also, going back to Isaiah's idea of Israel being God's vineyard, another quote really stood out to me. "The vineyard was planted to yield righteousness and justice. Yet the fruit it yielded was violence and outrage, affection God, arousing His anger." i think people today, myself included, imagine God as being all loving and all forgiving and absent of anger. we find it hard to believe that our God is a God of outrage and punishment, but Isaiah tells us otherwise. at a church service i went to tonight, the speaker talked about fear of the Lord. he read "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge..." (Proverbs 1:7).
while i could just be interpreting him completely wrong, i still disagree with a lot of the things Heschel says, the parts i can understand anyway. however, he definitely does make me think about what i really do believe. on the other hand, i love dorothy day. i feel like i can connect with her story so much better and her writing style makes it so much more interesting to read. i really enjoy reading the long loneliness and find her story inspiring. let me know what you think!
Yeah, I have such a tough time with the concept that God is a god of justice. This relates to class today- maybe its just how I'm defining justice. I don't think that God will destroy a people because they killed another people (despite what's in the Old Testament). That's a pretty literal definition of justice. I do think God is just, however, in the sense that "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." God will reward the poor, faithful, etc. and that is just.
ReplyDeleteThis topic seems to be controversial... maybe it is just me though. I believe God is a just God. However, I do feel that God punishes those based upon the concept of "what goes around comes around." In the end I still find God is a just God because his actions only seem fair and right. Even though we are not all perfect and sin, God still loves us and offers us hope. I feel this represents what justice is.
ReplyDeleteJustice, in general, is a hard concept to grasp. None the less, you throw God's Justice into the mix. I would like to think that God is an all-loving, all-forgiving God: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and you sin forgiven" (Isaiah 6). The problem(ish) with this, is that God doesn't forgive everyone. He seems to pick and choose who he forgives. It may be us, as in Isaiah's case, or it may not, as in Adam and Eve.
ReplyDeleteI think to some degree we all have this innate idealized vision of God. Maybe even too much so. We'd all like to think of God as all loving and all forgiving but is that REALLY reasonable? If we, his creation, and created in his image, are capable of anger, frustration, and violence, i don't think its too far of a stretch to imagine our creator having those capabilities because (in one theory) he gave the capacity to have those emotions to us. I think we idealized the lord almost too much so, and its almost unfair to Him sometimes. I mean, we sin, murder, pillage, etc. and if we humans do that on an almost daily basis (just watch the nightly news) can we really expect God to always let that go and keep a cool head? The bible was written by humans, and much of the violence and anthropromorphic qualities such as the one's you mentioned of God being violent etc. are just the human qualities of the bible coming out. Judgment is best left to God, as Rabbi Flipp said, if something truly bothers you about Heshel or the way he presents God: "take what you want and leave the rest".
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