8 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
about faith legitimately only then when the eye remains directed upon the cos-
mic margin, never given as object, at which faith is given a habitation.^33The fascinating caveat of the italicized words is left unexplained here, but Buber
clearly suspects that prevailing methods in the study of religion will miss the
mark as long as they lack a transcendent orientation (to a “margin... never given
as object”). That this criticism appears in Kingship of God is itself remarkable,
given that in this work Buber intended to demonstrate his scholarly credentials,
with a belated Habilitationsschrift meant to secure him a position at the Hebrew
University.^34 It is a testament to the distance between Buber and what he called
“official scholarship.”^35
Nonetheless, in Kingship of God, Buber represents himself as a biblical schol-
ar, hewing to scholarly conventions as viewed from an informed outsider’s per-
spective. This gives the work a sense of performance; Buber is playing at schol-
arship, although with his own livelihood at stake.^36 But the performance is so
effective that scholars have been moved to argue for a stronger appreciation of
Buber’s status as a Religionswissenschaftler. They emphasize that I and Thou was
originally intended to lay the groundwork for a multipart work in comparative
religion and had its origins in Buber’s 1922 Frankfurt lectures, “Religion as Pres-
ence.”^37 Among the notes from these lectures are plans for a larger book series,
in which I and Thou was to be a first installment.^38 Stroumsa remarks that “very
few of its readers... have read it as an introduction to the study of religious phe-
nomena, and Buber, quite wisely, never bothered to enlighten them on the book’s
original meaning in the mind of its author.”^39 This implies that Buber was happy
to be seen the way the readers of I and Thou preferred to see him, as an existen-
tialist sage and spiritual guide. Stroumsa thinks nevertheless that these plans
show that “the comparative study of religious phenomena stood at the very centre
of Buber’s intellectual life, from his early years on.” Zank agrees, arguing that
Buber’s abandonment of his systematic plans in comparative religion indicates
not a turning away from the field but “an increasingly sophisticated awareness of
problems related to the study of religion.”^40 Zank goes further than Stroumsa in
his ultimate judgment on Buber’s contribution. Where Stroumsa concludes that
“Buber never approached scholarship with the demanding exclusiveness that it
requires,”^41 Zank thinks that attention to his scholarly endeavors can clarify “the
taxonomic difficulty of classifying the author and his multifarious work.”^42 For
Zank, it makes more sense to call Buber a scholar of religious studies than any-
thing else—even a philosopher. I would add that in Buber’s unrealized plans of
research in comparative religion, the final volume would often be the same: “The
Religious Power and Our Time (The Power and the Kingdom).” The telos of Bu-
ber’s scholarship was theopolitics.
Whether or not Buber is currently respected as a serious biblical scholar,
he was a renowned teacher of Bible.^43 Buber’s position in this respect was close