SOME THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
I struggle with theology. I don’t think you have to have a clear, consistent theology in order to spiritually develop. A Shinto priest of Japan once said to the scholar Mircea Eliade that in Japan they don’t have a theology; they dance. But if you are a systematic thinker, not having clear answers here is going to a constant irritant. It is for me. Let me share three issues to consider rooted in our history.
One God or many? Our text clearly says that YHVH is one God amongst many. He’s out to show that he’s the most powerful God, so worship him, not any other. Worshipping only one God while maintaining belief in many is called monolatry, and I join plenty of scholars in arguing that this is the theology of the Bible. But a belief in many Gods is possible. So one God you pray to for battle success, a different one for when you want to get pregnant, kind of like Buddhist Boddhisattvas. You can, and this is true of much Buddhist and Native American thought that there’s an underlying unity, but many manifestations of it. I think that this underlying unity is an endorsement of a view of the divine as an impersonal force. I’ll discuss this more below.
What’s the relationship of the divine and the world? Maimonides, following Aristotle, believed that God existed wholly outside the world and did not have much to do with it. This is the classic theist position. His Jewish critics went after him and even accused him of being a heretic because, as we see from out texts, the God of the Bible is active in history and Maimonides opponents believed he was denying this. Their view was a kind of panentheism, a view that the divine is both inside and outside the world. The divine, almost always conceived as a male even while some say he is beyond being gendered, lies outside and above and beyond the world, but he also is highly interested in the world and acts in it. This panentheistic view is taken up again in Hasidic and neo-Hasidic thinking of such figures as the Baal Shem Tov and Arthur Green. Panentheism is also given a really cogent expression by the late Carol Christ in a remarkably clear book entitled She Who Changes. A third view is that the divine exists wholly within the world and is coterminous with the world. This is the pantheist view of Spinoza and he was actually expelled from the Jewish community because of his vocal advocacy for it.
Personal or impersonal force? If you believe in the divine as a personal force, it makes sense to pray to the divine and ask him/her/it to intervene—grant healing for someone, victory in battle, a prison term for Donald Trump etc. This is the traditional Jewish view. However, Maimonides, as I read him, did not believe in a personal force (Aristotle certainly did not) and Judith Plaskow, probably the leading contemporary Jewish feminist theologian, explicitly rejects this in a book she wrote with Carol Christ, Goddess and God in the World. Lao Tzu’s idea of the tao is also an idea of an impersonal divinity.
So to start putting some framework on a personal theological perspective, answer these three questions. One God or many? What’s the relationship between the divine and the world? Personal or impersonal force?
