Sárospataki Füzetek 20. (2016)
2016 / 2. szám - ARTICLES / STUDIEN - György Kustár: Ont he Slopes of Sinai - Some Hermeneutical Questions in Light of the Kabbalistic and Historical Critical Exegesis
On the Slopes of Sinai - Some Hermeneutical Questions is not as radical as the grammatical.91 This means that the spiritual dimension is not disconnected from the Scripture’s self-identical meaning structure, as the new linguistic logic created by the radical exegetical tools is. Although we cannot go as far as Kabbalist did in their radicalism, hermeneutically we are not far from their position. The text as we can understand it is indeed a powerful medium, in which to a certain extent the divine and human, the author and the recipient of the text, are both absorbed.92 The textual reality is indeed a location of the encounter between God and human, a realm where horizons melt together.93 As compelling as this theory might be, we have to face serious questions concerning this proposal. The mystical view of the Scripture as the shape of the divine seems to fade when we emphasize the sovereignty of God who has the freedom not to be present in the written Word for the reader if God wills. The even more confusing quandary emerges when we speak about the sermon as the word of God.94 For Karl Barth, at least, the solution of this problem is to assert the radical discontinuity between the human and the divine word. The problem of this theology is its one-sidedness that oversees the bound which indeed exist between God and his word and the recipient of that word in the form of covenant. The extreme separation of divine and human reality leads to the passive role of the reader or listener and to the overwhelming activity of the divine. Moreover, this model does not solve the historical issue, but further enforces it, since it declares the text as a pure document that needs God’s illuminating presence to transform to the Word of God. According to a covenantal theory, there is a possibility to assume that God by His own free decision bound himself to the text and makes him accessible through the encounter with it. Similarly, in the sermon, the identical covenantal bind applies: God is present where he is proclaimed, since he is bound by his own promise. This is not a magical view, but helps to comprehend the Scriptures in terms closer to the mystical than to the rigid historical-scientific model. What is applicable from the kabbalists is that the sacred text is not only a mirror of a historical development of ideas or cubic rituals. This model leaves room for a historical study also; however, we have to assume that it only has limited significance, as the interest is focused on the textual reality rather than its historical formation, and gains its meaning from analyzing the structural elements and inter-textual connections between elements of the text and between reader and text. The assumption that the text reflects the intention of God, and the whole process of canonization has its origin in the divine intention must be elaborated very 91 Ibid., 252. 92 Idei already made this comparison in his Absorbing Perfection, but he emphasized more the collision of horizons than the absorbing melting process. Cf. Idel, op. cit, 18. 93 Lesslie Newbigin, from a contextual perspective affirms that the "Bible as that body of literature [that] - primarily but not only in narrative form - renders accessible to us the character and actions and purposes of God." Cf. Newbigin, Lesslie: Foolishness to the Greeks - The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids, Eerdmanns, 1986, reprint 2003), 59. 94 See DeVries, Dawn: Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher, 100. 2016-2 Sárospataki Füzetek 20. évfolyam 49
