Postmodern Reflection II: The Transcendence of G-d

The Jewish Scriptures are often seen as speaking of another god-form made in the image of man, anthropomorphic and schizophrenic, just like the other ancient gods of the age. However, while there are certainly places where the text speaks of God in this way, the Jews knew full well that they were using cultural metaphors, and the Jews today do not read their Scriptures as inerrant.

Despite your opinion on their god, there is something embedded in their text that once you see is inescapable, irresistable, seductive, frightening, and challenging all at once. A good introduction to this embedded point, a point which serves as the virtue by which a radical deconstruction opens up, would be the following quote from Daniel Chapelle in his book "The Soul in Everyday Life":

"In the biblical tradition of the Judeo-Christian West, the essential unknowableness of all things, the fundamentally unnamable ground of all Being, is represented by the tetragrammaton YHWH. This unpronounceable Hebrew four-letter word—the original unspeakable “four-letter word”—consists of four consonants without pronunciation symbols. The deliberate omission of pronunciation symbols keeps it unspeakable. This safeguards the mystery of Being from being inadequately named, from being expressed in ways that fail to do it justice. The etymological root of the tetragrammation YHWH is associated with the verb hawah or hajah, meaning “to be.” This has been related to the scriptural “I am,” and thus to the metaphysical idea of “He is” or “He who is”—Being itself, Being in its most absolute sense. Historical data about related words suggest that YHWH lends itself to being pronounced as “Jaweh” or “Yahwe.” Hence, the “Yahweh” of modern usage. The insistence that the ground of Being should be identified by an indecipherable cipher, a cipher that is deliberately kept unspeakable because it is too full of mystery, serves to reflect a reality that is unidentifiable because it is unnamable, meaning unknowable. Put in traditional philosophical language, historical beings are phenomenal or concrete and visible, but Being itself, the ground of all beings, cannot be named by any noumenon, any definitive name that identifies it in absolute, objectifiable terms."

From this radically deconstructive vantage point, God becomes simultaneously named and unnamed, both "God" and "god." The Divine is signified not through definition or empirical description, but through negation and direction. God is pointed to as behind the dark cloud, all definitions and descriptions becoming negated by that cloud--what the mystics of old called the Cloud of Unknowing.

This is where the forbiddence of idolatry finds its origin.

This ban on idolatry is unique to Jewish culture and tradition at the time of their inception and for a long time after. This is no mistake because the Jews desired to safeguard the mystery from being captured, co-opted, territorialized, and contained by a concrete object. These concrete forms, even though they were most likely understood symbolically, were understood as capturing and replicating the form of God through divine revelation. But the Jews knew that God was formless. To idolize God would be betrayal of God. It would bring the Creator down to the stratum of the creature, or the origin of all forms down to the forms themselves.

In the Hebrew language, in the etymology of words translated "idol," you can find English equivalents like "image" and "form." The Greek equivalent, as evidenced by the Septuagint, is "eidos" which translates to English as "idea." So not only are idols images and forms that we lock the Divine into, giving it the shape we desire it to have, but idols can also be ideas or concepts we use to tame and cage the Divine.

In the New Testament, the Apostle John claims that God is Spirit. Spirit in the Greek is the same word for wind. The wind is formless and image-less. It cannot be understood or tamed or predicted. The entire Judeo-Christian narrative testifies to this God -- the Ground of all Being, the Logos, the Tao, the Cosmic Christ, the Way. But the Old Testament is especially a testament to the transcendence of God, while the New Testament leads us more surprisingly into the immanence of God while continuing to safeguard the Mystery of Being.