Talking About God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich, and Heschel by Daniel F. Polish (review)

Imagine being invited to Shabbat lunch the week of parshat Va-yeira, and gathered at the table are Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Your discussion, of course, regards Abraham’s challenge by God to sacrifice his son. Perhaps the next best thing to being invited to that table is reading Daniel Polish’s succinct Talking About God, in which he brings these four brilliant and original thinkers into dialogue around the themes of faith and relationship to God.

Polish describes Kierkegaard’s profound influence resonating in Buber, Tillich, and Heschel, stemming from Kierkegaard’s seminal Fear and Trembling, investigating how humans relate to God. All four have contributed original vocabulary to ongoing theological discussion: Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” Buber’s “I/Thou,” Tillich’s “ultimate concern,” and Heschel’s “God in search of man.” Kierkegaard, and his successors, identified the limits of the rational, intellectual approach to God. Polish observes, “By locating the essence of their thought in the personal, rather than the doctrinal, the experiential rather than the received elements of their traditions, they speak to people of all religious backgrounds” (p. xiv). Polish presents these four giants of modern existentialist theology as influential not only in their own religious traditions, but in the wider conversations among Jews, Christians, and others. This succinct volume uses these four great thinkers to illustrate four paths to meaning and faith, holding each as a lens through which to more clearly appreciate the others.

Kierkegaard discusses the efficacy of faith as a theological principle. Tillich acknowledges Fear and Trembling as the source from which “I received the impulse to reflect upon the categories of the ethical and the religious in their relation to each other” (p. 7). While acknowledging the vastly different worlds from which they sprang, Heschel suggests that the teachings of Kierkegaard reminded him of the Kotzker. Polish observes that Buber, Tillich, and Heschel shared the intuition that “thought itself was not the highest good—of much greater importance was how convictions were translated into action” (p.12).

Polish asserts that Kierkegaard would not have called himself a theologian. Rather than promoting a systematic theology, Kierkegaard emphasized that because human understanding is limited, we will know God only through our relationship with God. Abraham’s “leap of faith” can occur only when he takes the knife in hand, moving beyond the senses or logic, suspending the teleology of the ethical, to reach understanding through faith. Abraham is the model for Kierkegaard’s “infinite resignation,” a faith that does not make rational sense. But it is only by passing through this gate, giving up something under the promptings of faith, that we are bound to gain it back. “Infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith, so that one who has not made this movement has not faith; for only in the infinite resignation do I become clear to myself with respect to my eternal validity, and only then can there be any question of grasping existence by virtue of faith” (p. 38, citing Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling). Polish summarizes: “Yet in faith, Abraham is confident that not only will he not lose Isaac, but that he will also gain him” (p. 39).

Polish brings the critique of Buber and Heschel against Kierkegaard’s suspension of the ethical. Heschel, in The Prophets, states that God’s justice is “inherent in His essence and identified with His ways” (New York: Harper and Row, 1962, p. 255). Buber argues that to live in relationship with God demands ethical values that never can be suspended. For Buber and Heschel, writing after the horror of the Shoah, suspension of the ethical is unthinkable. Polish identifies Buber’s use of kavvanah, the deliberate, conscious intention that we bring to prayer and mitzvot, as an example. A religiously meaningful life is assessed through our unique deeds...