Originally posted by rwingett
The former being said, however, I don't think pantheists would agree with the necessity of coming up with an alternate term. They would, I'm sure, feel that 'god' was precisely what they meant. Nothing more, nothing less.
On the ex nihilo idea: The mainstream (or at least what seems to me, on my studies, as the predominant stream) of Jewish thought is that the cosmos is “created” (generated or engendered might be a better word)
from the “godhead”, which is called
ein sof.
I think of this as a kind of “gestaltic nondualism” in which
ein sof is the ground in which, from which, and of which all “figures” (manifestations) are.
And, quite frankly, I’m not sure (until God is conceived of as
a being of some kind, whether personalistic or not), that much more is needed beyond Agerg’s requirement—except perhaps that the generative dynamism be already embedded in the ground, which might raise the question of a “trigger”. The rabbis seem to have called that trigger “will”—but I would have to revisit the sources to explicate that, as it seems decidedly
not to mean a conscious urge; but, perhaps, simply an innate (to
ein sof) proclivity. Again, I’d have to research it, since it’s been awhile.
On Rwingett’s pantheism: I usually use the term “nondualism” in preference to pantheism, but that is a somewhat pedantic difference which does not need to come into play here (and the Jewish neo-Hasidic rabbi and scholar, Zalman Schachter-Shaolmi, also uses “pantheism” ). Such a view is not new, and should not be seen as somehow less normative than the theistic alternative. The ancient Stoics, for example, used
theos in a distinctly pantheistic way.
Dualism versus nondualism (pantheism) has long been the major metaphysical divide, and dualism should not be assumed to be somehow the “normative”, or pantheism somehow a “marginal” understanding historically. (This, incidentally, is the reason why I tend to choose the self-description “nontheist”, rather than “atheist”—admittedly a thin and, again, pedantic distinction perhaps—appended to my nondualism.)
Nondualism is also prominent (if not predominant) in Judaism, and has been. A rather famous (Hasidic) rabbi, Aiden Steinsaltz, once declared it to be the “official theology” of Judaiams, in reference to the tradition of Kabbalah. I think it is embedded in the Shema (the single “doctrinally required” statement of Judaism:
sh’ma Yisrael YHVH eloheinu YHVH echad). It is also expressed in Isaiah 6:3—
melo kol ha’aretz kevodo: “the fullness of all the earth is [his] presence”;
melo is a noun—“fullness”, not “filled with” or “full of”; and
kevodo, conventionally translated as “glory”, means [palpable, or weighty] “presence”.
On JS357’s “pre-existing semantic associations”: Pre-existing for whom? When I started to study Jewish thought, for example, I discovered that a lot of my pre-existing semantic associations were simply not there in Judaism, which is a paradigmatically different religion from the Christianity that I grew up in—in ways far more radical (“rootical” ) than what the term “messiah” means. You’re surely correct insofar as our particular cultural matrix is concerned (as long as that matrix excludes those particular Judaic influences, as well as others)—but I see no reason why I ought to eschew other longstanding semantic associations.
On Freaky’s “personalism”: From the view just outlined above, personalistic ascriptions are given to various
manifest (“post-creatio” ) aspects of the ineffable ground (called
ein sof). Such aspects might be called
el, elohim, YHVH (Hashem), shaddai, makom (“place” ), etc.
_____________________________________________
Note: All of the above is within the context of a “substance theology”. Judaism also has a strain of “process theology” (especially in the context of Kabbalah), in which “God is a verb” (from Rabbi David Cooper’s book titled thus); in fact, the principle name of God—YHVH—
is a verb!
The necessary characteristics of a god
14 Jan '13 18:16
Back to Top