Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Our God is not almighty
In 1984 Hans Jonas, the German philosopher, was awarded the
Leopold Lucas prize of the Tubingen university. He devoted his acceptance
speech to the question of “The concept of God after Auschwitz”. Ever since the
horrors of the Shoah philosophers, theologians, and simply human beings
everywhere have raised the question how God could have allowed such a thing to
happen. For many the very fact that it did happen simply proved that God did
not exist…as a consequence many lost all faith in God. Jonas, himself a Jew who
emigrated to the UK and later to the USA in order to flee the Holocaust, offers
a different answer. He says that every believer needs to square three aspects
of God: his goodness, his sovereignty (the fact that he is all powerful) and
his ability to be known by human beings. The holocaust poses a question: either
God is not all loving, or he is not all powerful, or we cannot really
understand him.
This is where Jonas moves into the field of speculation,
which he does not mind admitting, “since he is no theologian”. The Jewish Torah makes it very clear that man
can understand God, however imperfectly; and goodness is inextricably linked
with the very notion of God; which only leaves the notion that God is not
all-mighty. I quote: “The power of God is limited by anything which he
recognizes as having a right to exist and the power to act on its own
authority.” So far Jonas only reiterates classical Jewish theology. But he
takes it further: this God could of course revoke that freedom of human beings
whenever he felt like it, but Ausschwitz proved that he didn’t because “he
couldn’t.” “in allowing human freedom lies a renunciation of divine power. In
other words, creation itself was an act of divine self-limitation, of divine
self-emptying. And now that God has denied himself and thus granted existence
to each creature, he gave himself fully into this world and nothing else to
give; now it is up to man to give something to him.”
Jewish mysticism builds upon this thought with the idea of
the thirty-six righteous men who, as long as they can be found in the world,
assure the existence of the world. Christianity refines this thought: the
thirty-six have not been found, and so this world was doomed. But one righteous
human being was found, and that sufficed to save the whole world. That one
human being used his freedom not to hate, but to love; not to serve himself,
but to serve God; not to covet, but to give. And by doing so he restored to the
whole human race the ability to truly be free, because he was not only a true
human being, but also the Son of God.
This is the mystery of the Incarnation: God respected man
too much to simply take back his freedom. But he was also deeply concerned
about the way man was using that freedom. So God was powerless to change the
course of history, since it was up to human beings to determine that. So he
chose the only course left to him, he became a human being. And that is the
wonder of Christmas!
