I'm reading Abraham Heschel again – and also working through Divine Pathos and Human Being. The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel by Michael Chester, a Methodist scholar whose post-grad work was done on Heschel. Time and again I find Heschel writing in the 40.s, 50's and 60's saying things that have powerful resonance and uncanny relevance to some of the challenges and cultural pressures facing people of faith today. As a Christian I have a profound love, respect and I hope some humility when I explore the faith and traditions which give Christian thought and experience much of its shape and historic rootedness. Heschel's conviction that faith is to be lived, practiced, evidenced by action performed in obedience, given heart and motivation by piety as reverence for the One whose ultimate claim upon human life is grounded in the ineffability, holiness and loving mercy of God.
The Bible (by which Heschel meant the books of the Hebrew Scriptures) is a profound, uniquely rich and authentic text out of which comes the voice of God calling to obedience, seeking response rather than explanation, and demanding transformed living as well as, and indeed as more important than, full understanding. Here are two brief paragraphs from Heschel which would be provocative starting points in a class on hermeneutics and sacred text.
The surest way of misunderstanding revelation is to take it literally, to imagine that God spoke to the prophet on a long distance telephone. Yet most of us succumb to such a fancy, forgetting that the cardinal sin in thinking about ultimate issues is literal mindedness. The error of literal mindedness is in assuming that things and words have only one meaning.
Man has often made a god out of dogma, a grav en image which he worshipped, to which he prayed. He would rather believe in dogmas that in God, serving them not for the sake of heaven but for the sake of creed, the diminutive of faith. Dogmas are the poor man's share in the divine.
Both quoted in Chester, page 58.
Heschel's reverence for Torah is not so much articulated in words and ideas; it glows throughout his writing, it imbues his words with passion and poetry, Torah represents the splendour and glory of God gifted in grace to human eyes, ears and hearts. He would have been moved deeply by this picture, and the story that goes with it here.
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