The Preamble to the United States Constitution is famously ordained and established to form a more perfect Union, and so on. We might pause on “more perfect,” since we don’t often consider perfection to have degrees. Something either is perfect or is not.
Such dichotomous thinking has troubled many a philosopher considering the Christian God (which sometimes is also the Jewish God or Islam’s Allah). Yoram Hazony, president of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, argues in the New York Times for a less perfect God. The perfect God is a philosophically untenable ideal:
Philosophers have spent many centuries trying to get God’s supposed perfections to fit together in a coherent conception, and then trying to get that to fit with the Bible. By now it’s reasonably clear that this can’t be done. In fact, part of the reason God-bashers like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are so influential (apart from the fact they write so well) is their insistence that the doctrine of God’s perfections makes no sense, and that the idealized “being” it tells us about doesn’t resemble the biblical God at all.
Hazony swipes at Dawkins and Harris, glibly calling them “God-bashers.” Yet, if anything, Dawkins and Harris promote the realistic approach to God that Hazony champions; the difference is that Hazony seemingly holds to the idea that God actually exists . The reason people have gravitated to Dawkins and Harris is not because they are God-bashers but because the various God doctrines ultimately tie to pernicious, all-too-real effects in modern social and civic policies. I hardly need to specify such effects: we have seen them very clearly at least since September 11, 2001.
Hazony’s critique of the perfect God should appear bizarre in the minds of God’s devotees, for to them God not only is perfect but actually is perfection. They will not care particularly that the biblical God fails to resemble the philosophers’ God because the Bible is filtered through human idioms: language, vocabulary, structure, perspective. It is, they will say, only human reason and logic (i.e., philosophy) that allows us to glimpse the full and true nature of the God whose exploits are recorded in the Bible. The biblical viewpoint is limited and partial, even if the content and inspiration are infallible. I point all this out as a way of saying that Hazony has chosen to bark up the wrong tree.
Nevertheless, Hazony’s piece is instructive for demonstrating that Christians and Jews worship different Gods.
As Donald Harman Akenson writes, the God of Hebrew Scripture is meant to be an “embodiment of what is, of reality” as we experience it. God’s abrupt shifts from action to seeming indifference and back, his changing demands from the human beings standing before him, his at-times devastating responses to mankind’s deeds and misdeeds — all these reflect the hardship so often present in the lives of most human beings. To be sure, the biblical God can appear with sudden and stunning generosity as well, as he did to Israel at the Red Sea. And he is portrayed, ultimately, as faithful and just. But these are not the “perfections” of a God known to be a perfect being. They don’t exist in his character “necessarily,” or anything remotely similar to this. On the contrary, it is the hope that God is faithful and just that is the subject of ancient Israel’s faith: We hope that despite the frequently harsh reality of our daily experience, there is nonetheless a faithfulness and justice that rules in our world in the end.
The ancient Israelites, in other words, discovered a more realistic God than that descended from the tradition of Greek thought. But philosophers have tended to steer clear of such a view, no doubt out of fear that an imperfect God would not attract mankind’s allegiance. Instead, they have preferred to speak to us of a God consisting of a series of sweeping idealizations — idealizations whose relation to the world in which we actually live is scarcely imaginable. Today, with theism rapidly losing ground across Europe and among Americans as well, we could stand to reconsider this point. Surely a more plausible conception of God couldn’t hurt.
I wonder how Christians react to having their God characterized as “descended from the tradition of Greek thought.” Hazony, a Jew I’ll guess, pits Israel versus Greece and has the Jews come out on top: the Jewish-derived idea of God is more correct. What’s more, he presents the Jewish God as a better notion for a West where atheism continues to gain ground. It’s a pity Hazony doesn’t address the high level of secularism among Jews, particularly American Jews. If one wants to be an atheist, being an American Jew is right along the way.
Hazony’s essay is one more use of the “ancient wisdom” trope, the idea that people way back when had access to secret knowledge and/or powers. The ancient Israelites had a direct knowledge of God that was lost; the ancient Mayans could see into the future; the ancient Chinese knew the secret of life; the American Indians knew how to speak with nature; the ancient Greeks and Romans were wiser and tougher.
Things really ain’t what they used to be. Yes, let’s consider the Gods of both Greece and Israel. Just don’t call us “God-bashers” if we reject them both for being incoherent and unreal.
