Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 183How Is God Encountered, and
How Is He Encountered in the Bible?
Before we go on to speak in more detail about the modes and forms used
in characterizing the “texture” of the Bible, it is important that we ask, what
are the modes and forms by way of which God makes His presence known
or felt to human beings altogether, according to the religious testimony of
Buber and Rosenzweig? For them, the “encounter,” “meeting,” or “dialogue”
between God and human beings does not take place in some “extraterrito-
rial” dimension of “mystical” religious experience. It takes place in normal
individual and collective life. For example, we sense our very being and
birth as a gift , and intuit that we have not given ourselves to ourselves, and
so come to see ourselves as “created.” Sometimes we sense that an insight
has been placed within us or that a challenge has descended on us — an in-
sight or challenge that we could not have generated ourselves and that even
goes against our grain. As a part of this experience, we sense that we are
“commanded” to do this and not otherwise — that doing otherwise would
be unthinkable in the circumstances — and so experience “revelation.”
Sometimes, when we feel a hopeless anguish and sense that we have come
to a dead end, a “hand” seems to reach down to lift us up. When we feel
challenged to take that hand and not to revel in our despair, we intuit what
“redemption” can mean.11 For Buber and Rosenzweig, experiences such as
these, on both the individual and the collective level, can represent genuine
encounters with God and cannot always simply be reduced to “the uncon-
scious” or “mass psychology.” All reduction of the divine to the natural,
of the divine to the human, of the human to the natural, and so on — rep-
resents a stunting of experience. For those who have not shut themselves
off to the full range of human experience, for those who hold themselves
open to all aspects of experience in a spirit of “absolute empiricism,”12 en-
counter with the dimensions of creation, revelation, and redemption is
eminently possible.
Th e theology of Buber and Rosenzweig, then, is a kind of dialogical re-
ligious personalism, testifying to a personal interaction between God and
human individuals or groups, mediated by the events and “stories” of life —
whether modest or grand. Th is mode of interaction is to be distinguished
from the “philosophical mysticism” of classical metaphysics (wherein the
human intellect strives to unite with the divine intellect) as well as from
other forms of mystical experience (wherein human individuality and per-
sonality are overcome in favor of a striving for unity with the Godhead).13