Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Buber: Mysticism Without Loss of Identity - philosopher Martin Buber
Judaism, Wntr, 2000 by Martin A. Bertman
For Buber, this "fusion of revelation and redemption in Christ" destroys God's daily renewal of the work of creation, the ma'ase bereshit. The individual no longer lives in time which is necessary for the concreteness of an I-Thou with God. Salvation overwhelms creation and, thereby, it destroys the possibility for an endless holiness and "upbuilding" of the individual made possible by God's presence in the created world, in the very particularity of each individual's life.
The Gnostics--which means "knowers" in Greek--were much influenced by Christianity and, especially, by Plato, as indeed were most of the Church Fathers. They considered the time-bound world of creation to be imperfect by the mere fact of its being created, and unifying oneself with an eternal and unchanging power was the goal of spiritual liberation. Plato's Demiurge, whom they considered analogous to the Creator God of Genesis, is an inferior being. A Creator God does not even recognize the existence of a higher Supreme God who has no need to create but exists in his own self-aware contentment. Yet even more disturbing to Jews, the Supreme God of the Gnostics is for the spiritually liberated human being known to be essentially himself.
Most interestingly, Buber distinguishes between Jesus and Paul. He considers Jesus to be within the Jewish tradition whereas Paul is strongly influenced by Gnosticism: for Paul, the God of Creation and of Israel seems a lower God of the law and not the higher God of perfect love, at least as the one God historically disclosed Himself. The result is that Paul devalues the God of Israel's creativity and emphasizes salvation through belief in Jesus as Christ (Messiah) and God--whose life discloses the real nature of God as unified in the believer, viz., the eating of the mass as the actual body and blood of Christ. Consequently, Buber believes there are two centers to Christianity: one depends on the historical Jesus, and the other depends on the Gnostic Christ of Paul.
This thesis is central to his 1950 discussion of Judaism and Christianity in Two Types of Faith, a book in the nineteenth-century tradition of scholars like Renan and Strauss who began the modern attempt to find the historical Jesus. Buber says, "It must be borne in mind that in the teaching of Jesus himself, as we know it from the early texts of the Gospels, the genuine Jewish principle is manifest." [17] Buber calls that principle emunah, or trust. The Pauline center of Christianity contrasts with this by a theology built on pistis, the Greek word for belief. For Buber, emunahopens a dialogical relationship, whereas the gnostically structured theology of Paul absorbs the individual into a salvationary absolute, viz., "there is only one way to the Father and that is through the Son." Buber prefers religious experience over dogma, and is troubled by the narrowness of Pauline dogma; this is a preference for a direct individual relation to God rather than a church system.
Also, the Pauline view of salvation--"many are called and few are chosen"--suggests that a person is necessarily passive in salvation, made so by the weight of sin, as a sort of characteristic of creation itself. On the other hand, Buber sees the Jewish-Jesus orientation of Christianity to be open to the I-Thou, the individual's direct and personal relation to God. So Buber says, "In Paul we no longer see the doctrine of Jesus concerning the immediacy of prayer. [ldots] It is as though since the time of Jesus having instructed his apostles, a wall had been erected about the Deity in which one door had been broken open. Only to those individuals for whom it opened would there be vouchsafed the sight of the gracious God who had redeemed the world. Whosoever remains remote from this door is given up to the Satanic host to whom the god of wrath had abandoned man." [17]
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: News
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »