The Pull of the Divine Lure

For far too long, Jewish theology has been orphaned. Orthopraxy has taken its place: "Where," "when," "how," and "how much" have displaced the philosophical inquiries of "why" and "what for." The theological vacuum created is filled with bits of quotational Judaism and gestures of rote, routine, and mimicry. The unexamined life leaves the questing soul empty. Moreover, as C.S. Lewis cautioned, "When a person ceases to believe in something it isn't that he believes in nothing but that he begins to believe in anything."

Rabbi Artson's essay is a call for Jewish theological seriousness. We come, after all, from a "theological" seminary. We are indebted to him for placing theology higher on the agenda of our Jewish concern. To my mind, it is theodicy that lies at the heart of Artson's adaptation of Process Thought. The gnawing challenges of radical evil tug at the roots of Jewish theology: the character of God, the implications of the divine-human covenant, the limitations of human free will and obedience.

Artson finds that the presuppositions of conventional theology portray a static, impassive, and inflexible deity who governs the universe with the coercion of an omnipotent commander who often threatens, punishes, expels, and visits the iniquities of ancestors upon their progeny. That dominant theology appears bound to a frozen ontology that revels in permanence and absolutism and shies away from change and pluralism.

Artson's theological temperament presents us with a softer, kinder, gentler God who governs by persuasiveness. If the major metaphor of conventional theology is that of a judgmental Sovereign, Artson's approach may be said to portray the divine as a Magnet attracting iron filings. The God of traditional theology demands, orders, commands obedience. The latter, too closely questioned, threatens to break down the human-divine dialogue. "Sh'tok—be silent, for thus is My decree" (B. Menaḥot 29b). God decrees; man agrees. According to the dominant tradition, at Sinai we are to follow first, then to understand. Behavior precedes reflection. Who shall live and who shall die is a g'zeirah, a divine decree. While one may attempt to mitigate the evil of the decree through acts of kindness and piety, in the last analysis, we are bound to divine judgment.

Many are troubled by what appears to be the coercive, dictatorial character of such a God-idea. Artson imagines another idea of divine perfection. Here is a dynamic, evolving God, a struggling, growing, fallible power, open to creativity and encouraging mortals to search, innovate, discover, and generate greater order without divine compulsion.

As for the tragedies of suffering and evil, traditional theology spawns conventional responses of blame and fault, either of self or God. Repeatedly, one hears echoes of the voice of Job, "Where was the omni-God—omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent—at Auschwitz? How can we exonerate God's distant non-intervention?" Such dominant conventional theology tends either to use God as a scapegoat, placing all responsibility on God's back, or else rubbing the salt of guilt into our own wounds.

In contrast, the God-idea of Process Theology views God as open to a non-predictable future, in which the human being is an equally evolving cohort. Properly understood, evil and suffering are "existential goads" calling us to repair the world. Artson's ontology brings to mind the insight of the talmudic sages who insist that "Nature pursues its own course" (B. Avodah Zarah 54b). The world is as it is, but not as it ought to be. The chaos in our lives is not traced to divine punitive judgment.

Artson's masterful presentation stimulates some epistemological and ethical inquiries. How do we know whether what we do or what we are intent on doing is to be traced to "divine" luring, or "divine" persuasion, or "divine" invitation? Before or after the event, can we ever read the intent of mind of the One who lures? In what sense may it be claimed that we know the "initial aims" of the lure and its "unfulfilled goal"?

The "divine lure" is said to coax, summon, and invite us to create...