Concepts of Scripture in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 185a function of a human “anthropomorphizing” tendency. He Himself has
chosen to meet human beings on their “ground” of space and time as a
“speaking person.”16 It is not that we create God in our image — conceiv-
ing of Him as, say, a God of love on the model of our own love experience.
Rather, as Rosenzweig says in his famous magnum opus, Th e Star of Re-
demption, “we love as God loves and because God loves.”17
God’s appearances, however, are always fl eeting — and He can never be
permanently identifi ed with any thing, force, person, or creature in the
world. He may take up “temporary residence” in certain objects, persons,
situations, or places — but He is never the “God of ” those objects, persons,
situations, or places. One might call such manifestations “temporary in-
carnation,” although it is not certain that Buber and Rosenzweig actually
understand divine-human encounters quite this way. Oft en one senses that
they experience God as “refl ected” in things or “hidden behind” things —
rather than residing, even temporarily, in things. God is never permanently
incarnate in any particular place, thing, or person. Buber and Rosenzweig
testify to having experienced encounters such as these personally. Th eir ex-
istentialist philosophy, wherein philosophers do not strive to be objective
beholders of Being but rather accept themselves as fi nite, concrete subjects
who are inextricably implicated in their philosophy, is properly called “ex-
periencing philosophy.” For Buber and Rosenzweig, the Bible and other
texts, traditions, and practices were legitimated not by reason or by agree-
ment with the principles of this or that philosophic system but by reso-
nance with concrete, individual experience in its totality.
Buber and Rosenzweig did not merely legitimate the Bible from the
standpoint of their own religious experience, however. Th ey complemented
their orientation to the Bible by regarding it also as a source of legitimation
for personal experience. Ultimately, they could not remain content with in-
dividual experience as entirely self-legitimating. Th ey sought sanction for
their own dialogical experience in the sacred writings of their people and
tradition and especially in the Bible. Eventually, they came to see the Bible
as the quintessential and paradigmatic example of the dialogical orienta-
tion — a foundational text that both introduced the dialogical perspective
into the history of the spirit and was the most eff ective in bringing about
its proliferation.18
It should not surprise us, then, to fi nd echoes of Buber’s and Rosen-
zweig’s experience of God in their interpretations of the Bible, as well
as reverberations of what they might have regarded as a “biblical” God-
orientation in accounts of their personal religious experience. Buber, for