Buber: Mysticism Without Loss of Identity - philosopher Martin Buber

Here the immediacy is shut off: "die Unmittelbarkeit ist abgetan." Man and God are driven from the concrete demands of daily life, the earthly life is an illusion of the other life: St. Augustine speaks of the Christian as more a citizen of the "heavenly Jerusalem" than the earthly Jerusalem. By God's inscrutable will some individuals receive the grace of participating in this "higher" world, and so for them the tasks in fulfilling a personal destiny are tangential to their salvation. There is the so unJewish understanding in Paul that no one can fulfill the law, much less be saved by it; in the Torah's laws for all the concrete aspects of a human life are replaced by the dogmatic instruction and salvationary monopoly of the Church.

This is a "sacramental" approach to life rather than a dialogical one; for Buber, the "mechanical" sacraments involve a curtailment of reality of the concrete particular destiny of individuals that encounter a living God who deepens their understanding both of Him and of human responsibility. Buber says, "Faith is not a feeling in the soul of man but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole reality without reduction or curtailment." [19] It is of this direct, creative, and holy capacity of human beings to approach God that Buber says "Forgiveness is not eschatological [about the end of days] but eternally present. Immediacy to God is the covenant established in the creation of man, and it has not been annulled." [20]

The I-Thou is derailed if there is no possibility of an immediate contact with God, even when the I-Thou is between man and man or between man and other living beings. Further, it curtails the seriousness of speaking from the very concrete demands of one's life. Consequently, Buber sees Paul, like the Gnostics, without compassion for the ordinary circumstances of a person's life and, therefore, for the human task as a redeemer/discoverer of the holy. "In Paul there is no longer room for that immediate relationship of God to His creatures which is extant in the Old Testament even when God is most indignant In the Pauline view, God does not wax wrathftil but rather hands man over to the power of fearful wrath permitting him to be tortured until Christ arrives to rescue him.... For Paul, there is no divine compassion in the dimension of pre-Christian history counterpoised to the demonic sovereign power of the raging wrath." [21]

It is only the "end of time" or eschatological message of Jesus--"resist not evil," "let the dead bury the dead," etc.--that is abhorrent to Pharisaic (Rabbinical)Judaism. But with Paul, there is a dirempted world-view. In jewish terms, it is blasphemous to deny the honor of God as a lawgiver and sovereign, and it is idolatrous to fashion salvationary gods and demonic powers that limit God's access to His creation. Particularly, living in the pagan world where gods copulated with men and women to produce heroes and demi-gods, the Christian narrative of a young man/god that redeems or saves mankind through his suffering follows the idolatrous pattern of paganism.