Abstract
This paper argues that God, despite his Perfection, can have faith in us. The paper includes exegesis of various Midrasihc texts, so as to understand the Rabbinic claim that God manifested faith in creating the world. After the exegesis, the paper goes on to provide philosophical motivation for thinking that the Rabbinic claim is consistent with Perfect Being Theology, and consistent with a proper analysis of the nature of faith. Finally, the paper attempts to tie the virtue that faith can exhibit to the virtues associated with art, as it is understood by R. G. Collingwood. This association is particularly apt, given the Midrashic description of God as an artist. All of this is offered in response to Rabbi Moses Nachmanides who argued (against other important commentaries) that Abraham’s faith, in Genesis 15:6, wasn’t worthy of particular praise.
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Notes
A Midrashic collection, redacted circa. third century from texts dating back to the end of the first century.
There is an allusion here to Numbers 23:19 which is lost in translation.
These verses are cited in “From the bible to the rabbis” section below.
Not all Open Theists deny that there are true future contingents, but this denial is open to and common among, Open Theists.
To support the claim that ‘נאמן’ can be read as ‘having faith’, see Jubilees 17:15 (with thanks to Professor Michael Segal for the reference). An anonymous reviewer suggests that even if Moses is described as worthy of God’s faith, it doesn’t automatically entail that God has faith. Moses could be hypothetically worthy of God’s faith, even if God isn’t the sort of being that could have faith!
Deuteronomy 9:7, Isaiah 49:7, Jeremiah 42:5, Hosea 12:1, Psalms 19:8 and 111:7—the last two references apply the word not directly to God, but to His statutes, which are presented as fair.
The Septuagint (Habakuk 2:4) explicitly asserts that God has faith in righteous people. The Masoretic version of the same verse makes no such assertion.
Deuteronomy 32:4, Isaiah 11:5, Hosea 2:22, Psalm 33:4, Psalm 36:6, Psalm 40:11, Psalm 88:12, Psalm 89:2,6,9,25,34,50; Psalm 92:3, Psalm 96:13, Psalm 98:3, Psalm 100:5, Psalm 119:75,86,90,138, Psalm 143:1, Lamentations 3:23. In one instance, it’s negated of God: Job 4:18.
A collection of Midrashim, from texts dating back to the early third-century and earlier.
The wishes that get criticised all seem to be uttered by the able-bodied, wishing for super-human capabilities. Would this Midrash criticise a disabled person wishing, for example, that they had two arms, instead of one?
The Modeh Ani prayer attributes great faith to God (alluding to Lamentations 3:23). It seems to imply that we wouldn’t have woken up, each morning, had God not had faith in us. However, a proper reading of that prayer is best informed by this Midrash. God is a trustworthy custodian of our soul each night. The theme is developed further by Midrash Tehellim, Mizmor 25, upon which the prayer was almost certainly based. The prayer thus praises God not for His great faith, but for His great faithfulness (i.e., faith-worthiness).
Potentially redacted as late as the ninth century, but certainly containing older passages.
Most likely redacted in the fourth/fifth century.
I assume that (1) Plato endorses the identity of indiscernibles, and (2) Platonic forms are supposed to instantiate themselves perfectly. Constance Meinwald (1992) denies (2). From the Parmenides onwards, Plato was committed to the truth of ‘treehood is a tree’ and to the denial of the notion that forms instantiate themselves. She argues that he made these claims on the basis of the equivocality of ‘is’, corresponding to a number of different modes of predication (see also Michael Frede (1967, 1992)). Notwithstanding, I think I’m entitled to my assumptions for the following reasons: (a) I’m not interested here in what Plato really thought, but in how Plato had been received by those Rabbis under his influence; (b) even according to Meinwald, prior to the Parmendies, Plato thought that forms instantiate themselves, and that only forms perfectly instantiate themselves; and (3) the conjunction of my two assumptions provides a good way of explaining why Plato thought that the concrete, as opposed to the abstract, was irreparably corrupted.
Gesenius (1979, p. 293) suggests that ‘חסד’ can sometimes mean ‘disgrace’, by means of antiphrasis. This was anticipated by Rashi (who appeals to the Aramaic word ‘חסודא’) and by Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (citing Proverbs 25:10). Nachmanides rejects the idea that one Biblical word should have opposite meanings. He argues that ‘חסד’ always means lovingkindness, and reads the verse in question to be commenting on the nature of the bond between siblings which is broken by incest. Gaby Lebens has suggested, in conversation, a reading of the verse according to which the prohibition is motivated by lovingkindness—hoping to avoid birth-defects associated with incest. My explanation, however, is in the spirit of the commentaries of Ibn Caspi and Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser (better known as the Malbim). The approach is also hinted to by Ibn Ezra.
This is a reference to the Mishna in Tractate Avot 5:10.
I rule out the idea that God would create n universes where n is less than all of the acceptable universes but n > 1. Why would God choose to create an arbitrary number of universes, if one would suffice, or if He could create all of them at no extra cost? If you’re unmoved by this argument, and think that God might chose to create an arbitrarily selected n universes, it still seems as if, by choosing them, and not all possible universes, God is taking a plunge nonetheless.
Another two principles of plenitude state that what can be said about creating universes can be said about sustaining them too, see (Kraay 2010).
Rabbi Hasdai Crescas thought that God’s purposes for creating a universe simply couldn’t be satisfied by any finite number of universes, and hence, according to Crescas, God must have created the Theistic Multiverse. Kraay’s position is therefore represented in the world of Jewish philosophy (Harvery 2011; Feldman 2012).
For extensive references to this topic, including the literature concerning whether God can make arbitrary choices, see (Kraay 2008).
This is a contentious reading of Plato’s Third Man Argument. I merely contend that my presentation is a plausible reading of the Parmenides 13128ff. I also contend that, whether or not this was Plato’s argument, it is, nevertheless, a legitimate concern to hold against Plato’s theory of forms, at least pre-Parmendies. See footnote 14 above.
This paragraph echoes the core of Alvin Plantinga’s Free Will Defence (Plantinga 1977).
I shall argue that personhood requires emotions. Maimonides argues, in his Guide to the Perplexed, I.LIV, that God has no emotions. For Maimonides, the word ‘person’, as I am using it, cannot apply to God. My fully articulated position, which I simplify for the purposes of this paper, is that ‘God is a perfect person’ is literally true, relative to the story in which we live, but possibly meaningless, or false, when said of the same God outside of the story (Lebens 2015, Forthcoming). As far as Maimonides is concerned, on the other hand, it can never be literally true to say of God that He has emotions; or is a person.
For a more thorough exploration of these issues, see Anastasia Scrutton (2013).
Alexander Douglas has suggested to me, in correspondence, that:
the James-Lange thesis is a particularly strong version of the idea that emotions necessarily involve the body, which is very common from the Phaedo onwards. A weaker version would be that of Descartes: emotions require a body in the same way that sense-perceptions do. Maybe you can stoically control your crying, trembling, etc., but you still need a nervous system to have the emotions since it’s just part of what an emotion is that it involves nerves.
In response, and in place of an argument, I can only point out that I endorse Linda Zagzebski’s contention that a perfect God would be omnisubjective, and would know exactly what sense-perception is like, even though He doesn’t have sensory organs (Zagzebski 2013a, b). It seems that omnisubjectivity, as a notion, is bound to the doctrine that experiences typically mediated by physiology are, in principle, open to be had by an immaterial subject of experience. Accordingly, I deny that having nerves is part of what emotions are. If I were to develop an independent argument for this claim, I would start with Saul Kripke’s discussion of pain and C-fibres firing, at the end of Naming and Necessity (Kripke 1972).
Picard doesn’t claim that the advantages bought by emotion are in principle non-substitutable. She argues that we should work towards the creation of affective computers, because we don’t know of any other way to purchase these advantages (Picard 1997, p. 249).
For the notion of simultaneity required here, see (Stump and Kretzmann 1981).
Although it saves Divine impassability, the picture of an emotional God is complicated in other ways, when one locates God outside of time. He must be experiencing all sorts of emotions, as responses to distinct temporal stimuli, in one giant and simultaneous mental-event. Again, I’m using the word ‘simultaneous’ in a non-standard way here. See the previous footnote.
An anonymous reviewer raises a worthy objection. ‘Why can’t I have ‘faith’,’ the reviewer asks, ‘that my son’s basketball team will win their game—even though I don’t at all expect the opposing teams’ parents to want it to be true?’ I could envisage two lines of response: (1) it might be possible to have faith in such situations, but somehow blameworthy (just like it’s possible, but blameworthy to have beliefs without sufficient evidence). You can have faith that your son will do his best, but to have faith that he’ll win, is to have faith that equally worthy others will lose, and thus perhaps faith is the wrong attitude to have here; (2) some sports fans argue that it would be objectively good for their team to win out over others. When Leicester City won the Premier League, it was said to be a good think for English football, in that it demonstrated what could be achieved by smaller clubs with fewer resources. People had faith that Leicester would win, against the odds, and they afforded the proposition a positive evaluation. The first option is more concessive. It accepts that a positive evaluation is not constitutive of faith, but constitutive only of appropriate faith.
See https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices, see also (Chan 2012).
Dunnington’s (ms) account of faith places desire and disposition at its heart.
If God is outside of time, then the only sense in which the psychic can be prior to consciousness, and consciousness prior to the intellect, is if the priority is not chronological but logical.
An artist creates ‘in the same sense that Christians asserted, and neo-Platonists denied, that God created the world’ (Collingwood 1938, p. 129).
See footnote 30 above. Perhaps the best explanation of why faith can be a bad thing is because it’s placed in things and propositions that don’t deserve a positive evaluation.
Thankfully for us, God’s plans for the world didn’t need to pass through anonymous peer-review. It’s true that the Midrash has God consulting others—but they are neither peers, nor are they anonymous!.
See for example, Tanya, Iggeret Hakodesh: 13.
Bereshit Rabba 38:12.
See Tractate Baba Metzia 86b, based on Genesis 18:1–15.
To think of global faith in terms of these desires and dispositions comes close to Dunnington’s (ms) account of ‘saving faith’. It should be noted that Rashi seems to adopt this conception of faith but consistently reads verses of the Bible that seem to attribute faith to God, as attributing only trustworthiness to Him. Rashi might therefore agree with my conception of faith, and my understanding of its potential virtues, even though he most likely denies that God embodies this virtue.
I am grateful to Trent Dougherty, Daniel Howard-Snyder, and Jonathan Kvanvig, who first encouraged me to turn my attention to a systematic study of the nature and value of faith. I’m grateful to all of the participants at the summer seminar on the nature and value of faith, that took place in Bellingham Wa., in 2016. I’m grateful also to my students at The Drisha Institute for Jewish Studies, who spent the June of 2016 with me, learning Midrash and Jewish texts on the nature of faith—human and Divine. I’m grateful to Robert Hopkins and Robin Dembroff for allowing me to cite their unpublished work. I’m also grateful to my good and erudite friends, Alexander Douglas, Kent Dunnington and Naftali Goldberg who provided me, along with two very useful anonymous reviews, tremendously helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This whole project took on a life of its own, only after a very encouraging discussion with Elisabeth Camp, to whom I extend warm thanks. Thanks are also due to the guest editors of this Journal, for all of their help. This research was made possible through the support of a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. The opinions expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Religion Trust.
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Lebens, S. The life of faith as a work of art: a Rabbinic theology of faith. Int J Philos Relig 81, 61–81 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9600-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-016-9600-3