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davehershey's review against another edition
3.0
The silence of God is a big challenge to theists. This book, which I heard about on the Jordan Peterson podcast, seemed appropriate to read on the subject. The first part, where the author looks at how God seems to diminish and disappear throughout the Bible narrative, is brilliant. His insights here on how God even steps aside throughout Genesis for humans are thought provoking. I was wondering how he'd tackle Christianity and he does so, as well as with Rabbinic Judaism, in interesting ways. Its not that I agree with all his conclusions, but this part of the book was probably close to five stars.
Part two is a discussion of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. They were two men who grappled with God's silence in similar, as well as differing, ways. I love Dostoyevsky's novels and Nietzsche is always worth learning more about. This section ties in well as a contemporary illustration that extends from the disappearance of God in the Bible. I'd have liked a bit of a bridging of that gap with thoughts on history from the end of the Bible to today. Is Friedman's interpretation of the Bible conditioned by a culture that absorbed Nietzsche's critiques? Was God silent throughout the history of the church and no one noticed? That aside, those two writers grappled with the challenge Friedman saw. This section is probably four stars.
Then part three he discusses science and Kabballah. I admit he lost me here. The science is interesting, though perhaps already a bit dated twenty years later. Maybe its me not really being a science person, or just that while scientific things challenge some I have never seen it as a problem. In other words, God's silence is a challenge to me. Evolution or big bang? Shrug. But its not that it doesn't connect with me, it didn't seem to connect to the rest of the book.
So overall, the first two parts are four stars but part three brings it down to three.
Part two is a discussion of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. They were two men who grappled with God's silence in similar, as well as differing, ways. I love Dostoyevsky's novels and Nietzsche is always worth learning more about. This section ties in well as a contemporary illustration that extends from the disappearance of God in the Bible. I'd have liked a bit of a bridging of that gap with thoughts on history from the end of the Bible to today. Is Friedman's interpretation of the Bible conditioned by a culture that absorbed Nietzsche's critiques? Was God silent throughout the history of the church and no one noticed? That aside, those two writers grappled with the challenge Friedman saw. This section is probably four stars.
Then part three he discusses science and Kabballah. I admit he lost me here. The science is interesting, though perhaps already a bit dated twenty years later. Maybe its me not really being a science person, or just that while scientific things challenge some I have never seen it as a problem. In other words, God's silence is a challenge to me. Evolution or big bang? Shrug. But its not that it doesn't connect with me, it didn't seem to connect to the rest of the book.
So overall, the first two parts are four stars but part three brings it down to three.
utopologist's review against another edition
4.0
Richard Elliott Friedman is a Biblical scholar who has written a couple of books on the Old Testament (Who Wrote The Bible? is pretty high up on my list). Guy knows his Hebrew, which is one of the reasons this book was so fascinating.
In a nutshell, The Disappearance of God is about just that. The book is divided into three sections, each detailing what Friedman calls a “mystery”:
The disappearance of God in the Bible
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God
the similarities between the Big Bang and the cosmology of Jewish Kabbalah
For the first mystery, Friedman whips out his Biblical scholarship in full force. The basic premise for this section is that while Yahweh starts out performing grand, impressive, and public miracles, as the Bible progresses he begins to scale down his interactions with humanity (both communication and signs/wonders) until by the time the books of prophets are being written, Yahweh has ceased to communicate with people except through visions and other dream-like states.
Friedman frames the interaction between humanity and God in the Old Testament as a “divine/human balance”. At the beginning, all humanity is basically a child, unable to make decisions for themselves and unable to behave the way they’re told. As time goes by, however, God seems to give humanity more “power” or influence in the balance, as seen by, for example, Abraham and Job arguing and debating with God, humans choosing the signs from God instead of being told what they’ll be, and Jacob wrestling with (and overcoming!) God and subsequently demanding a blessing. With Moses, Friedman argues that God begins a rapid fade from his previous behavior, to the point where at the end it seems as if Moses has been given divine powers without even needing to call on God. Then Elijah and Elisha perform miracles that don’t explicitly involve God and don’t necessarily “glorify him” as previous miracles had (wiping out a bunch of kids with bears, multiplying bottles of oil, a cloak (which passes from Elijah to Elisha) parting a river. Friedman describes this shifting of the balance of power as perhaps a growing child receiving more responsibility from a parent as the child ages.
Then Friedman ties in the New Testament. According to Friedman, the miracles of Jesus are of the type that haven’t been seen for centuries, since Elijah (which is why Jesus is thought to be Elijah by some). This is taken as a sort of wink from God as a confirmation of Jesus’s divinity. Friedman views the story of Jesus as a sort of culmination of the divine/human struggle throughout the Bible: God incarnates and moves among humans, and they kill him. When Jesus says “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it “fits comprehensibly in a linear historical sequence that has near its beginning an account in which some human form of God meets Jacob and, with no reason at all given, they fight.
The second section begins with a lengthy biographical discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche. His madness, his family, his love life, and his religious upbringing are all discussed at length. Almost as prevalent in the chapter is Fyodor Dostoevsky (and how Nietzsche read and enjoyed his work). Friedman seems fascinated by the fact that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky seem to have arrived at the idea of the death of God independently. Friedman compares both men to Jacob, “for having wrestled, prevailed, and suffered the wounds of divine struggle. They did not play at it nor approach it as a set of intellectually interesting propositions.” Nietzsche feels that humankind cannot “be all that it is capable of being in a god’s presence.” In the Bible the generation that rebels the most is the one closest to God (wilderness) and the one with the least presence of God is the best-behaved (Ezra/Nehemiah/Esther). Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky agree that with the death of the divine, humanity must step in to replace it.
Regarding Dostoevsky, Friedman spends a significant section of one chapter on The Brothers Karamazov (which, he notes, Nietzsche never got a chance to read) and more specifically the chapter involving the story told by Ivan Karamazov describing the meeting of the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus Christ. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that he shouldn’t have rejected the devil’s temptations in the wilderness, because they would have given him miracle, mystery, and authority, the three things which the Church needs to control people. The Inquisitor then says that the Church isn’t working for Jesus, but for Satan, and “that is our mystery.” Jesus responds by kissing the Inquisitor. Friedman notes that both an atheist and a believer could read the story and feel vindicated, reflecting both divine hiddenness and the divine/human balance. The divine voice “acquiesces in the human appropriation of powers from the divine realm.”
Friedman finishes the section by describing both Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s “fear” (moreso in the latter than the former) that without God “all is permissible”. Nietzsche saw a “death of traditional morality” and predicted that in the twentieth century, “there would be wars the like of which have never been seen.” Obviously he was vindicated, but his belief came from this disappearance of God. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
The last section describes, as I mentioned above, the uncanny similarities between the Big Bang theory and the cosmology of Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical movement). in Kabbalah “the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God…the creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God himself.” The deity became concentrated in a point which exploded outwards and filled space with emanations. These emanations, Sefirot, are what everything in the universe is made out of. Friedman compares the Sefirot with the fact that all matter emerged from the same single point at the beginning, as in, we are all made of matter that was present at the formation of the universe.
I’ve done a horrifically poor job of describing the last section, but it ends with the idea that perhaps God was a divine parent to humanity, allowing it more responsibility as it could handle it and finally receding from view until now, when we are starting to discover that, as Friedman concludes, “there is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”
In a nutshell, The Disappearance of God is about just that. The book is divided into three sections, each detailing what Friedman calls a “mystery”:
The disappearance of God in the Bible
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the death of God
the similarities between the Big Bang and the cosmology of Jewish Kabbalah
For the first mystery, Friedman whips out his Biblical scholarship in full force. The basic premise for this section is that while Yahweh starts out performing grand, impressive, and public miracles, as the Bible progresses he begins to scale down his interactions with humanity (both communication and signs/wonders) until by the time the books of prophets are being written, Yahweh has ceased to communicate with people except through visions and other dream-like states.
Friedman frames the interaction between humanity and God in the Old Testament as a “divine/human balance”. At the beginning, all humanity is basically a child, unable to make decisions for themselves and unable to behave the way they’re told. As time goes by, however, God seems to give humanity more “power” or influence in the balance, as seen by, for example, Abraham and Job arguing and debating with God, humans choosing the signs from God instead of being told what they’ll be, and Jacob wrestling with (and overcoming!) God and subsequently demanding a blessing. With Moses, Friedman argues that God begins a rapid fade from his previous behavior, to the point where at the end it seems as if Moses has been given divine powers without even needing to call on God. Then Elijah and Elisha perform miracles that don’t explicitly involve God and don’t necessarily “glorify him” as previous miracles had (wiping out a bunch of kids with bears, multiplying bottles of oil, a cloak (which passes from Elijah to Elisha) parting a river. Friedman describes this shifting of the balance of power as perhaps a growing child receiving more responsibility from a parent as the child ages.
Then Friedman ties in the New Testament. According to Friedman, the miracles of Jesus are of the type that haven’t been seen for centuries, since Elijah (which is why Jesus is thought to be Elijah by some). This is taken as a sort of wink from God as a confirmation of Jesus’s divinity. Friedman views the story of Jesus as a sort of culmination of the divine/human struggle throughout the Bible: God incarnates and moves among humans, and they kill him. When Jesus says “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it “fits comprehensibly in a linear historical sequence that has near its beginning an account in which some human form of God meets Jacob and, with no reason at all given, they fight.
The second section begins with a lengthy biographical discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche. His madness, his family, his love life, and his religious upbringing are all discussed at length. Almost as prevalent in the chapter is Fyodor Dostoevsky (and how Nietzsche read and enjoyed his work). Friedman seems fascinated by the fact that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky seem to have arrived at the idea of the death of God independently. Friedman compares both men to Jacob, “for having wrestled, prevailed, and suffered the wounds of divine struggle. They did not play at it nor approach it as a set of intellectually interesting propositions.” Nietzsche feels that humankind cannot “be all that it is capable of being in a god’s presence.” In the Bible the generation that rebels the most is the one closest to God (wilderness) and the one with the least presence of God is the best-behaved (Ezra/Nehemiah/Esther). Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky agree that with the death of the divine, humanity must step in to replace it.
Regarding Dostoevsky, Friedman spends a significant section of one chapter on The Brothers Karamazov (which, he notes, Nietzsche never got a chance to read) and more specifically the chapter involving the story told by Ivan Karamazov describing the meeting of the Grand Inquisitor and Jesus Christ. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that he shouldn’t have rejected the devil’s temptations in the wilderness, because they would have given him miracle, mystery, and authority, the three things which the Church needs to control people. The Inquisitor then says that the Church isn’t working for Jesus, but for Satan, and “that is our mystery.” Jesus responds by kissing the Inquisitor. Friedman notes that both an atheist and a believer could read the story and feel vindicated, reflecting both divine hiddenness and the divine/human balance. The divine voice “acquiesces in the human appropriation of powers from the divine realm.”
Friedman finishes the section by describing both Nietzsche’s and Dostoevsky’s “fear” (moreso in the latter than the former) that without God “all is permissible”. Nietzsche saw a “death of traditional morality” and predicted that in the twentieth century, “there would be wars the like of which have never been seen.” Obviously he was vindicated, but his belief came from this disappearance of God. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
The last section describes, as I mentioned above, the uncanny similarities between the Big Bang theory and the cosmology of Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical movement). in Kabbalah “the fundamental fact of creation takes place in God…the creation of the world, that is to say, the creation of something out of nothing, is itself but the external aspect of something which takes place in God himself.” The deity became concentrated in a point which exploded outwards and filled space with emanations. These emanations, Sefirot, are what everything in the universe is made out of. Friedman compares the Sefirot with the fact that all matter emerged from the same single point at the beginning, as in, we are all made of matter that was present at the formation of the universe.
I’ve done a horrifically poor job of describing the last section, but it ends with the idea that perhaps God was a divine parent to humanity, allowing it more responsibility as it could handle it and finally receding from view until now, when we are starting to discover that, as Friedman concludes, “there is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”
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