Divine Haecceity : Reclaiming the Literary Character of God in Hebrew Scripture with Rosenzweig and Miskotte

The Character of God in Literary Scholarship

Several book-length works engage God as a literary character within Hebrew Scripture. The most famous example in this genre is Jack Miles’s Pulitzer-prize winning God: A Biography (1995). Other entries include W. Lee Humphreys’s The Character of God in the Book of Genesis (2001) and Avivah Zornberg’s Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (1995). ² Each of these books attends to God as a ‘figure made of words’: a textual production, embedded within a story (or other discourse) and set alongside other characters also built out of words. ³ Importantly, too, each book prescinds from ‘the historian’s god behind the text’ as well as from the ‘believer’s god in front of the text.’ ⁴ In other words, these books bracket the God-character as a literary phenomenon from its history of development; and from classic, normative theological interpretations.

This bracketing is overt and programmatic. It allows these literary readers a certain heuristic innocence, and it permits—even invites—their research to generate results that live at some distance from received conceptions of God. The character of God, according to these authors, shows (intra-story) development and dimension; he is, as such, a ‘round character.’ ⁵ To take but one example: in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, the God-character takes steps to limit human power and to ensure that God alone possesses immortality. Such is the case at the end of Genesis 3, when God says: ‘See, the humans have become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and now they might reach out their hands and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever’ (v. 22). To prevent that possibility, God expels the humans from the garden. Or again, in Genesis 6, God caps the human lifespan; ‘my spirit shall not abide in mortals forever. . .their days shall be one hundred twenty years’ (v. 3).

Christian interpreters have commented on these texts for millennia, have read them from within the coordinates of classical Christian theology. What sets these more recent literary readers apart is their bracketing. Instead of seeking to reconcile these literary phenomena with, say, divine simplicity or divine immutability, they read God as a character speaking, moving, and making decisions alongside other characters. They are thereby able to discern characterological ambivalence and indecision. Jack Miles finds God’s curtailment of human potential to be at odds with God’s prior blessing on human multiplication. ‘Why does the Lord God want to stop mankind from living forever?’ (Miles asks) ‘If God’s only motive in making mankind was that mankind should be God’s image, and if God himself lives forever, then why should mankind not live forever? Would immortality not facilitate obedience to God’s positive [commands to be fertile and increase]?’ ⁶ Miles concludes that the God-character’s mind is divided. The Lord God ‘holds immense power’ but ‘seems not to know what he wants to do with it.’

Or again: these literary readers trace out motives like anxiety or self-protectiveness. Lee Humphreys observes that the God-character appears ‘jealous of his position’; ‘protecting privilege and status seem paramount to [the Lord] God.’ ⁷ The God-character comes off, Humphreys says, as a sort of ‘ambivalent parent.’ ⁸ Avivah Zornberg’s meditations, richly interwoven with midrash, also advert to the parental metaphor for God. She writes of the ‘ambiguities of independence’: the sadness that both artists and parents experience when ‘the work works itself loose from the vision.’ ⁹ Thus it is with sadness that God ‘diminishes’ his creation, Adam. ¹⁰

The Character of God in Christian Theology

This is, so far, just a sampling of the results that ensue from bracketing the ‘believer’s god,’ and instead reading God as a literary character within Hebrew Scripture. What emerges from this exercise is an interesting character—in Lee Humphreys’s words, ‘the most compelling character in the book [of Genesis].’ ¹¹ Here and elsewhere in Hebrew Scripture, the God-character is complex, dynamic, conflicted, labile, ‘round.’ But such findings are unusable for much if not most Christian theology. The present section of the article articulates two reasons for this situation. One factor is ontological; it concerns the nature of God, and in particular, the relation of God’s revealed self to God’s immanent self. The second factor is scriptural; it concerns the role of scripture vis-à-vis God within Christian theology.

The distance of the ‘round’ God-character from classic Christian theology is obvious enough. In contrast with the ‘figure made of words’ who is ambivalent, irresolute, parentally sad, and so on, the Westminster Confession, for example, claims:

There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free.

But the differences must be mapped out more subtly than simply charting antitheses between doctrinal ‘without body’ versus literary bodiliness, doctrinal ‘without passions’ versus characterological passion, doctrinal immutability versus narrative progression and dynamism. What deserves notice is that Christian theological claims aim for ontology: they aspire to describe the divine person in ways that are true everywhere and always. As such, they prioritize God’s immanent self, and the attributes that apply to it from everlasting and apart from God’s actions of making and saving creation. If and insofar as God’s economic self-revelations receive constructive theological attention, these latter are devalued relative to God’s self in se. By contrast, literary approaches have no such all-times and all-places aspiration. They limn specific textual presentations of God; they subsist at the hic et nunc. They are hence not fit for purpose for Christian theologies that characteristically favor always- and everywhere- attributes.

The second factor that renders literary results unusable for Christian theology is scriptural. In searching for ongoing, ever-true, ontological claims about God, Christian theology oftentimes positions scripture in ways that perennialize it. Scripture is treated as a repository of propositions about God. Or it is imagined as a template: a model (or models) of how God perennially operates. Regardless the conceptual chassis, the effect is to take episodes from scripture and to make them timeless, available and theologically referential in any subsequent context. The more textured and time-bound a given scriptural passage is, the more difficult it is to perform this interpretive ‘stretching.’ Because literary readings of the God-character in Hebrew Scripture emphasize their individuality and quirk, they therefore trend in a quite different (and oblique) direction from the interest of perennializing Christian interpretation.

Any proposal for Christian theology to resource the literary character of God must overcome both these limiting factors. It must honor the literary particularity of the biblical God; and it must revalue the relationship between God’s innermost, everlasting self and God’s economic mission to the world. The next section of the article retrieves just such a project from two lesser-known twentieth-century theologians. Haecceity, divine this-ness, makes a fitting shorthand for their contribution.

The Character of God in Rosenzweig and Miskotte

These two figures are, respectively, Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) and K.H. Miskotte (1894–1976). Rosenzweig was a German Jewish philosopher, famously a near-convert to Christianity, and less famously, an early ‘alt-ac.’ ¹² He declined a professorial career and instead founded a Lehrhaus, a house of study, to reconnect educated Jews with their religious heritage, in particular with Hebrew Scripture. Together with Martin Buber, Rosenzweig pursued an ambitious and distinctive, perhaps even bizarre Bible translation project. He was paralyzed from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) for the duration of their collaboration. Miskotte was a Dutch Reformed pastor, later theology professor. Although junior to Rosenzweig by only eight years, Rosenzweig was a key interlocutor and inspiration for Miskotte from his dissertation (completed in 1932) until his latest writings (1966). ¹³ He calls Rosenzweig ‘the greatest Jewish theologian of our time.’ ¹⁴ There is thus significant continuity between their two proposals, though naturally Miskotte’s brings the matter of divine ‘anthropomorphisms’ into closer relationship with traditional loci of Christian theology. ¹⁵

Rosenzweig’s essay that bears most directly on the theological generativity of God’s literary depictions in Hebrew Scripture is a short note he wrote in response to an encyclopedia article on biblical anthropomorphism. ¹⁶ Rosenzweig criticizes the encyclopedia article’s treatment of God’s human-like biblical presentations. He rejects the encyclopedia’s ascription of such expressions to the ‘inadequacy of [human] language’ or to the ‘limitations of [human] thought.’ ¹⁷ The core of Rosenzweig’s objection concerns the distance of God that these framings presume. God is, on such thinking, far off from human language such that it is incommensurable to God; God is absent from human experience, and hence human thinking about God has no anchor or reference point. ¹⁸

Rosenzweig asserts just the opposite: not divine distance but rather divine nearness is his theme; divine proximity, divine this-ness. Indeed his comments center on ‘theological experiences’: occasions when God draws near to humans. Rosenzweig parses that nearness in terms of both human timefulness and the bodily-spiritual life of humans. That is, God encounters us timely, punctiliarly, in specific events; and God encounters us within the texture and concretion of our lived experience. At the end of his note, Rosenzweig writes his own miniature version of the anthropomorphism article (‘how that article would sound if the New Thinking were already today capable of being encyclopedic’ ¹⁹ ). It pivots on this sentence: ‘[God] meets man. . .he enters into his, the creature’s, concrete, that is, momentary bodily and spiritual [leiblich-seelische] reality with equally concrete momentary corporeal and ensouled [leibhaft-seelenhafte] meeting.’ ²⁰

Biblical anthropomorphisms for Rosenzweig therefore protect this event-character of God. Human-like literary renditions of God reflect past incidents of God’s meeting, and as such they assure that God can ‘always, at every moment, meet our and all creation’s momentary bodiliness and spirituality.’ ²¹ The constructive promise of these episodic presentations of the God-character lies in their power to engender trust that God is similarly near, capable of meeting us, in any human circumstance. ‘There is not one biblical statement, even the most ludicrous and offensive, which cannot be realized in the meeting with creation or creature, today as ever.’ ²²

Rosenzweig further argues that classical, metaphysical claims for God arise from distrust. ²³ They reinscribe divine distance. Descriptions of God’s being—who God is for all times and places—take a genuine theological experience and then ‘consolidate’ it. The omni-attributes ‘stretch out’ a particular meeting as a bulwark against a presumed scarcity of God’s ongoing revelation (like hoarders of manna!). Or the omni-attributes consist of ‘nonexperienced phantoms.’ ²⁴ Either way, they abstract from the singular incident. Paradoxically, Rosenzweig says that ‘“anthropomorphism” [is] the protective armor of “monotheism.”’ ²⁵ By keeping to the punctiliar and concrete, anthropoid speech about God demonstrates ‘courage to trust’: it doesn’t need to speak for all times and places, but is content to testify to its one experienced moment. God will ‘send other messengers’ to other occasions. ²⁶

Miskotte’s writings reprise Rosenzweig’s key concerns. In fact Miskotte quotes Rosenzweig’s note at length in his postwar magnum opus titled When the Gods are Silent. ²⁷ (As far as I know, until the present article, Miskotte is the only Christian theologian to interact with Rosenzweig’s essay) Like Rosenzweig, Miskotte stresses ‘the “event” character of God’s manifestation.’ ²⁸ He emphasizes ‘the historicality’ ²⁹ of God’s presence; he centers on the ‘special and particular encounters.’ ³⁰ This-ness, haecceity, is his theme, too. He prescinds from the omni-attributes, since they are ‘not something that can be experienced or thought,’ but rather ‘only known and confessed as the power of this God.’ ³¹ Miskotte claims that ‘communion with God’ is real and hence always and freshly possible. ³² Both thinkers alike sidestep the perennialization of scripture: they take each literary incident in its own integrity, not as a proposition or principle or template, but as a trace of a real past ‘theological experience.’

That said, Miskotte diverges from Rosenzweig in two principal ways. Perhaps better, he evidences two Christian enrichments. The first enrichment is ontological. Rosenzweig is agnostic about God’s being in se. In the terminology of Christian theology, which he does not use, Rosenzweig limits his observations to the divine economy. Michael Oppenheim writes that ‘anthropomorphisms are more than devices for Rosenzweig, because God is encountered as a person. . .this is not a statement about God’s nature nor about [God’s] essence. . .we do not know what God is in-Himself, but we do know how God has been and still is encountered.’ ³³ Miskotte on the other hand does not evidence the same agnosticism about God’s being within the divine self. On the contrary, he shows awareness of the distinction between the immanent and economic God (even using the nomenclature of ‘oikonomia’ ³⁴ ). But Miskotte raises the difference only to assure that ‘in God’s revelation we are dealing with God himself.’ ³⁵

The relevant section of Miskotte’s postwar book is concerned to defend the theological primacy of Hebrew Scripture, especially its anthropomorphic speech. ³⁶ It opposes schemata that that demote Hebrew Scripture and criticizes Christian interpretations that make Hebrew Scripture inferior, preparatory, or obsolete (think here: type and antitype, law and gospel, prophecy and fulfilment). In that discursive context, Miskotte stresses the close consonance, even identity, between God’s self and God’s self-disclosure in Hebrew Scripture. The literary God-character of Hebrew Scripture is for him not just phenomenological but anchored in the divine ontology: in one key sentence, Miskotte claims that it ‘is not as if something happened to God that is alien to him; it is inherent in his nature to be allied with [humankind], to be intelligible to [humankind], to have communion with [humankind], indeed to be a man among men.’ ³⁷

This is Miskotte’s first enrichment: to assert the non-alienness of God’s anthropomorphizing self-revelations relative to God’s very self. This is Miskotte’s overcoming of the historic Christian devaluation of the revealed God relative to the immanent God. Miskotte does not draw on any more precise concepts to scaffold this relationship. He does not, for instance, say that God repeats or reiterates the divine self in the economy; God does not ‘second’ God’s self, as others in the post-Barthian trajectory have put it. But such conceptual specification is not the goal of Miskotte’s section. His enrichment rather emerges from a problem within Christian theology: namely, that traditional approaches position Hebrew Scripture as lesser vis-à-vis the New Testament. Rosenzweig, of course, labored under no such burden.

The second enrichment that Miskotte makes responds, not to a problem in Christian interpretation, but to a central, positive commitment of Christian theology. Twice his section appeals to the term assumptio carnis: the assumption of flesh. ³⁸ This phrase refers to God’s self-humanization in the incarnation. But Miskotte’s section denies that this event is contained only in the New Testament. He argues that both testaments of the Christian Bible testify to a single Object. Miskotte allows, following Barth, that one testament describes ‘the time of expectation’ and the other, the second, describes ‘the time of remembrance’; but the time of God relativizes them both. ³⁹ ‘What [the testaments] have in common is their relationship to, their orientation toward one and the same Object, one and the same Name, one and the same Event, one and the same Salvation.’ ⁴⁰ Miskotte does not mean by this that the Old Testament prophecies the incarnation, or that it witnesses by types and figures to Christ. Rather, he intends that both testaments show God ‘becoming man, entering into the existence of human life, acting in the dimension of history, making [the divine self] known in actual events.’ ⁴¹ An extended quote shows how Miskotte encompasses the human-like, literary God-character inside of this same movement of God that is already at the heart of Christian theology:

Anybody who simply cannot ‘put up with’ the incarnation will also not know what to do with YHWH, who speaks and hears, who wounds and heals, who comes down and visits us, who walks in the garden and confuses the language of the tower builders, who accompanies his people in pillars of cloud and fire, who sits enthroned on the cherubim and precisely as such is the God of heaven and earth. . .but he who hears the witness of the time of remembrance [the New Testament] will not wonder at the witness of the time of expectation [the Old Testament]—or rather he will stand before it in utmost wonder, but in such a way that both will equally arouse his wonder. He will marvel at both as signs that the Lord God has truly taken on human nature. ⁴²

In Rosenzweig’s short essay, Christianity reflects an inner-Jewish ‘battle against biblical “anthropomorphisms”’ and indeed against monotheism. In his opinion, Christianity follows a similar strategy as Philo of Alexandria: it posits a mediatory Logos that compensates for the distance to which Hellenization ‘banishe[s]’ God. ⁴³ It is a turning-away from the concreteness of God in Hebrew Scripture. Miskotte, however, discerns a deep theological continuity between the nearness of God in Hebrew Scripture and the drawing-near of God in the incarnation, to which the New Testament bears witness.

Conclusion

In sum, Rosenzweig and Miskotte share in common a thorough-going emphasis on the particularity, the historicality, the haecceity, of God’s meetings with humans. They see the literary presentations of God in Hebrew Scripture as traces of specific past moments of encounter; and as promises and pledges that God is nearby to speak again. In this way, they overcome the Christian reflex to perennialize scripture. They would agree, I think, with Avivah Zornberg’s comment in connection with the Genesis texts where God limits human power:

if we are to speak of God’s sadness. . .of his frustration and sense of mourning, and, above all, if we are to unpack the imagery of God’s hands, making and unmaking, molding and reducing man, then our effort will be toward an understanding of what this can mean in and for man’s life. . .[Man] feels himself as full of possibilities, and yet mysteriously cross-chained. ⁴⁴

To use Rosenzweig’s phrase, a ‘theological experience’ informs and corresponds to these human-like characterizations. So, too: Miskotte must, as Rosenzweig need not, overcome the Christian devaluation of Hebrew Scripture relative to the New Testament. He links this interpretive issue closely with the ontological issue, the devaluing of the divine economy relative to the divine self in se. Correcting the one requires realigning the other. Miskotte reasserts that haecceity is not alien to God, but concurs with God’s truest self.