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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2012
Initially I briefly expound Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith so as to clarify Buber's sharp contrast between Jewish faith (Hebrew Emunah) and Christian belief (Greek Pistis). I suggest that Buber's polarisation of Emunah, a trust and existential engagement with God, over against Pistis, an intellectual acknowledgement which lacks immediacy with God, has certain resonances with Wilfred Cantwell Smith's distinguishing between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in his attempt to overcome the Enlightenment tendency to reduce religious faith to propositional belief. I also acknowledge that Buber's conceptually alert and religiously constructive engagement with the Bible in its own way embodies many of the concerns in the current attempts to bring Bible and theology together via ‘theological interpretation’ or ‘a canonical approach’. However, Buber's account of the Old Testament overlooks the presence of the idiom ‘to know that’ (Hebrew yada( ki), which points to the importance of cognitive content in relation to knowing Israel's God. I consider a number of narratives which feature the deuteronomic idiom ‘to know that Yhwh is God’ (or closely comparable formulations) – Elijah on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), Rahab (Joshua 2), Naaman (2 Kings 5) and David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) – and consider the function of ‘knowing that Yhwh is God’ in each passage. By way of conclusion I reflect on the complementarity of ‘knowing God’ and ‘knowing about God’ and the problematic nature of tendencies, represented by Buber, to set these over against each other. I also suggest that there is fruitful work to be done through a comparative and synthetic biblical and theological study of the relationship between the Old Testament concern that people should ‘know that Yhwh is God’ and the New Testament concern that people should ‘believe that Jesus Christ is Lord’.
1 A version of this article was presented at the Society for the Study of Theology in York on Wednesday 13 April 2011. I am grateful to those then present, especially Vincent Brümmer, for constructive comeback in question-time.
2 English trans. by Norman P. Goldhawk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951; repr. New York: Collier Books, 1986). All parenthetical page numberings in my main text refer to this work. This trans. has also been reissued, with identical pagination, and with an afterword by David Flusser, in The Martin Buber Library (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003; afterword pp. 175–235).
3 Friedman, Maurice, Martin Buber's Life and Work: The Later Years, 1945–1965 (New York: Dutton, 1983), p. 83.Google Scholar
4 The distinction goes back to Augustine – verissime dicimus, sed aliud sunt ea quae creduntur, aliud fides qua creduntur (De Trin. 13.2.5; I am grateful to Lewis Ayres for this reference) – even though the familiar shorthand of fides quae and fides qua developed subsequent to Augustine.
5 Buber's typology is primarily outlined at the outset (pp. 7–12) and conclusion (pp. 170–4) – whence my preliminary formulations here are largely drawn – but recurs in varying ways throughout the book (e.g. p. 42).
6 One necessary clarification is that Buber recognises that he is using his categories as ideal types: ‘When I treat the two types of faith frequently as that of the Jews and that of the Christians I do not mean to imply that Jews in general and Christians in general believed thus and still believe, but only that the one faith has found its representative actuality among Jews and the other among Christians’ (p. 11). The extent to which he sees these historic instantiations as in some sense representative of patterns of human faith beyond the contexts of Judaism and Christianity is, perhaps disappointingly in the light of the broad claim in Buber's thesis (‘in the end only two types of faith’), left unspecified; there is a passing reference to Islam, which is aligned with Christianity (p. 42), but no discussion to justify Buber's larger claim. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky comments that ‘Buber would undoubtedly admit that there are also other types, but these he would classify as “types of wisdom” (Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse) rather than types of faith’ (‘Reflections on Martin Buber's Two Types of Faith’, Journal of Jewish Studies 39/1 (1988), p. 97).
7 The prime verbal form of the root, with the sense ‘have faith’, is the Hiphil, he)emin.
8 At root, such a dichotomy usually displays the conviction that the developing traditions about Jesus in the New Testament, and subsequently in patristic theology, are not authentic developments of what was already present at least in nuce, but rather are in significant ways founded upon misunderstanding and misrepresentation. This is not the place to weigh the pros and cons of such an approach – though it tends to incorporate assumptions about Jesus which are not only more or less positivist but also less able to do justice to the New Testament than sometimes supposed, as not a few New Testament scholars have recently pointed out.
9 For Buber himself, this is not unrelated to his own deep intuitions, as a Jew, about Jesus: ‘From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother . . . I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith’ (pp. 12, 13).
10 Of course, the clear-cut contrast which Buber makes between the Jewish and the Greek is one which most scholars now feel greatly oversimplifies the many interpenetrations of Jewish and Greek in the Hellenistic world.
11 Neither ‘faith working through love’ (Gal 5:6) nor the nature of life ‘in Christ’, for example, are aspects of Paul's concept of faith that Buber discusses.
12 Buber says elsewhere that ‘[t]here is for [Paul] in the course of history no immediacy between God and man, but only at the beginning and the end’ (p. 160), whereas for the Jewish pattern of faith even the darkness of the world does not diminish immediacy: ‘That He hides Himself does not diminish the immediacy; in the immediacy He remains the Saviour and the contradiction of existence becomes for us a theophany’ (p. 169).
13 Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 84.
14 Gershom Scholem, for example, sees this as Buber's ‘weakest book’ with ‘an extremely dubious thesis’; and, more generally, he observes that ‘Buber's predilection for exaggerated antitheses, which no longer pinpoint the real phenomena of faith, though they always contain a grain of truth, is a fundamental weakness of his work’ (in his ‘Martin Buber's Conception of Judaism’, in his On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), pp. 164, 169).
15 A range of responses, predominantly positive, is surveyed in Friedman, Martin Buber's Life and Work, pp. 83–101.
16 Flusser, in his ‘Afterword’, argues that Buber's recognition of two types of faith is valid, but that this does not distinguish Judaism from Christianity. Rather, one kind of faith, trust in God, characterises Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike, while the second kind of faith, a salvific believing in Jesus, is peculiar to Christianity.
17 I confess that I cannot help taking with a pinch of salt Buber's initial disclaimer of inter-religious apologetic concerns: ‘There is scarcely any need to say that every apologetic tendency is far from my purpose. For nearly fifty years the New Testament has been a main concern in my studies, and I think I am a good reader who listens impartially to what is said’ (p. 12). Whatever Buber's conscious intentions, they surely stand in relation to what he actually wrote rather in the way that Buber at one point depicts a scholarly observation about a confessional statement at the ending of the first Epistle of John: ‘That to be sure agrees perfectly with the aim of the confession, but not in the same measure with its effect’ (p. 133). For it is surely impossible to come away from Buber's book without the sense that Christian faith, as he depicts it, is not only different from, but inferior to, its Jewish counterpart. Even David Flusser, in his positive commendation of the value of Buber's thesis, notes that Buber's friend, Hugo Bergmann, called the book ‘apologetic’; and Flusser finds himself unable to deny that ‘perhaps the reproach has some foundation’ (‘Afterword’, p. 176).
18 My opening comment about a ‘forgotten book’ is perhaps illustrated by the absence of reference to Buber in the recent Tilley, Terence W., Faith: What it is and What it isn't (New York: Orbis, 2010).Google Scholar
19 For purposes of historical theology much, of course, could be gained by taking time to contextualise Two Types of Faith within various wider frames of reference. On the one hand, there is Buber's own frame of reference: how do the emphases of Two Types of Faith relate to his larger oeuvre, not least his I and Thou and his other works of biblical criticism, and how does the book relate to Buber's concerns with then-contemporary Judaism and Zionism, and the developing shape of the nascent state of Israel, where he wrote? On the other hand, there is Buber's location within a mid-twentieth-century intellectual frame of reference – existentialism, mid-twentieth-century biblical scholarship, and Buber's affinities to certain kinds of liberal Protestantism.
20 Smith's own primary account is his Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). There is an excellent introduction to his overall approach in Hughes, Edward J., Wilfred Cantwell Smith: A Theology for the World (London: SCM, 1986).Google Scholar
21 Faith and Belief, pp. 3, 12.
22 Ibid., pp. 12, 205, 13, 14.
23 Ibid., p. 325, n. 65.
24 E.g. in the latter part of this article I try to model an imaginatively serious and non-reductive engagement with the received form of certain narratives.
25 Martin Buber and Christianity: A Dialogue between Israel and the Church (London: Harvill Press, 1961), pp. 102–3. Von Balthasar presents the book as a whole as a ‘reply’ to Two Types of Faith (p. 8), but only engages specifically with it in a short section (pp. 101–6).
26 See esp. Johnson, Luke Timothy, The Letter of James (AB 37a; New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 111–14Google Scholar, 236–52, esp. pp. 242, 249–50. Johnson persuasively argues that James and Paul ‘are dealing with quite separate issues, but with a language shaped by a shared symbolic world’ (p. 114).
27 Johnson, James, p. 246.
28 There are, of course, numerous routine uses of the idiom to signify recognition that something is the case (e.g. Gen 3:7, 8:11, 20:6, 38:16), analogous to Buber's point about he)emin ki. But these are not my concern here.
29 It may be indicative that Cantwell Smith discusses the aleph-mem-nun root as the Hebrew term for ‘faith’, and although he notes that other roots in the Hebrew Bible, including yada(, depict the faith/belief relation, he does not linger to explore (Faith and Belief, p. 323, n. 59).
30 G. J. Botterweck, ‘yāda(’ in TDOT, vol. 5, p. 471.
31 See e.g. Joyce, Paul M., Ezekiel: A Commentary (LHBOTS 482; New York & London: T&T Clark, 2007), pp. 27–8.Google Scholar
32 So e.g., Jerusalem (5:13), the land of Israel (7:4), Sidon (28:22, 23), Egypt (29:6).
33 The material about ‘knowing that’ in Ezekiel and the Priestly writings tends to be more familiar than that in Deuteronomy and deuteronomistic writings because of the well-known essays of Zimmerli, Walther, ‘I Am Yahweh’ and ‘Knowledge of God According to the Book of Ezekiel’ in his I Am Yahweh (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982; English trans. by Stott, Douglas; ed. and introduced by Brueggemann, Walter), pp. 1–28, 29–98Google Scholar. To be sure, Zimmerli touches briefly on the deuteronom(ist)ic texts in the latter essay (pp. 51–3), but insofar as they do not ‘contribute anything essential to the question of this literary form's origin and original setting . . . [and] are of interest only in relation to the subsequent history and secondary employment of the formula’, his religio-historical angle of vision finds little of interest here.
34 Here and subsequently biblical translations are NRSV.
35 I develop the argument of this paragraph more fully in my ‘How Appropriate is “Monotheism” as a Category for Biblical Interpretation?’, in Stuckenbruck, Loren T. and North, Wendy E. S. (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism (JSNTSS 263; London and New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), pp. 216–34.Google Scholar
36 Comparable in idiomatic terms is 1 Sam 14:17, where Saul's roll-call reveals that Jonathan and his armour-bearer ‘were not there’ ()en yonathan . . .) – the point is not non-existence but absence.
37 Compare the royal lover's depiction of his beloved as ‘one’, i.e. the one and only, despite the remarkably extensive alternatives available to him – ‘sixty queens, eighty concubines, maidens without number’ (Song of Songs 6:8–9).
38 This ‘Kenite hypothesis’ was once widely held, and still has advocates; see Blenkinsopp, J., ‘The Midianite-Kenite Hypothesis Revisited and the Origins of Judah’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 33 (2008), pp. 131–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
39 Rahab's wording is slightly less precise than that in Deuteronomy, for she speaks of Yhwh without the definite article, )elohim rather than ha)elohim (2:11b). One way of reading this within the world of the narrative is that Rahab is speaking without the theological nuance which might otherwise be expected, as she is still a newcomer to Israel's faith.
40 ‘Kindly’ renders the Hebrew hesed, the ‘steadfast love’ which is a prime characteristic of Yhwh himself (Exod 34:6–7).
41 The principle that Yhwh works in surprising and subversive ways is one with wide biblical resonance.
42 Perhaps comparable is the significance of Israel's crossing of the Jordan on dry ground both for Israel and for ‘all the people of the earth’ who will ‘know that’ (yada( ki) Yhwh is mighty (Josh 4:6–7, 23–4).
43 Dentan, Robert C., The Knowledge of God in Ancient Israel (New York: Seabury Press, 1968)Google Scholar.
44 Ibid., pp. 38–9.
45 In other passages, Dentan chooses his words more carefully – e.g. ‘In ancient Israel . . . genuine knowledge involved the whole of a man's personality – his mind, his feelings, and his deeds . . . the most important truths are those that are apprehended not with the mind only, but with the total being of a man’ (pp. 40, 41). The passage cited, however, is a reminder that rhetorical exaggeration can be counter-productive.
46 See e.g. Rom 10:9, 1 Cor 12:3, 2 Cor 4:5, Phil 2:11, although my formulation is not precisely that of Paul, who in each passage depicts speaking this affirmation about Jesus rather than believing it as such (even though, of course, for Paul the two belong together). One might also include John's climactic statement of purpose in his gospel: ‘These things are written that you may believe that (pisteuete hoti) Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31).
