The Revival o f Theopaschism in Post-World

War II Theology

Susannah H eschel

The repudiation following the French Revolution of political power

based on inherited family led to a broader cultural problem of the
meaning of inheritance, as Simon During has described.1 What could
be used to legitimate power, apart from family lineage? The question
was not only political; the notion of intellectual inheritance also became
deeply problematic for theologians. For both Jews and Christians,
engaging in a critical, historical reading of their religious texts and
traditions suggested that an unquestioned acceptance of their traditions’
authority was no longer viable, nor was the Old Testament heritage
automatically viable for Christians. The destabilization of patrimony
raised the problem of how religious authority in the modern world
might be established, and what role the inheritance of traditional beliefs
and practices should play in forging one’s religious identity.
In no other two religions does the question of theological inheritance
play a greater role than in Judaism and Christianity, whose relationship
is permeated with tensions. I will argue that Abraham Joshua Heschel,
as a thinker and a personality, reconfigured for many theologians the
Christian inheritance of Judaism, while rendering untenable older models
of Christian supersessionism.
During the 1960s, Heschel became the voice of Judaism in the
negotiations with the Vatican over Nostra Aetate; he was the symbol
of the Jews in the Civil Rights Movement; he was viewed as embodying
what is most uplifting and inspiring about Judaism to numerous Jews
and Christians around the world. Christians take inspiration from his
work, ranging from secluded Carmelite nuns who use his writings for
meditation and prayer, to liberals who draw their social activism from
the inspiration of his writings and political work. Indeed, it is his

1 Simon During, "Rousseau’s Patrimony: Primitivism, Romance and Becoming

Other," in: Francis Barker, et al. (Hg.), C o lo n ia l D is c o u r s e /P o s tc o lo n ia l T h e o ry
(Manchester, 1994).

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 Susannah Heschel

ability to appeal to Christians across the theological spectrum that is

so striking.
How does it happen that a Jewish thinker has been embraced so
heartily by so many Christian theologians of such diverse backgrounds?
The most important elements Christians find in Heschel’s work are his
written description of Jewish faith and his personal embodiment of
Jewish faith, which stand in sharp contrast to the negative images that
have dominated Christian literature for centuries; and, second, his
understanding of divine pathos, which has become so important in the
work of Christian theologians.
Let me begin with two distinctions: between Heschel’s views o f
Christianity and those of other modem Jewish thinkers, and between
the Christian theological world in Germany, where he studied in the
1930s, and that of the United States, where he arrived in 1940.
HescheTs position among Jewish thinkers is unusual with regard to
Christianity. While the Jewish fascination with Christianity is not new,
with the modern period there arose particularly intense Jewish interest
in the figure of Jesus and in questions of New Testament historiography.
Yet Heschel is unlike other Jewish thinkers who lavished enormous
attention on the figure of Jesus from Abraham Geiger to Martin Buber
to David Flusser. Heschel, by contrast, did not interest himself in
Jesus and hardly ever mentioned him. He was quite explicit about it:
Why should Jews speak to Christians of divisive doctrines - after all,
nothing a Jew can say about Jesus will ever satisfy a Christian, since a
Jew can never affirm the Christology that defines Christianity. Rather,
Heschel emphasized, Jewish thinkers should speak to Christians about
what unites us - about problems of faith and prayer, what he called
depth-theology. Heschel departs in this way not only from the topic of
Jesus, but from the function played in modern Jewish thought by the
excessive interest in depicting a Jewish Jesus who never strayed from
Pharisaic teachings and methods of scriptural interpretation. As I have
argued elsewhere, the Jewish Jesus of modem Jewish thought functioned
to draw a separation between Christianity and the Jewish Jesus: If the
religion of Jesus was Judaism, then the religion a b o u t Jesus - Christianity
- was a deviation from Jesus’s own faith and religious practice. Claiming
Jesus as a Jew and emphasizing Christian theology’s alienation from
him was an act of revolt against the Christian hegemony over Western

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civilization, with the implication that it is Judaism that stands as the

originator of the monotheistic religions that shaped European culture.
Heschel, however, departed from that political agenda to create a
different kind of relationship with Christian theologians. He sought
not to undermine the authenticity of Christian theological claims, but
to find a mutuality between the two religions that would provide each
with a spiritual sustenance devoid, as much as possible, of partisan
political interests. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who attacked
his involvement in the Second Vatican Council as obeisance to the
Christian enemy, Heschel felt that his efforts were for the sake of
saving Jewish lives. Moreover, Heschel was genuinely interested in
Christian theology, and several of the Christian theologians who knew
him have told me that he was unique among Jewish scholars in his
sympathetic knowledge of contemporary Christian theology and in his
respect for their own work on rabbinic Judaism. It was unusual in
those days for Jewish scholars to approach Christian colleagues to
learn about their own research; it was assumed, I have been told, that
the relationship between a Jewish scholar and a Christian scholar of
Judaism would be teacher to pupil. Heschel was unique, the great New
Testament scholar W.D. Davies informed me, because he was never
patronizing.
Heschel’s writings on Christianity are significantly different in topic
from those of most other modem Jewish thinkers: He is unlike Buber,
with his obsequious embrace of Jesus as the best Jew who ever lived,
and unlike Baeck, with his insistence on the radical superiority of
Judaism to Christianity, the religion of manly ethics versus the religion
of feminine romanticism. Heschel writes in his essay, "No Religion Is
an Island," delivered as his inaugural address as the Harry Emerson
Fosdick Visiting Professor at Union Theological Seminary, that both
communities have obligations toward one another:
"A Christian ought to ponder seriously the tremendous
implications of a process begun in early Christian history. I
mean the conscious or unconscious dejudaization of Christianity,
affecting the Church’s way of thinking, its inner life as well as
its relationship to the past and present reality of Israel - the
father and mother of the very being of Christianity. The children
did not arise to call the mother blessed; instead, they called the

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mother blind... A Christian ought to realize that a world without

Israel would be a world without the God of Israel. A Jew, on the
other hand, ought to acknowledge the eminent role and part of
Christianity in God’s design for the redemption of all humanity...
A Jew ought to ponder seriously the responsibility involved in
Jewish history for having been the mother of two world religions.
Does not the failure of children reflect upon their mother? Do
not the sharp deviations from Jewish tradition on the part of the
early Christians who were Jews indicate some failure o f
communication within the spiritual climate of first-century
Palestine?... The supreme issue is today not the halacha for the
Jew or the Church for the Christian - but the premise underlying
both religions, namely, whether there is a pathos, a divine reality
concerned with the destiny of humanity which mysteriously
impinges upon history; the supreme issue is whether we are
alive or dead to the challenge and the expectation of the living
God... What is urgently needed are ways of helping one another
in the terrible predicament of here and now by the courage to
believe that the word of the Lord endures forever as well as here
and now; to cooperate in trying to bring about a resurrection o f
sensitivity, a revival of conscience; to keep alive the divine
sparks in our souls, to nurture openness to the spirit o f the
Psalms, reverence for the words of the prophets, and faithfulness
to the Living God."2
It is precisely those urgently needed qualities that Heschel seemed to
embody for many Christians.
Heschel’s positive assessment of Christianity is particularly striking
given his experience as a student in Germany during the late 1920s
and 1930s. During his student years at the University of Berlin, numerous
noted Protestant theologians embraced racial theory with some
enthusiasm, calling for the elimination of the Old Testament from the
Christian Bible, and proclaiming Jesus an Aryan. One o f the first
Christian theologians with formal training in rabbinics was Gerhard

2 Susannah Heschel (ed.), M o r a l G r a n d e u r a n d S p ir itu a l A u d a c ity : E s s a y s o f

A b ra h a m J o s h u a H e s c h e l (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp.
242,249-250.

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Kittel, at the University of Tubingen, who became notorious by May

of 1933 for his enthusiastic support of Nazi anti-Semitic policies.3 The
few additional Christian scholars in Germany who participated in the
study of Judaism have also displayed anti-Semitic convictions; for
example, Julius Wellhausen, who wrote not only on the Hebrew Bible
but also on the Second Temple period; Georg Beer, who participated
in an extensive project of translating and editing critical editions of the
Mishnah and Tosefta; and their students, younger scholars such as
Karl Georg Kuhn, Paul Fiebig, Johannes Hempel, Georg Bertram,
among others. Beer, for example, published a critical edition of the
Mishnah tractate Pesahim in 1912 in which he suggested that the Jews
killed Jesus because the Jews maintained a tradition of practicing human
sacrifice around the time of Passover, down to the present day.4Hempel,
who replaced Heschel’s thesis advisor, Alfred Bertholet, as professor
of Old Testament at the University of Berlin in 1937, wrote Heschel a
complimentary letter in 1936 on the publication of his book, D ie
P r o p h e tic ,5 and then in 1939 became one of the founders of an anti-
Semitic propaganda institute.6 It is not irrelevant to note that all of
those scholars active in the study of Judaism in Germany in the 1930s
joined the Nazi Party or the SA, or became involved in producing
anti-Semitic propaganda or went to work as experts for the Gestapo.
Imagine, then, what it meant for Heschel to move from the Christian
scholars o f Germany to those he met in the United States: Reinhold
Niebuhr, W.D. Davies, James Sanders, Daniel Day Williams, John
Bennett, Robert McAfee Brown. When Heschel began writing in the
United States, his work was received by a Christian theological

3 Robert P. Ericksen, T h e o lo g ia n s U n d e r H it l e r (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1985).
4 Georg Beer, P e s a c h im (Ostem). Text, Ubersetzung und Erklarung (Giessen,
1912), p. 94ff. See Christian W iese, E in " S c h r e i in s L e e r e ? " D i e
A u s e in a n d e r s e tz u n g d e r W is s e n s c h a ft d e s J u d e n tu m s m it d e m J u d e n tu m s b ild
d e r p r o te s ta n tis c h e n T h e o lo g ie im K o n te x t d e r D isk u ss io n iib e r d ie S te llu n g d e r
jiid is c h e n G e m e in s c h a ft im w ilh e lm in is c h e n D e u ts c h la n d 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 1 4 ; Ph.D.
diss.,
Goethe University, 1997, pp. 371-372.
5 The letter is dated Gottingen, October 10, 1936, and is in the private possession
o f the author.
6 Susannah Heschel, "Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the
Institute for the Study and Eradication o f Jewish Influence on German Church
Life," in: Church History, vol. 63, no. 4 (December, 1994), pp. 587-605.

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community radically different from that in Germany. Niebuhr, for

example, gave a positive appreciation to the Hebrew Bible that could
not be found among his German counterparts.7 The receptivity he
found in the United States never existed in Europe.
Among Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere, Heschel was perceived
as a source of inspiration. Thomas Merton wrote in his diary in 1960,
Heschel "is the most significant spiritual writer in this country at the
moment. I like his depth and his realism. He knows God!"8 A few
weeks after his death in 1972, Heschel was quoted by Pope Paul VI at
his weekly audience, the first Jewish thinker so honored. Indeed, the
Pope had thanked Heschel personally for his books, for giving religious
inspiration to the Christians of Italy. Christians knew that he was not
interested in a theological duel, but in making Jews better Jews,
Christians better Christians.
Heschel’s friendship with the great Protestant New Testament scholar
W.D. Davies is another example. Their relationship was profound, and
is reflected in Davies’ work on the development of early Christianity
within the setting of Judaism, as well as his important study o f the
Land of Israel, and it was with Davies that Heschel met to discuss
interpretations of the Passion narratives prior to his consultations in
Rome. For Davies, as for so many other Christians, Heschel embodied
Torah, in his knowledge, his wisdom, in his entire personality. Meeting
him was a radical event, because he felt that Heschel immediately
personified the contrast between how Christians have traditionally
represented Judaism and what Judaism actually is. What impressed so
many Christians was their awareness that Heschel believed and
exemplified what he wrote, that he embodied the piety he described.
Through his writings as well as his personality, one of Heschel’s
most important accomplishments was to correct the one-sided
understanding of Judaism as a legalistic religion by restoring its
theological underpinnings to a position of prominence. Like H.N. Bialik,
Heschel sought a revival of attention to restore aggadic literature.
Heschel, however, went further, with the argument that aggadic material

7 Reinhold Niebuhr, "Masterly Analysis o f Faith," in N e w Y o rk H e r a l d T r ib u n e

Book Review, April 1, 1951.
8 Thomas Merton, T u rn in g T o w a r d th e W o r ld : T h e P i v o t a l Y e a r s , Victor A.
Kramer (ed.) (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1966), pp. 61-62.

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within rabbinic texts revealed a flourishing and sophisticated theological

speculation among the rabbis, on topics ranging from the nature of
revelation to the nature of God. His work presents a more complicated
and richer picture o f rabbinic Judaism than the normative, unified
voice presented in the work of scholars of rabbinics ranging from
George Foot Moore to Ephraim Urbach. Rather than a unified position
that created a "normative Judaism," Heschel argues that conflicting
theological positions are expressed by the rabbis. The views of Rabbi
Akiva, Heschel argues, are mystical, apocalyptic, radical,
uncompromising, enthusiastic, strong, militant, deep, and paradoxical,
while those of Rabbi Ishmael are critical, rationalistic, clear, dry,
measured, balanced, careful, and patient.
In distinction to Gershom Scholem’s comparable recovery of Jewish
mysticism, Heschel’s recovery of aggadic theology rendered prior
Christian depictions of Judaism untenable and forced a reconsideration
o f the Pauline epistles and of early Christian theology. For example,
his work raises the question of whether patripassionism, the third century
assertion of the suffering at the cross of God the father, should continue
to be seen by historians of Christian thought exclusively within the
realm of hellenistic philosophy; surely Heschel’s demonstration of
divine pathos within biblical and rabbinic thought opens the question
of Jewish influence. Or, in another example, the theories of orthodox
Protestant theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
concerning divine dictation of the Bible might be placed, as Heschel
suggested in an unpublished letter to Cardinal Bea, in the context of a
particular strain of rabbinic thought that first emerged in the second
century and argued for a similar divine dictation of the Torah.
The centrality of divine pathos is the most important aspect of
Heschel’s link to Christian theology, but also the most fraught. It
raises questions o f how Christians are to negotiate their patrimony -
and where it is to be located. There is a long tradition of hellenistic
philosophical assumptions in Christian theology that disallows any
notion of divine reciprocity or suffering. Yet the Hebrew Bible is also
part of the Christian inheritance - and its understanding of God is as
deeply passionate. Through Heschel’s work, Christian theologians have
been able to legitimate their return to patripassionism via his
interpretation of divine pathos in the Hebrew Bible, and recover as

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well marginalized Christian teachings of medieval mystics, Anabaptists,

and the African-American church that make similar claims.
For Christians, the problem posed by theopaschism, divine suffering,
was doctrinal: whether divine suffering could be affirmed without
compromising the Trinity, specifically, the distinction between God
the father and the son who had suffered crucifixion. The issue first
arose in the third century, when some Christians tried to affirm God’s
unity by asserting that God the father had suffered with the son on the
cross; the suffering of Christ was the suffering of the father. Known as
patripassionism or Sabellianism, the question was why Jesus had died
on the cross, but God had not died, and the problem was that o f
modalism: the assertion that there is only one Godhead with agency.
How could God the father descend into the body of a virgin, be bom
from her, and then suffer on the cross? Those claims were formulated
prior to the establishment of trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century,
and were soon rejected as heretical. As Tertullian wrote in his accusations
against Sabellius, if the father was understood to have suffered on the
cross, there would be no distinction between him and the son. Arius’s
reaction to that was to argue for homoiousios, that the son is of similar
substance but subordinate to the father, an unsatisfactory solution that
led the Council of Nicea to formally affirm that Jesus was homorousios,
of one substance with God, but to distinguish between the hypostasis,
personhood, of the father, son and holy spirit, and their ousia, their
being. It might be suggested that without patripassionism, no trinitarian
doctrine would have developed. Moreover, nowadays one might argue
that most, if not all, Protestant theologians are modalists, that is, rejecting
the idea of three separate agents within the Trinity and assuming instead
that there is only one Godhead which can be designated as Father or as
son.
In the post-World War II era theopaschism has reemerged as a
central feature of Christian theology, both in the American schools o f
process theology, represented by figures such as Schubert Ogden, John
Cobb, Edward Farley, Sheila Davaney, among others, and in the very
different German Lutheran tradition associated with Jurgen Moltmann
and Eberhard Jungel. There are several reasons for the revival, including
the influence in America of the philosophers Whitehead and Hartshome,
political challenges to notions of God as an impersonal, impassive

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deity, and existential difficulties with traditional Christian beliefs that

God is unaffected by human activity, even by prayer. Heschel’s work
is frequently cited by these theologians, particularly in their affirmation
of the Hebraic roots of Christianity. The figure who uses Heschel most
often is Jurgen Moltmann, and it is to his work that I will now turn,
with some consideration as well of Eberhard Jiingel.
Let me briefly indicate some of the aspects of divine pathos that
Heschel discusses at great length and in each of his major publications.
First, divine pathos is not described by him as an attribute of God’s
essence, but as an aspect o f God’s activity: "The idea o f the divine
pathos is not a personification of God but an exemplification of divine
reality, an illustration or illumination of His concern. It does not represent
a substance, but an act or a relationship." 9 Divine suffering does not
exist apart from a relationship of God with Israel, in which God
sympathetically participates in the suffering o f Israel. That divine
participation transforms Jewish suffering from a chastisement for
wickedness to a suffering on behalf of the world, as a means of bringing
redemption.
As the central feature of the God known to Judaism, divine pathos
represents not a substance, but a relationship. That relationship can be
perceived only when one is in sympathy with God, meaning not in
subordination but in active cooperation with God. Love of God does
not mean aspiring to the Being of God in Himself, but "harmony of
the soul with the concern of God. To be a prophet means to identify
one’s concern with the concern of God."10 What is God’s concern?
"Pathos means: God is never neutral, never beyond good and evil.
God is always partial to justice. It is not a name for a human experience,
but the name for an object of human experience. It is something the
prophets meet with, something eventful, current, present in history as
well as in nature."11
Central for Heschel is that divine pathos not be viewed as a static
anthropomorphic conception, but as an insight into God’s relation to
human beings and as a stimulus to human action. He writes that "man’s

9 Abraham Joshua Heschel, T h e P r o p h e ts (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) p

273.
10 Heschel, T h e P r o p h e ts , p. 309.
11 Ibid, p. 231.

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 Susannah Heschel

concern for justice is a theomorphism."12 Divine pathos demands a

human response and forbids passivity. Heschel expands the classical
kabbalistic understanding of z o re k h g a v o h a , divine need and
responsiveness to human beings, as Arthur Green has pointed out, by
making God responsive not only to private acts of religious observance,
but also to public acts of social justice.13 That expansion forms the
basis for Heschel’s claim that religion and politics are inseparable, but
also for an implied critique of Christian passivity during the Holocaust.
Heschel develops the category of divine pathos as a theological
basis for social and political engagement. In their appropriation of the
category, however, German Protestant theologians have dissociated its
linkage to the political and used it instead to express their dissatisfaction
with traditional theism. Divine pathos in post-World War II German
Protestantism is used to revive Luther’s theology of the cross. For
example, in the work of Jurgen Moltmann, it is the suffering, crucified
God who stands as emblematic of the Christian message, a sensibility
that first arose for him during his three years as a German POW in
1945-48. He writes:
"The idea of the passion of the passionate God contraverts the
fundamental axiom of Aristotelian, philosophical theology, which
was God’s essential apathy. The Impassibility o f God was an
idea cherished by the Greek Fathers and by the medieval
theologians. When I began to get beyond this axiom, I discovered
links about which I had previously no idea. My first discovery
was the Jewish concept of the pathos o f God, which Abraham
Heschel found in the prophets; then my attention was drawn to
rabbinic and kabbalistic ideas about God’s S hekhinah in the
people of Israel."14
Eberhard Jiingel also emphasizes God’s suffering as "a deep insight
into the peculiar ontological character of the divine being."15 To avoid

12 Heschel, The P r o p h e ts , p. 272.

13 Arthur Green, "Three Warsaw Mystics," Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought,
13 (1996), pp. 1-58
14 Jurgen Moltmann, The C r u c ifie d G o d : T he C r o s s o f C h r is t a s th e F o u n d a tio n
a n d C ritic ism o f C h r istia n T h e o lo g y , transl. by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden
from the German (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
15 Eberhard Jiingel, G o d a s th e M y s t e r y o f th e W o r ld , Darrell L. Guder (transl.)

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any heretical challenge to the doctrine of the trinity, both Jungel and
Moltmann assert that the suffering o f the father and the son are not
identical (patripassionism), but distinct: Moltmann writes that in the
passion of his son, God the father suffers the pains of abandonment
that are a kind of death of God, which he endures out of love for
humanity.
For both Moltmann and Jiingel, divine pathos is equated with
suffering and humiliation, and the cross is an event that occurred
intersubjectively, between the father and the son. At the cross, God
willingly suffered the godforsakenness that separates the son from the
father. Divine suffering is undertaken freely, according to Moltmann,
as an expression of love for those who suffer, and is a necessary
component o f love. If it is as love that we experience God, then in
experiencing God we also experience God’s experience of us. Moltmann
abandons the traditional distinction between the immanent and economic
trinities, between ousia and hypostasis, what God eternally is in himself
and how God acts outside himself in the world. The cross is internal to
the divine trinitarian experience, and is the ultimate expression of
divine selfhood. In Jesus, he writes, the sh a lo m of God has begun and
is now experienced in the spirit.16
Incarnation, for Moltmann, is intimately tied to God’s willing self-
humiliation in the crucifixion, as "the eternal death of the godless and
the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can
experience communion with him... The godforsaken and rejected man
can accept himself where he comes to know the crucified God who is
with him and has already accepted him."17
Who are the godless? Jungel writes:
"According to the Jewish faith, only the law made fellowship
with God possible... The legalistic approach to the law... makes
God the one who is really the object of demands in that such an

(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1983), p. 62; cited by J.B. Webster,

"Eberhard Jungel," in T h e M o d e m T h e o lo g ia n s , David F. Ford (ed.) (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1989), vol. 1, p. 98.
16 Cited by Arne Rasmussen, T h e C h u rc h a s P o l i s : F ro m P o li t ic a l T h e o lo g y to
T h e o lo g ic a l P o li t ic s a s E x e m p lif ie d b y J u r g e n M o ltm a n n a n d S ta n le y H a u e r w a s
(Notre Dame, In: University o f Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 143.
17 Moltmann, T h e C r u c if ie d G o d , p. 277.

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approach promises the salvation of fellowship with God as a

result of the law’s fulfillment. But only God can grant that
fellowship. Thus [God] is required to fulfill the law on his part
in case man should fulfill it too. But that reduces God to the
principle of human self-confirmation... For the godlessness which
will not let God be God leads to death, according to the law."18
For both Moltmann and Jiingel, however, no human response is
generated automatically by divine pathos. Their emphasis is on God,
particularly the nature of divine suffering in communion with humanity,
and less on anthropology. "Hope" as Moltmann’s central religious
category is to bring inspiration, not necessarily political action.
It is striking that Heschel’s divine pathos is lifted by Moltmann and
Jiingel from its context in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic tradition, to
reach its alleged apotheosis in Christology, even as Judaism is described
as legalistic and godless. A similar direction has been taken by several
prominent Asian Christian theologians, including Kazoh Kitamori,
Dennis Ngien, and Kosuke Koyama, who cite Heschel approvingly,
but then assert that Christianity sees the best and ultimate fulfillment
of his ideas. Koyama writes, "Prophetic theology is the attempt to
experience history through the painful inner life of God, as made most
clear in the crucifixion of Jesus. The word of the cross points to God’s
agitated emotions because of God’s love toward us."19
There are several important distinctions, in addition to the
Christological, between Heschel’s divine pathos and the work o f the
Christian theologians who have appropriated his category o f divine
pathos. As Elliot Wolfson has pointed out, Heschel’s term "pathos" is
distinct from the Christian theological term "passion" and "is meant to
convey that in the biblical sources God’s suffering is a correlative
phenomenon, for it is always in response to the suffering of the other."20

18 Jiingel, G o d a s th e M y s te r y o f th e W o r ld , pp. 358,365,366.

19 Kosuke Koyama, M l. F u ji a n d M t. S in a i: A C r itiq u e o f I d o ls (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1984), p. 241. See also Kazoh Kitamori, T h e o lo g y a n d th e P a in o f
G o d (Richmond, Va: John Knox Press, 1965) and Dennis Ngien, T h e S iijf e r in g
o f G o d A c c o r d in g to M a r tin L u t h e r ’s T h e o lo g ia C r u c is (New York: P. Lang,
1995).
20 Elliot R. Wolfson, "Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics o f Reading:
Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology," in: S u fferin g R e lig io n , Robert
Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (eds.) ( London and NY: Routledge Press, 2002),

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Whereas Christian theopaschism understands God the Father’s suffering

with Jesus on the cross, and the passion itself as Jesus’s suffering with
humanity, it does not describe a reverse process, in which Jesus
participates in the suffering of God, or humanity with Jesus. In Jewish
theology, as Heschel emphasizes, divine pathos is correlative,
stimulating a sympatheia with God that characterizes human potential
at its highest.
That God is affected by human actions (and inactions), according
to Jewish sources, Moltmann argues that divine love and suffering is
utterly passive and unconditional. God’s love and counterlove "cannot
prohibit slavery and enmity, but must suffer this contradiction, and
can only take upon itself grief at this contradiction and the grief of
protest against it, and manifest this grief in protest."21 Judaism, on the
other hand, understands God’s inner life as both affected by humanity
and affecting human life. Indeed, redemption of humanity depends
upon the inner state of God; in Judaism, as Moltmann acknowledges,
"God is intentional and transitive."22
Whereas theopaschism stands in sharp contrast to the orthodox
Christian theological tradition of divine impassibility, much as divine
pathos was rejected in most of Judaism’s philosophical tradition, there
is still a longer and more prominent tradition of correlative divine
suffering in Jewish :exts, including the Bible, rabbinic literature,
Kabbalah, and Hasidism.
The empathic God of Protestant theology does not seem to rejoice,
but is described by Moltmann and Jtingel virtually only as suffering
and, as such, as humiliated and degraded. Their God does not command,
perhaps in an avoidance of the old Lutheran problem of works
righteousness, nor does their God seem to judge or punish, an odd
omission for post-war German Christians. Moreover, the God of
Moltmann and Jiingel does not seem to need us or be enriched or
diminished by us. For Heschel, divine suffering is not the central
aspect o f God’s pathos; it is divine neediness strength and rejoicing
are also God’s responses to humanity. Whereas Christian traditions of

p. 101.
21 Moltmann, p. 248.
22 Moltmann, p. 270.

81
 Susannah Heschel

theopaschism focus on God’s participation in the suffering o f Christ,

Judaism’s traditions of divine pathos speak of God’s participation in
the life of all of Israel. Moltmann himself rejects the correlative
possibility: "Christian theology cannot develop any dipolar theology
of the reciprocal relationship between the God who calls and the man
who answers; it must develop a trinitarian theology, for only in and
through Christ is that dialogical relationship with God opened up."23
Moltmann’s conclusion locates an essential difference between
Heschel’s theology of a reciprocity between God and human beings
and the divine suffering found in the work of Jungel and Moltmann.
Heschel’s God does not simply feel for human beings, but commands
them and responds to them. Although Moltmann has been a strong
advocate of theologies of liberation, he does not credit human actions
with an effect on God. Similarly, deeds play little role in Jungel’s
theology; his focus is on linguistic expressions o f faith rather than
social or political forms of Christian expression. Indeed, he is critical
of political theology for what he views as its extreme emphasis on
human agency. As Wolfgang Hardtwig explains it, religion offers
salvation in exchange for the human recognition o f limited agency,
whereas politics offers human control over life but without the possibility
of transcendence. A political religion recognizes the centrality o f the
human desire for transcendence, but offers political means to achieve
it. Yet the far greater extent of human agency suggested by Heschel’s
understanding of divine pathos renders the distinction between the
religious and political opaque; the political and religious are intimately
intertwined.
That is not the case in the Christian appropriations of Heschel,
however. For Jungel, human deeds at best are responsive to the divine
initiative of grace; they are never, as in Heschel’s theology, evocations
of a divine response. According to Jungel’s system, the complementarity
between God and the world occurred in Jesus Christ, but is now confined
to the idiom of consciousness as expressed in the German idealist
tradition. The superiority o f divinity in Christianity is also affirmed;
Moltmann writes, "Where for Israel immediacy with God is grounded
on the presupposition of the covenant, for Christians it is Christ himself

23 Moltmann, p. 275.

82
 The Revival o f Theopaschism in Post-World War II Theology

who communicates the Fatherhood of God and the power of the Spirit.
Therefore "Christian theology cannot develop any dipolar theology of
the reciprocal relationship between the God who calls and the man
who answers; it must develop a trinitarian theology, for only in and
through Christ is that dialogical relationship with God opened up."24
Divine pathos, for Heschel, is not, as for Moltmann and Jiingel, an
ontological category, but a situation, a relationship. Similarly, the
response to God is not ontological, as it is for Christian theologians
who see it exemplified in God becoming man in Jesus; for Heschel,
divine pathos evokes an identification with God’s concerns and an
overriding determination to bring them to fruition through human deeds.
Indeed, it is through the human identification with God - the essential
relationship - that Heschel bases his claims regarding divine pathos.
His understanding of the nature of God, and, indeed, any possibility of
understanding God, begins with the human experience of God, not
with philosophical speculation. Heschel is best understood within the
postmodern movement that seeks to overcome oppositions between
spirit and body, self and other, a movement profoundly influenced by
mystical literature. His is an effort to question the limits of representation,
particularly of religious language. The language of the prophets, he
writes, is an intimation and evocation, and recognition of the limits of
human understanding is essential to preventing language from becoming
iconography.
It is not easy for a Christian theologian to read Judaism. The pattern
was set early on, with the Christian appropriation of Jewish Scriptures
and concomitant delegitimization of Jewish interpretations. How can a
Christian theologian make use of a Jewish theological insight within a
Christian context without an ensuing claim to exclusivity or superiority?
On the other hand, as Heschel writes, should there not be a mutual
enrichment between Christians and Jews? At a Catholic conference on
religious renewal he stated:
"I believe that one of the achievements of this age will be the
realization that in our age religious pluralism is the will of God,
that the relationship between Judaism and Christianity will be
one o f mutual reverence, that without denying profound

24 Moltmann, p. 275.

83

i
 Susannah Heschel

divergencies, Jew and Christian will seek to help each other in

understanding each one’s respective commitment and in
deepening appreciation of what God means... Christian renewal
should imply confrontation with Judaism out o f which it
emerged... The vital challenge for the Church is to decide whether
Christianity came to overcome, to abolish, or to continue the
Jewish way bringing the God of Abraham and God’s will to the
Gentiles."25
Although he is perhaps the most influential of post-war Protestant
theologians, Moltmann is not representative of Christian appreciation
of Heschel’s work, only of the potential dangers inherent in one
theological tradition’s appropriation of him. For many others in the
Christian theological community, Heschel has opened the question o f
inheritance. Is the proper intellectual heritage of Christianity to be
found in 2,000 years of a theology rooted in Hellenistic philosophy, or
in the very different teachings of the Hebrew Bible? With the effort to
recapture the Hebraic roots o f Christianity, will models o f
supersessionism and other theological techniques of anti-Judaism finally
be discarded? If much of Christian theology has been marked by a
strange sense, unique among world religions, of shame over Christian
origins within Judaism, Heschel offers Christians a Jewish inheritance
they can admire and embrace.

Conclusion
Comparing Jewish and Christian theologies of the post-World War II
era brings us into two very different agendas. The task of post-World
War II Jewish theology was to recover and save Judaism. The crisis
faced by Jews was not matched by most Christian theologians, who
have certainly not agonized to the same degree that Christians did in
the immediate post-World War I era. At that time, a crisis of German
Protestantism was widespread and Karl Barth’s neo-Orthodox statement,
E p istle to the R om ans, published in 1919, was considered by many as
the difficult but only solution for the preservation of Christian theological
and moral structures.
For the Jews, surviving World War II brought the realization o f

25 Heschel, M o r a l G ra n d e u r, p. 272,

84
 The Revival o f Theopaschism in Post-World War II Theology

being the wretched of the earth, at least of Christian Europe, and the
recognition that a colonialist revolt was no longer even possible, given
the utter destruction of European Judaism. Zionism, of course, is the
classic postcolonial political route. How, then, to evaluate Heschel’s
turn to the spiritual and theological? I turn for understanding to a
comparison with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Seamus Deane
suggests, in C e ltic R e v iv a ls , that Yeats’s turn to mysticism at the
height o f the Irish struggle against the English is not a withdrawal
from the present or a reversion to the past, but contains a revolutionary
potential in the poet’s insistence that "Ireland should retain its culture
by keeping awake its consciousness of metaphysical questions."26 Also
writing on Yeats, Edward Said has noted, "In a world from which the
harsh strains of capitalism have removed thought and reflection, a poet
who can stimulate a sense of the eternal and of death into consciousness
is the true rebel, a figure whose colonial diminishments spur him to a
negative apprehension of his society and of civilized modernity."27 So,
too, with Heschel, a poet who has stimulated for us our awareness of
the divine, of the ultimate questions of the meaning of life and the role
of death, and who has given us prophetic warnings against the dangers
of perceiving modernity as civilized, and, at the same time, proper
injunctions o f our responsibilities toward that society. If we are to
preserve ourselves as Jews, it will be not through politics alone, nor
through possession of land, wealth, might, or numbers, but by heeding
Heschel’s enjoinment that we keep awake our consciousness of
Judaism’s metaphysical questions and its profound theological response.

*
Rivka Horwitz has been a pioneer in every way. For everyone in the
field of Jewish Studies, she is a model o f scholarly thoughtfulness,
enthusiasm, and integrity. Her mind has been focused throughout her
life on the central questions o f Jewish philosophy, and she has been
remarkably productive in her writing. She pioneered the field of modem

26 Cited by Edward W. Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," in: Terry Eagleton,

Fredric Jameson, Edward W. Said, N a tio n a lis m , C o lo n ia lis m , a n d L ite r a tu r e
(Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 81.
27 Ibid.

85
 Susannah Heschel

Jewish thought - which, years ago, was foolishly said by some not to
be a legitimate field of study - demonstrating the highest levels of
scholarship and insight. Rivka stood alone as a woman in her field
throughout much of her career, and considering the kind of prejudice
and condescension that I have experienced from my male colleagues, I
can only imagine how much worse it must have been decades ago, in
the early years of her career. Her ability to endure such attitudes and
persist in her commitment to the field is an extraordinary tribute to her
passion and will earn enduring respect for generations to come.
Given Rivka Horwitz’s long interest in the work o f my father,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, and her determination to see his work
published in Hebrew translation, I dedicate this essay to her.

86
Judaism, Topics, Fragments,
Faces, Identities

Jubilee V olu m e in H onor o f Rivlca

edited by

Haviva Pedaya
Ephraim Meir

Ben-Gurion University o f the Negev Press

Editorial Secretary: Aviezer Cohen

ISBN 965-342-929-9

All Rights Reserved

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press

Beer-Sheva 2007

Printed in Israel
 Contents

Haviva Pedaya and Ephraim Meir

Preface 13

Introduction 15
Mordecai Breuer
Fragm ents o f Identity and M em ory 21
Bibliographical List of Rivka 27

Rivka Horwitz
A bout M yself. Fragments o f Autobiography 37

Hebrew Part
Part I: Topics and Identities
Rivka Horwitz
From H egelianism to a Revolutionary Understanding o f
Judaism: Franz R o sen zw eig ’s Attitude toward Kabbala and M yth 43

Haviva Pedaya
W alking and Rituals o f Exile: Rituals o f Expulsion and the
Construction o f the S e lf in the Spaces o f Europe and the land
o f Israel 73

David Sorotzkin
Natural Law and D eviance: The Problem o f Nature and the
Shaping o f the Im age o f Judaism in Ideological Patterns in
Early M odern Europe 149

Ehud Krinis
H istory and Theosophy: M eta-History in Isaac Breuer's Thought 195

Ron Margolin
Jew ish M yth in the Tw entieth Century - Research and D iscussion 225

Paul Fenton
Som e Remarks on D ance in H assidism 277

Meir Buzaglo
Israeliness, Judaism and the Problem o f Faithful Interpretation 293
‫יהדות‪ :‬סוגיות‪ ,‬קטעים‪,‬‬
‫פנים‪ ,‬זהויות‬
‫ספר רבקה‬

‫עורכים‬
‫חביבה פדיה ואפרים מאיר‬

‫הוצאת הספרים של אוניברסיטת בן־גוריון‬

 ‫רשימת הכותבים‬

‫משה אידל ‪ -‬ה אוניב רסי ט ה ה ע ב רי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬

‫פול א ל ב ה ר ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת ב ר אילן‪ ,‬ר מ ת גן‬
‫דב א ל בוי ם ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫מאיר בוזג לו ‪ -‬ה אוניברסי ט ה ה עברי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫יעקב בליד שטיין ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫ק ר ל א‪ .‬ג רו צינג ר ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת פו ט ס ד ם‪ ,‬ג ר מני ה‬
‫ר ב ק ה הורבי ץ ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫מיכל הלד ‪ -‬ה אוניברסי ט ה ה עברי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלים‬
‫ז׳ואל הנ ס ל ‪ -‬ה אוניב רסי ט ה ה עב רי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫זאב הרווי ‪ -‬ה אוניברסי ט ה ה עברי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלים‬
‫סוזן ה של ‪ -‬דר ט מות קולג׳‪ ,‬אר ה״ב‬
‫פנ חס זיו ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גו ריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫ב ר כ ה זק ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫ר פ א ל י שפה ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת ב ר אילן‪ ,‬ר מ ת גן‬
‫אביעזר כהן ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫אס תר ליבם ‪ -‬בי ת ה ספ רי ם הלאומי וה אוניברסי ט אי‪ ,‬ירו שלים‬
‫יהודה ליב ם ‪ -‬ה אוניברסי ט ה ה עברי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫דני אל י׳ ל ס ק ר ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫אפרי ם מאיר ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת ב ר אילן‪ ,‬ר מ ת גן‬
‫יונתן מאיר ‪ -‬ה אוניב רסי ט ה ה ע ב רי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫רון מרגולין ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת ת ל־ א בי ב‪ ,‬ת ל־ א בי ב‬
‫דוד סו רו צ קין ‪ -‬ה אוניברסי ט ה ה עב רי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫חביב ה פדיה ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫יוסף ינון פנטון ‪ -‬אוני ב רסי ט ת סו ר בון‪ ,‬צ ר פ ת‬
‫אדמיאל קוס מן ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת פו ט ס ד ם‪ ,‬ג ר מני ה‬
‫חיים ק ריי ס ל ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫אהוד ק ריני ס ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
‫שלו ם רוזנ ב רג ‪ -‬ה אוני ב רסי ט ה ה עב רי ת‪ ,‬ירו שלי ם‬
‫וולפדי טרי ך ש מי ט־קוב אר צ׳יק ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת ק א סל‪ ,‬ג ר מני ה‬
‫יוסף של מון ‪ -‬אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן גוריון בנג ב‪ ,‬ב א ר שבע‬
 ‫פרופ׳ רבקה הורביץ‬
‫כב בתמוז תרפ׳׳ו ‪ -‬יד בטבת תשס׳׳ז‬
 ‫מזכיר המערכת‪ :‬אביעזר כהן‬

‫מסת״ב ‪9 6 5 -3 4 2 -9 2 9 -9‬‬

‫כל הזכויו ת ש מו רו ת‬
‫להוצ את ה ס פ רי ם של אוני ב ר סי ט ת בן־גו ריון בנג ב‬
‫ב א ר שבע ת שס״ז‬