{"id":506,"date":"2004-07-11T19:39:08","date_gmt":"2004-07-11T07:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=506"},"modified":"2004-07-11T19:39:08","modified_gmt":"2004-07-11T07:39:08","slug":"monotheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/506","title":{"rendered":"Monotheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Philosophy of Martin Buber<\/em> I read today of a conversation between Buber and an old man. Said the old man to Buber:<\/p>\n

\n“What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called ‘God’ it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Buber replied:<\/p>\n

\nYes, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of men with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their fingermarks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I look to the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby and unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of man have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw characitures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name’. But when all madness and delusions fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say ‘He, He’ but rather sigh ‘Thou’, shout ‘Thou’, all of them the one word, and then they add ‘God’, is it not the real God whom they all emplore, the One Living God, the God of the children of men? Is it not He who hears<\/em> them? And just for this reason is it not the word ‘God’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name<\/em>, consecrated in all languages for all times? … We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then:<\/p>\n

\nThe old man stood up, came over to me, laid his hand on my shoulder and spoke: “Let us be friends”. The conversation was completed. For where two or three are truly together, they are together in the name of God.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Philosophy of Martin Buber I read today of a conversation between Buber and an old man. Said the old man to Buber: “What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}