In this paper I would like to revisit a forgotten book and contribute a footnote to a forgotten debate. However, it will not, I hope, be simply an exercise in the arcane and the recherché. For it is one of the characteristics of theology, as of the humanities generally, to revisit texts of the past, in the hope that one may know them better, and perhaps be able thereby to draw on them for a fresh articulation of issues of enduring significance. My hope is that some fresh light may be thrown on at least two areas the relationship between biblical exegesis and constructive theology, and the nature of religious epistemology.Footnote 1
Introduction to two types of faith
In 1950 Martin Buber, one of the outstanding Jewish contributors to theology and philosophy in the twentieth century, published a little book, Zwei Glaubensweisen, which was swiftly translated into English as Two Types of Faith.Footnote 2 Although Buber's biographer, Maurice Friedman, depicts the book as ‘the book on Jesus and Paul’,Footnote 3 such a designation should not obscure the fact that Buber offers an extended engagement with the whole Christian Bible, both Old and New Testaments, so as to set out a characteristic and provocative thesis.
Buber's thesis, based in a close textual and historical analysis of the Bible and related Jewish and Christian literature, is that ‘there are two, and in the end only two, types of faith’ (p. 7), a duality which he links with ‘the faith of Judaism and the faith of Christendom’ (p. 173). One type of faith Buber depicts with the Hebrew term Emunah; Emunah is characterised by trust. The other type Buber depicts with the Greek term Pistis; Pistis is characterised by belief that something is true. Some such distinction, often formulated as that between the act of believing and the content of what is believed, has of course a long history within Christian theology, from which is derived the familiar shorthand of fides qua creditur and fides quae creditur for the two elements respectively.Footnote 4 Nonetheless Buber (who makes no reference to this historic shorthand) has a distinctive approach. For Emunah is further characterised by, among other things, a sense of immediacy in relation to God, by a context of historic community within which individuals discover their identity, and by a sense of ‘something eternal’ which in the present moment ‘become[s] actual’. Pistis, on the other hand, is further characterised by the presumption of a fundamental distance between subject and object which needs to be overcome, it originates in the individual, and it leads to credal formulations which do not belong to the essence of living religion but to its outposts.Footnote 5 Instead of two modes of faith, as in the Augustinian shorthand, Buber presents two types of faith which are deeply different one from the other.Footnote 6
Buber develops his account of Emunah through a consideration of the portrayal of Jesus in the synoptic gospels and also certain Old Testament texts which use both verbal and nominal forms of the Hebrew root aleph-mem-nun, of which Emunah is the nominal form;Footnote 7 here (because of the nature of my own thesis) I will concentrate primarily on the Old Testament texts, which Buber expounds memorably.
For example, Buber takes a significant use of the aleph-mem-nun root in Isaiah 28:16, hamma)min lo) yahish, ‘He that believeth will not make haste’, and comments thus: ‘all through the Old Testament to believe means to follow in the will of God, even in regard to the temporal realization of His will: the man who believes acts in God's tempo. (We only grasp the full vitality of this fundamental Biblical insight when we realize the fact of human mortality over against God's eternity)’ (p. 22). Alternatively, Buber considers Isaiah 7:9, where there is a famous word play on differing verbal forms of the Hebrew root. He suggests that the verse can be rendered, ‘If you do not trust (ta)aminu) you will not remain entrusted (te)amenu)’, and comments: ‘The prophet is saying (to put it in our language): only if you stand firm in the fundamental relationship of your life do you have an essential stability. The true permanence of the foundations of a person's being derive from true permanence in the fundamental relationship of this person to the Power in which his being originates’ (p. 28).
Perhaps the most famous usage of Emunah in the Old Testament, Habakkuk 2:4, vetsaddik be)emunato yihyeh, Buber renders as ‘But the man proved true will live in his trust’. He notes its contextual contrast with ‘the presumptuous man’ and comments, initially on this latter figure:
Here is unmistakably meant the man who recognizes no other commandment than the never-resting impulse of his own force to become power. He refuses to know moderation and limitation, and that means, he refuses to know the God from Whom he holds on trust his power as a responsibility, and Whose law of moderation and limitation stands above the deployment of force by those who are endowed with it . . . Opposed to him, and appearing only in brief exclamation, is the ‘man proved true’, the man who represents on earth the truth of God, and who, trusting in this faithful God, entrusts himself to Him in this confidence which embraces and determines his whole life, and through it he has life. (pp. 48–9)
Elsewhere Buber depicts Emunah in terms of its resistance to any objectifying of God, for Israel recognises God ‘not as an object among objects, but as the exclusive Thou of prayer and devotion’ (p. 130). Indeed,
when Israel confesses (Deut. vi. 4) that JHVH is its Lord, JHVH the One, it does not mean that there is not more than one God – this does not need to be confessed at all – but that ‘its’ God is the One to Whom it is related by such an exclusive immediate Emunah, by such love of the whole heart, the whole soul and the whole might of the being (v.5), as one can only be related to One who cannot be represented, which means One who cannot be confined to any outward form. In scripture this is called ‘to be wholly with God’. (pp. 130–1)
Further, Buber says of Emunah that ‘the immediacy of the whole man is directed towards the whole God, that which is revealed in Him and that which is hidden’ and that Emunah is ‘the great trust in God as He is, in God be He as He may’ (p. 154).
So far, there is probably nothing, I think, in Buber's account of Emunah with which a Christian is likely to disagree. Should not Christians strongly affirm all that he says and also see it as, in principle, representing their faith in God as known in Christ? But there's the rub. For Buber consistently sets up Pistis, the characteristic Christian expression of faith, as different from Emunah. He does this by setting up a strong dichotomy between Jesus and Paul (a move, of course, that has been a recurrent topos in modern biblical scholarship).Footnote 8 He argues that Jesus (that is, the historical figure of the first century, as attested by appropriate critical analysis of the synoptic gospels) belongs fully within the authentic Jewish mould of Emunah.Footnote 9 By contrast, it is Paul whom ‘we must regard as the real originator of the Christian conception of faith’ (p. 44). This is because of Paul's particular frame of reference, that is, the world of Hellenistic religiosity: ‘That the faith-principle of acknowledgement and acceptance in the sense of a holding henceforth that so-and-so is true is of Greek origin requires no discussion. It was made possible only through the comprehension reached by Greek thought of an act which acknowledges the truth’ (p. 11).Footnote 10 What Paul originates, John and subsequent Christian writers take for granted and develop in their own ways.
It seems clear that the Pauline/Johannine/Christian conception of faith represents a distinctly thinner conception of human relationship with God than its more robust Jewish counterpart. For Buber sees Christian understanding of Pistis less as ‘Here I stand’ than as ‘I acknowledge something to be the case’,Footnote 11 which diminishes, even if it does not entirely lose, existential engagement and trust (and when Judaism moves in this direction, as Buber acknowledges has often been the case, it is always, in Buber's judgement, a falling away). The Christian pattern of ‘believing that’ means not only a loss of engagement with ‘the depth of the actual moment’ but also, as the other side of the same coin, a loss of ‘immediacy’ with God, for the ‘spiritual’ has become intellectualised and abstracted from the ‘human’ (pp. 30–5).Footnote 12
The reason for this is that Buber's typology of faiths, focused in the antithesis between Jesus and Paul, serves a particular purpose for Buber in his own Jewish self-understanding. As David Novak puts it, ‘In his reflection on Judaism and Christianity (Two Types of Faith), Buber clearly wants to claim Jesus as a primary teacher of the type of Judaism he considers to be a truly authentic response to God's revelation’.Footnote 13
It may be helpful to summarise Buber's presenting thesis in terms of Hebrew and Greek terminology. In the Old Testament, Emunah and its related verbal form he)emin are of primary theological significance and depict unreserved human commitment to God. In the New Testament a comparable pattern can be found in the synoptic gospels, where pisteuo is used absolutely, with God as recipient of the trust which pisteuo represents. However, it is characteristic of the New Testament and subsequent Christianity to depict faith in terms of pisteuo hoti, a usage which is first developed by Paul and then fully appropriated by John.
Preliminary reflection
Why do I discuss this book? It is arguably the work by Buber which is most open to critical objection,Footnote 14 even though some have upheld Buber's thesis,Footnote 15 sometimes with modifications.Footnote 16 Is Buber here more than a Jewish counterpart to the countless Christian writers who have often written profoundly about Christian faith but combined this with pejorative, and often caricatured, accounts of Jewish faith?Footnote 17 Does the book really merit being pulled off the shelf again?Footnote 18 Three factors may perhaps make the exercise worthwhile.Footnote 19
First, whatever the specific defects in Buber's thesis about Pistis and Emunah, it anticipates an approach to religion which has been advocated more widely in recent years, especially in the formidable work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and the ‘Harvard School’. Cantwell Smith sharply distinguishes between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’.Footnote 20 The former he depicts in glowing terms: it is ‘a characteristic quality of potentiality of human life’; it is ‘a quality of the person, not of the system . . . an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one's neighbour, to the universe; a total response; . . . a capacity to live at more than a mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of, a transcendent dimension’, which, ‘at its best . . . is stable no matter what may happen to oneself at the level of immediate event’.Footnote 21 Belief, by contrast, ‘is the holding of certain ideas’, the attempt to articulate that reality which faith apprehends, but all of whose propositions are only partially adequate objectifications of that reality. Moreover, it is characteristic of Western Christianity that it has linked belief and faith ‘more closely, more deliberately, more emphatically, than . . . any other group’, whereas Jews ‘have seldom . . . had to attend to the matter of whether their faith prescribes belief; on the few occasions when the question has been raised, their answer has as often as not been a vigorous “no”’.Footnote 22 Cantwell Smith's approach clearly derives its energy primarily from his own extensive historical and comparative work, in relation to his concern to resist a widespread tendency since the Enlightenment to reduce religious faith to propositional belief. Only late in his Faith and Belief does he make passing, albeit appreciative, reference to Buber's Two Types of Faith – ‘He perceived clearly and felt deeply the distinction between faith as interpersonal and as propositional, and set it forth commandingly in that essay’.Footnote 23 But for all that Cantwell Smith develops his distinction between faith and belief with far greater range and sophistication than Buber develops his distinction between Emunah and Pistis, certain significant Buberian resonances are clear. So I hope that an engagement with Buber may perhaps also contribute in a small way to wider reflection on issues of religious epistemology.
Second, I hope it may be helpful to consider Buber in the context of the contemporary movement of renewed interest in holding together Bible and theology, a movement variously called ‘theological interpretation of scripture’, ‘reading the Bible as scripture’, ‘canonical interpretation’ and such like. From the perspectives of both biblical and theological scholarship, we regularly lament the differing agendas and expertises of biblical scholars and theologians, such that it can be difficult to foster significant dialogue between them. To be sure, this is something of a perennial topos in modern biblical and theological scholarship, which may not always accurately capture what is actually happening on the ground. Nonetheless Buber remarkably combined being at home in the literature of biblical scholarship (New Testament as well as Old Testament) with philosophical and theological expertise and also engaging with the existential realities of a Jewish life of faith in the modern world; so I am always struck, when I read Buber, by a sense that he was already doing with considerable acuity, some two generations ago, what many of us are struggling to do now and sometimes proclaim as something new. There are indeed aspects of the contemporary movement which do, I think, improve upon previous characteristic modes of handling the biblical text.Footnote 24 However, attention to the history of scholarship, here as elsewhere, is always salutary in its ability to humble some of our more unguarded claims that we have just invented something which others have longed for from afar and which we have decided to call a ‘wheel’.
Third, there is, I think, a major lacuna in Buber's handling of the scriptural portrayal of the two types of faith, ironically in his home ground, the Hebrew Bible. To the best of my knowledge, none of the numerous critiques of Buber's thesis have focused on this lacuna. Overwhelmingly, they attend to the adequacy, or otherwise, of Buber's accounts of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament, of Pistis as representative of a Christian stance, of the nature and meaning of the aleph-mem-nun root in Jewish tradition, and such like. Occasionally, to be sure, a critique has touched on my present concern. Hans Urs von Balthasar, for example, says:
The antithesis [of emunah and pistis] is artificial because the Old Testament faith is founded upon a similar objective and positive belief (a belief in a ‘that’ to use Buber's terms), that is to say upon the fact of the promise given to Abraham and all the consequences that flow from it, upon the authority of Moses and the sealing of the Covenant on Sinai . . .Footnote 25
But this general observation about the content of belief within the Old Testament would, I suspect, have been acknowledged but shrugged off by Buber as not really touching his concern. Something more sharply focused is needed.
‘Knowing that . . .’ in the Old Testament
One preliminary point, a minor lacuna, is that Buber does not mention the Letter of James in his discussions of the New Testament. Here we have a famous critique of ‘believing that’ (pisteuo hoti), which has regularly been taken to be a critique explicitly of Paul, though there are other perfectly good, indeed preferable, ways of accounting for James's formulation.Footnote 26 In a discussion of ‘the unitary character of faith and faith's deeds’ in 2:14–26,Footnote 27 James issues a challenge: ‘You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe – and shudder’. One can profess belief in God, and even make the fundamental Jewish affirmation of the Shema, and yet it may be worthless; for, as the demons show, it can be an intellectual acknowledgement that is divorced from doing God's will. Over against this James sets the scriptural examples of Abraham and Rahab whose actions provingly demonstrate their faith. However, although this recognition of the potentially problematic nature of ‘believing that’ would have been germane to Buber's discussion, I imagine that he would simply have said that James here, like Jesus in the synoptics, upholds a typically Jewish understanding of faith as Emunah.
The remarkable lacuna comes in Buber's handling of the Old Testament. To be sure, Buber recognises that the idiom of ‘believing that’ (in Hebrew, he)emin ki), in the sense of acknowledgement that something is the case, is present in the Old Testament, but the usage is merely commonplace: ‘of course, a “believing that” does appear also in the Old Testament (so Exod. iv. 5), in order to say that belief is accorded to an account received about some event, without there being attributed to this act of faith any of that fateful meaning such as we find in the statements of John’ (p. 33). Buber may have been led astray, however, by restricting his attention to usage of the root aleph-mem-nun. For at no point does he discuss the Hebrew idiom ‘know that’ (yada( ki), even though this phrase, which involves acknowledgement that something is the case, is used regularly within the Old Testament in ways which are without doubt theologically weighty.Footnote 28
To be sure, the verb ‘know’ (yada() is regularly used with a person or God as the direct object, and the idiom of ‘knowing Yhwh’, which is regularly linked with integrity of lifestyle (e.g. 1 Sam 2:12, Jer 22:16) and at least once with steadfast perseverance (Dan 11:32), is clearly resonant with Buber's depiction of Emunah. But my concern here is with ‘knowing that’, a distinct idiom which has, as we will see, an obvious functional similarity to the New Testament usage of ‘believing that’.Footnote 29
This idiom is usually studied in relation to its most common recurrent formulation, a ‘prophetic oracle of divine self-demonstration’,Footnote 30 found especially in Ezekiel, ‘know that I am Yhwh’ (yada( ki )ani yhwh).Footnote 31 The point of this seems to be the desire for an existential realisation, on the part of Israelites and non-Israelites alike,Footnote 32 of the reality of Yhwh who is speaking through the prophet. However, the somewhat formulaic use in Ezekiel is less interesting for my present purposes than the usage elsewhere in the Old Testament, especially in Deuteronomy and texts which in varying degrees exemplify deuteronomic/deuteronomistic perspectives.Footnote 33 Deuteronomy is a prime theological voice in the Old Testament, and important for grasping the Old Testament's canonical witness to God and life under God. I will consider three examples.
Example 1: Deuteronomy's desired acknowledgement of Yhwh
My first example is Deuteronomy 4 where Moses (the speaking voice throughout) expounds the astonishing and unprecedented nature of Yhwh's election of Israel. A concise summary of the Exodus and Sinai traditions serves a specific purpose: ‘To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that (yada( ki) the Lord is God (yhwh hu) ha)elohim); there is no other ()en (od) beside him’ (v.35);Footnote 34 and, relatedly, a little further on: ‘So acknowledge (yada() today and take to heart that (ki) the Lord is God (yhwh hu) ha)elohim) in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other ()en (od)’ (v. 39).
Three points about this. First, this acknowledgement, this ‘knowing that’, is based on the particularities of Yhwh’s engagement with Israel in both deed and word. The appeal is not to theological abstractions, but rather to the specifics of Israel's history with Yhwh. While the nature of this history is, to be sure, unstraightforward from the perspective of modern historiography, its function as grounding and warranting Israel's acknowledgement is clear within the narrative of the text. The implication is that without the particularities there would be no acknowledgement.
Second, the content of the acknowledgement, that Yhwh is ‘God’, involves a recognition of the uniqueness and supremacy of Yhwh. Here the Hebrew idiom, with the definite article (ha) before the term for deity ()elohim), seems clearly designed to distinguish Yhwh as the deity from all other deities; in conventional English idiom, it is the difference between lower case ‘god(s)’ and upper case ‘God’. This differentiation of Yhwh from all other deities is indicated also by the added clarification in each case, ‘there is no other’ ()en (od).
Third, the force of this acknowledgement is as much existential as it is intellectual. This is because the denial of other deities (‘there is no other’) – both here and elsewhere in the Old Testament, especially Isaiah 40–55, where comparable language is used (e.g. Isa 45:5, 14) – is a matter of clarifying Israel's allegiance and how she is to conduct herself. Here it may be worth noting what is surely one of the oddities of modern biblical scholarship.Footnote 35 On the one hand, it is generally agreed that the fool who says ‘there is no God’ ()en )elohim, Ps. 14:1, 53:1 (Heb. 2)) is denying not the existence of God as such but rather that God makes the kind of difference such that he should be heededFootnote 36 – i.e. ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical’ atheism. Yet on the other hand it is equally generally agreed that, when the biblical text says of other deities in relation to Yhwh that ‘there is no other’ ()en (od), the sense found in the fool's words should not be found here; rather, this is indeed a denial of their existence, such that the biblical text here represents a breakthrough to ‘monotheism’ in its modern sense. Yet within the Old Testament ‘other gods’ always represent a threat to Israel's allegiance to Yhwh; the rhetorical force of saying ‘there is no other’ is like that of the political orator who says to the crowd ‘we have no choice’, ‘there is no alternative’, where the point is invariably not to deny the theoretical existence of alternatives, but rather to urge that these alternatives should be thrust aside and that only one way should be recognised as the way ahead. So too for Israel, their acknowledgement that ‘Yhwh is God, and there is no other’ is to direct their allegiance and their conduct in the way that is epitomised in the Shema (Deut 6:4–9): because Yhwh is ‘one’, in the sense of ‘the one and only’,Footnote 37 he is to be loved and adhered to unreservedly; both the intellect and the will are to be fully engaged in relation to Yhwh, and alternatives to him, while recognised to exist, are to be rejected.
A clear narrative exemplification of this understanding is the account of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). In Elijah's judgement, the Israelites’ problem is their divided allegiance, their preference to hedge their bets rather than follow Yhwh unreservedly: ‘Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God (ha)elohim), follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The people did not answer him a word’ (18:21). Elijah then lets the prophets of Baal make their sacrifice first, and when they call upon Baal nothing happens. As the narrator puts it, ‘there was no voice, and no answer’ ()en qol ve)en (oneh, 18:26, 29); one can read this as the narrator endorsing with regard to Baal the fool's view about God ()en )elohim) – this is a deity who is absent, who makes no difference. When Elijah's turn comes he prays, among other things, ‘that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God’ (ha)elohim, 18:37); and when fire falls in response to this prayer the people exclaim, ‘The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God’ (yhwh hu) ha)elohim, 2x, 18:39). Israel is brought to a recognition that is both intellectual and existential. Such acknowledgement of Yhwh as they might have had previously is now shown to be merely formal and nominal, making no real difference to them. Now they recognise that Yhwh is indeed the true God, unlike Baal, and they simultaneously pledge their allegiance to him, that they will follow him without hedging their bets.
In each context, Deuteronomy 4 and 1 Kings 18, Israel's acknowledgement ‘that Yhwh is God’ is rooted in the recognition of Yhwh's particular acts of power on Israel's behalf, whether the exodus and the voice on Sinai, or the fire falling and consuming the sacrifice on Carmel; and it is an acknowledgement which involves the practical commitments of allegiance, as a corollary of rejecting other possible allegiances. There is surely present here a rich dynamic of contested allegiance, existential responsiveness, and a necessary dimension of intellectual recognition and understanding.
Example 2: A trio of non-Israelites who embrace Israel's faith
My second example, or trio of examples, relates to three individual acknowledgements of Yhwh from beyond Israel. An individual coming to recognise that something is the case about God, and changing how they think and what they do accordingly, is a phenomenon that Buber links with Pistis. Yet consider Jethro, Naaman and Rahab.
Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, a Midianite and a priest, hears of the exodus and comes to meet Moses in the desert (Exod 18:1, 5). When Moses tells Jethro all that Yhwh has done in the exodus, Jethro exclaims: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh. Now I know that (yada( ki) the Lord is greater than all gods, because he delivered the people from the Egyptians, when they dealt arrogantly with them’ (18:10–11). If one can set aside modern historical hypotheses about Jethro as the source of Moses’ knowledge of God as Yhwh, and thus a believer in Yhwh before ever Moses and Israel were,Footnote 38 and attend rather to the logic of the narrative – where Moses has learnt from God himself at the burning bush that his name is Yhwh (Exod 3:13–15) – the picture would appear to be this: Jethro is so impressed by what he hears that he becomes able to make the acknowledgement that is characteristic of Israel, that Yhwh is the supreme deity, because of his power demonstrated on Israel's behalf. The terminology is not quite that of Deuteronomy 4 or 1 Kings 18, but the conceptuality is closely similar.
Naaman is a successful Aramean army commander, who suffers from leprosy; however, on the strength of the testimony of a young Israelite girl, who had been taken captive on a raid, he is sent to Israel in search of a cure (2 Kings 5:1–5). After an initial misdirection to the king of Israel, Elisha summons Naaman ‘that he may learn that (yada( ki) there is a prophet in Israel’ (5:8). After Naaman's initial disappointment, when Elisha fails to act impressively and offers instead an unimpressive-sounding prescription, he eventually does what he is told and is healed (5:9–14). At this point he comes and stands before Elisha and says, ‘Now I know that (yada( ki) there is no God in all the earth except in Israel’ and, in consequence, henceforth he will ‘no longer offer burnt offering or sacrifice to any god except the Lord’ (5:15, 17). By virtue of his healing, Naaman has become able to make that confession of God which, as we have seen, should characterise Israel: only in Israel is the true God, Yhwh, to be found; and this recognition brings with it a new allegiance with practical consequences. To be sure, Naaman anticipates real difficulty in formal consistency in his new allegiance, given the constraints imposed by his responsibilities to the Aramean king who will continue to worship in the temple of Rimmon; but Elisha apparently sees the exclusive commitment in Naaman's own practice of worship as a sufficient indicator of the authenticity of his allegiance to Yhwh (5:18–19).
Rahab is a maximally unpromising figure – a Canaanite and a whore (Josh 2:1). However, when two Israelite spies come to her house, she protects them from the searches of the king of Jericho. She then says to them, presumably in explanation of her action on their behalf, ‘I know that (yada( ki) the Lord has given you the land, and that dread of you has fallen on us . . . for we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt . . . The Lord your God is indeed God (hu) )elohim) in heaven above and on earth below’ (2:9–11). Rahab acknowledges Yhwh in the way that should characterise Israel,Footnote 39 and on this basis acts ‘kindly’ towards the spies and seeks similar ‘kindly’ dealings for herself and her family in return (2:12).Footnote 40 On this basis Rahab and her family are indeed spared and become part of Israel (6:25). Thus a clear knowledge about Yhwh, on the basis of what he has done, and corresponding action, can be found even in the most unlikely of persons.
Jethro, Naaman and Rahab have in common that they are not Israelites, and yet they each make Israel's acknowledgement of Yhwh as supreme, in each case on the basis of some recognition of what Yhwh has done. It is hard to know how best to characterise these figures; the language of ‘conversion’ belongs to later times and contexts, and may have difficulty in doing justice to factors such as Jethro and Naaman returning to live in their own contexts, beyond Israel. Nonetheless, it is clear that Jethro, Naaman and Rahab share important qualities with converts, most obviously their acknowledgement of the sovereign and definitive nature of Yhwh, the God of Israel, which is such that, by implication, they see the world and live in it differently henceforth.
Example 3: The significance of David's victory over Goliath
My third example comes from one of the most famous narratives of the Old Testament, the account of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17). In a manner characteristic of many Old Testament narratives, at the dramatic climax of the story, as David confronts Goliath on the field of battle, David speaks to Goliath with words which articulate the meaning of the event:
45 But David said to the Philistine, ‘You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This very day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the Philistine army this very day to the birds of the air and to the wild animals of the earth, so that all the earth may know that (yada( ki) there is a God in Israel, 47 and that all this assembly may know that (yada( ki) the Lord does not save by sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand’.
David sees two purposes in his coming victory. First, his victory will enable ‘all the earth’ to ‘know that there is a God in Israel’. This appears to be the same in substance, if not in formulation, as Naaman's profession of faith – for the point of ‘that there is a God in Israel’ is clearly not simply that Israel has a deity as do other nations, but that the deity in Israel is indeed the true God. Despite the difference in wording, one should probably understand David's words as looking to that universal recognition of Yhwh that, in exactly the terminology of Deuteronomy 4:35, marks the culmination of Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple: ‘so that all the people of the earth may know that (yada( ki) the Lord is God (ha)elohim); there is no other ()en (od)’ (1 Kings 8:60). Thus the first point of David's victory is the desirability of other nations coming to share in Israel's particular knowledge of God.
Second, David seeks something specifically for Israel, in terms of what they will come to know: ‘that the Lord does not save by sword and spear’. Here a particular content is to be given to Israel's existing understanding of Yhwh: Yhwh works in surprising ways, subverting the usual criteria for strength and victory – in this case utilising the daring trust and resourcefulness of the youthful David to overcome the brute force and confident contempt that Goliath represents.Footnote 41
Thus Yhwh's giving Israel victory through David will have two distinct, though related, points of significance, one for ‘all the earth’ and one for Israel.Footnote 42 Knowledge that something about God is the case is sought here for Israelites and non-Israelites alike.
Conclusions
What might be learned from all this?
The first and most obvious conclusion would be the failure of Buber's dichotomy between two types of faith to do justice even to the content of the Hebrew scriptures. Yet it is important to state this carefully. I do not want simply to maintain that the formal similarity of yada( ki to pisteuo hoti is sufficient of itself to refute Buber's thesis, even though his overlooking of yada( ki is surely an embarrassing blind-spot. For the characteristic content of recognition, that Yhwh is the true God, is certainly much less developed than the credal affirmations which have typically characterised Christianity and which might arguably be Buber's real target. At least some of what is envisaged by ‘knowing that Yhwh is God’ might be claimed by Buber as implicit within his account of Emunah. Probably the real issue at stake is the extent to which Buber offers a non-cognitivist account of knowing God, which needs a fuller discussion than is possible here. Nonetheless two points may be made. On the one hand, the usage of yada( ki shows no unease with the affirmation of cognitive content in relation to Yhwh, and so is at odds with any strongly non-cognitivist account of knowing God. On the other hand, there is an undoubted carelessness in Buber's formulation of his argument, which has helped give rise to other careless accounts in which existential religious commitment is polarised in a facile way over against intellectual formulations.
For example, Robert Dentan's semi-popular work of Old Testament theology (published a generation agoFootnote 43) puts matters thus:
So when the men of ancient Israel spoke of ‘the knowledge of God,’ they were not talking merely of information concerning God, but of an intimate personal attachment to him. The Old Testament does not depreciate intellectual knowledge; it stresses over and over again the importance of knowing certain theological facts: that Yahweh is the God of Israel (Deut. 29:6; 1 Sam. 17:46; Ezek. 6:7; etc), that he is the only God there is (Deut. 4:39), that he has a definite moral character (Ps. 119:75; Jon. 4:2), that he has done certain mighty acts for his people (Judg. 2:10; Ps. 78:4; Mic. 6:5), and that his will has been revealed in formulas that can be learned (Pss. 78:5f.; 119:125). But, for Old Testament man, this kind of second-hand knowledge of mere facts about God is no substitute for the personal confrontation with God himself that Martin Buber describes, with classic brevity, as the relationship of ‘I and Thou’. The ‘knowledge of God’ is not simply the absorption by the mind of accurate theological information, but the involvement of a person with a Person.Footnote 44
After saying that the Old Testament ‘does not depreciate intellectual knowledge’ Dentan, with appeal to Buber, surely goes on to do something along those lines himself. For he depicts the content of what Israel and others are to ‘know that’ as ‘second-hand knowledge’ which conveys ‘mere facts about God’, which are ‘no substitute for the personal confrontation with God himself’. Of course, any religious truth can be reduced to ‘mere facts’ which are acquired ‘second-hand’ as a ‘substitute’ for the real thing – in prophetic terminology, ‘these people . . . honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me’ (Isa 29:13). But that is only when religious truths are debased and misused, or when elementary pedagogy is prematurely foreclosed. The point of such formulations is to enable and deepen engagement with God through the grasp of crucial facets of the divine reality; the formulations aim to bring head and heart together, so that a more adequate, a more genuinely whole response to God is possible.Footnote 45
One of the prime reasons, I think, for the renewed vitality of much Christian theology in recent years has been the fresh appreciation of the complementary character of ‘knowing God’ and ‘knowing about God’, and the refusal to play these off against each other. It may help, therefore, to see how this complementarity is portrayed in scripture, even in the Old Testament, where the fact that there is less overt credal content than in the New Testament and Christian faith does not mean that there is no credal content at all.
Second, it may be helpful to reflect briefly on the functional similarity between an Old Testament ‘knowing that’ and a New Testament ‘believing that’. This is not the place to embark on a review of the massive literature which deals with the nature of, and relationship between, ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’; though we might at least note the recurrent modern tendency (which entered the mainstream in the late seventeenth century courtesy of John Locke) to draw a sharp distinction between them, and greatly to prefer ‘knowledge’ (which is reliable) to ‘belief’ (which is uncertain, a matter of opinion rather than truth). Yet while it would be premature to claim an identity of meaning between Hebrew yada( ki and Greek pisteuo hoti, a strong similarity of function seems clear. They can each serve to specify fundamental content about God which it is important that humans should grasp, content which is to be held to be true and trustworthy, content which should reorientate human life in relation to God and make a difference as to how that life is lived. ‘Knowing that’ and ‘believing that’ alike depict a state of epistemic assurance, related to a particular kind of orientation of human life towards God.
Finally, one possible way of taking further some of the concerns of this article would be a comparative and synthetic study of the content of two primary biblical professions of faith: in the Old Testament, the deuteronomic formulation, ‘to know that Yhwh is God’ (yada( ki yhwh hu) ha)elohim); and in the New Testament, the summary formulation of Pauline faith, ‘to believe that Jesus Christ is Lord’ (pisteuein hoti kyrios Iesous Christos).Footnote 46 Common to each profession is a personal name, Yhwh and Iesous, which in each context is presented as a given, something already well-known. That is, both Deuteronomy and Paul presuppose a knowledge of these respective names which is drawn from other contexts. In terms of the received form of the canon, such contexts are constituted by antecedent narratives – exodus and Sinai in the Old Testament, the gospels in the New Testament – which give a particular content to the name, and so give content to the whole credal formulation. Yhwh's self-revelation to Moses at the burning bush, the deliverance of Israel from the Egyptians, the making of a covenant with Israel, and the gracious renewal of that covenant when Israel proves faithless – all these give content to the name Yhwh, and so underlie and inform the knowledge that this deity, Yhwh, is indeed the true God. Likewise, it is Jesus’ being sent in self-giving ministry in the gospels which culminates in his self-giving on the cross, on the basis of which God the Father raises him from the dead and supremely exalts him, which gives content to the profession that this Jesus is indeed both Christ and Lord.
In other words, the name which identifies the one who is acknowledged is associated in each testament with a narrative of salvation. This narrative of salvation is, in each testament, an account of the divine work pro nobis; that is, it is told by those who are its beneficiaries. Each narrative portrays a sequence of momentous events whose meaning is constantly contested and misunderstood (even by the beneficiaries), and whose meaning must be rightly discerned if it is to be rightly appropriated. It is now the biblical portrayal, as canonically preserved and received in communities whose identity is defined by it, which functions to mediate this divine action pro nobis, which is summarised in the two credal professions. Thus that which these two professions of faith should convey is, in principle, a summary of core content in both Old and New Testaments, where head and heart alike are challenged and summoned to respond.
