'm all for robust scientific investigation, but science is not value neutral and indeed even the selection of facts is not value neutral. We make a grave mistake in putting into the hands of doctors, professors, and generals the power and the right to determine the limits and ends of rationality, who, despite their acuman and sature, have no more standing than you I in determining the resolution of these issues.

Society is in a great divide between the machinists and the mystics. Both sides are finding it more difficult to talk to each other, and both sides deserve mutual and self-skepticism. I think the mystics are correct to question science's alleged objectivity, the desanctification of nature, and the falsehood that the scientific method is the only path to truth. The mechanists are correct in applying rigor and rationality to their search for knowledge. The mystics correctly embrace realms of reality that are outside of the laboratory-- mystery, ambiguity, transcendent experience, and illogic contradiction. The mechanists correctly embrace the common Aristotelian language of words, mathematics, and logic, which, whatever their imperfections, are the most reliable and only way of separating truth from falsehood in the natural world.

So are you saying that the ambiguity of God makes makes the question of God’s existence relatively unimportant? This is a variant of theism I hadn't considered (although I do know theists who toy with the idea that God may not be omnipotent -- this might take care of the problem of evil.)

I think so. It isn't important. What is important is the Idea of Truth, the hard work in looking beneath the surface of things, of never-ending skepticism and self-questioning-- not just of information and sources of information but also presuppositions and implications.

Yes, God's omnipotence and human morality contradict each other. It's impossible to have one and also the other.

Yes! Abandon metaphysics. Join the Spartan meritocracies of the world (see Daniel Harbour, “The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism”).

I'm not quite so eager to abandon metaphysics so long as such thinking arouses within me doubts about a world best characterized by H.G. Wells' Shape of Things to Come, who envisioned that out of the military apocalypse an agnostic freemasonry of engineers and technicians who would emerge to reorder the world. It is not in the laboratory but in the inner recesses of our conscience and sense of decency as well as from our religious traditions that we can sort out the answers to such questions as these:

1. Can we spell out clearly the purpose of that scientific research?
2. Who is to shoulder the responsibility if that scientific discovery should prove harmful?
3. In what way are scientists accountable to the public?
4. Is that scientific research moral both in terms of means and ends?
5. What is the impact of that scientific research or discovery on our physical, emotional, and spiritual well being?

I freely admit that a world with God is benighted and chaotic, but I'm not quite so quick to walk away from such a world. I'm reminded of Controller Mutapha Mond's discussion of God in Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World to John the Savage who says that he likes the inconvenience of living with a belief in God.

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

And I too claim them all.