I wish first and foremost to draw attention to the constancy with which Genesis says of Jehovah, but never, to my knowledge, of the Elohim, that he appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; this in itself presupposes that he was not the immediate content of their consciousness, as those think who propose revelation as the one and only first principle of explanation. No less noteworthy is the way the patriarchs at significant moments call Jehovah by name as one calls someone whom one wishes to detain, or who should show himself.
Schelling, F.W.J., Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology.
. . .
The original human race had, in the relatively-One and eternal [Elohim], in fact really understood the true, the essentially-One and eternal. Only the advent of the second god [Jehovah] brings consciousness to the point where it distinguishes the essentially-eternal, which in the merely accidentally-eternal had been the true, the genuine god—where it distinguishes the essentially-eternal from that which was so only for one era.
. . .
The true god is mediated for him by the natural god not just transiently, but constantly, for him the true god is never the existing god, but constantly only the god coming to be, which in itself would suffice to explain the name “Jehovah,” in which that same concept of coming to be is pre-eminently expressed. Abraham’s religion does not therefore consist in his abandoning that god of the primal time, and becoming untrue to him, in fact it is the heathens who do that; the true god himself was revealed to Abraham only in that god of the primal time, and is thus indivisible from him, indivisible from the god who always was, the El Olam, as he is called.
. . .
Just as the true god is for him the same as the El Olam, similarly this true god is the same as the god of heaven and earth; for as such was once worshipped the god common to the whole human race. For Abraham, Jehovah is not a materially different god from this one, for him he is simply the true god of heaven and earth.
. . .
But it cannot eliminate it for the present, it will therefore overcome this limitation only to the extent that it recognizes the true god as the god indeed now merely appearing, but at the same time as the god who at some time shall be. Seen from this side, the religion of Abraham is pure authentic monotheism, but this is for him not the religion of the present—in the present his monotheism is subject to the restriction of mythology—certainly, though, it is for him the religion of the future; the true god is the one who shall be, that is his name. When Moses asks under which name he should proclaim the god who will lead the people out of Egypt, this god answers “I shall be the I shall be”; here, thus, where the god speaks in his own person, the name is translated from the third person into the first, and it would be quite inadmissible to find here too the expression of the metaphysical eternity or immutability of God.
. . .
We earlier explained the name “Jehovah” as the name of the one who is coming to be—perhaps this was its initial meaning, but according to that explanation it is, in the case of Moses, the name of the future one, of the one who is now only coming to be, who will one day exist, and all his pledges too concern the future.
In the history of theology proper, debates have often flared up between “personalist” and “classical” conceptions of God. The personalists claiming that God must be dynamic, dialectal, relational, perhaps even in time, perhaps even a God whose future is open; the Classical theists claiming that God must be metaphysically simple, timeless, immutable, and impassable. Both sides appeal to both scripture and philosophical considerations; the personalists saying that the bible presents us with a relational God, and that God must change to create ex-nihilo, and God cannot will evil; the Classical theists claiming that creation ex-nihilo, and God’s aseity is demanded by the bible and these things imply simplicity and impassibility when interrogated philosophically.
Schelling, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, finds, in the Hebrew bible, a conception of God which pushes towards the classical God, and one which pushes towards the personalist God, he affirms both as one and the same God. For Schelling (drawing on the biblical criticism of that time, whether that criticism is correct or not historically is a different issue which I will not comment on here), the “Elohim” conception is the essentially-One, eternal, universal, absolutely transcendent, and primordial God; Jehovah, on the other hand, is the conception of God with a name, he is one who becomes with creatures, he is the God of specific people, and he is the God who reveals himself, who even appears (through angels).
However, Schelling claims that within the biblical narrative this Jehovah is simply identified with the “El Olam” transcendent primal God, revealing that God as the one that becomes; rather than one who “exists” (I read this as referring to “being” in the Parmenidean sense: immutable and simple), he “comes to be.” This God reveals himself to Moses as the one who “shall be:” his determination is temporal; it is in the future. This God is not merely a primordial God relegated to the mythical realm who appears, but he is the primordial God who appears and who will be and is in fact not determined in mythic time but in the unfolding of time, and in the future, in his future action. His “existence” is in the future.
Schelling is largely basing his reading of the God of the Hebrew bible from the redaction criticism of his time, which, although I have not studied enough on the issue to have an informed opinion, I tend to be skeptical of. However, the value of Schelling’s insights here seems to me to be with regards to theology proper and how to approach the issue. The God of the bible is the God which the classical theists search for: the first cause, the eternal ground of reality, the unique unity; but he is also the dynamic and relational personal God that appears and interacts in transient time whose existence is determined by the future, by what he will do in the future.
This idea has deep metaphysical implications. The implication is that the ground of all existence, the first transcendent cause of reality, is not “being,” but becoming. Parmenides, who may be called the patriarch of “being” ontology writes:
The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for anything not to be, is the way of. conviction, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that something must needs not be, – that, I tell thee, is a wholly untrustworthy path. For you cannot know what is not – that is impossible – nor utter it; For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.
Parmenides, On Nature, 2.4–3.1.
One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In it are very many tokens that what is, is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one (ὡς ἀγένητον ἐὸν καὶ ἀνώλεθρόν ἐστιν, ἐστι γὰρ οὐλομελές τε καὶ ἀτρεμὲς ἠδ’ ἀτέλεστον).
Parmenides, On Nature, 8.1–5, 9–13, 19–21, 25–32.
. . .
And, if it came from nothing, what need could have made it arise later rather than sooner? Therefore must it either be altogether or be not at all.
. . .
How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future (εἰ γὰρ ἔγεντ’, οὐκ ἔστι, οὐδ’ εἴ ποτε μέλλει ἔσεσθαι).
. . .
Wherefore all holds together, for what is; is in contact with what is (Τῷ ξυνεχὲς πᾶν ἐστιν· ἐὸν γὰρ ἐόντι πελάζει). Moreover, it is immovable in the bonds of mighty chains, without beginning and without end (ἄναρχον ἄπαυστον); since coming into being and passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them away. It is the same and it rests in the same-self place, abiding in itself (Ταὐτόν τ’ ἐν ταὐτῷ τε μένον καθ’ ἑαυτό τε κεῖται). And thus it remaineth constant in its place; for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit that holds it cast on every side.
As we can see, Parmenides—in his thinking about ontology—posits being as immutable and absolutely complete. Much of the classical theist tradition—as well as the generally metaphysical tradition from Plato onwards—has followed the basic impulse of Parmenides: to ground reality in stable being. This way of thinking evolves into Aristotle’s unmoved mover, Plotinus’s “one,” and these are brought into the Christian tradition eventually being taken up by the (perhaps most influential) Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas. God in this tradition is the uncaused first cause, the unmoved first mover, the highest telos, whose telos is himself. The greatest cosmological and teleological arguments, Thomas’s five ways, Duns Scotus’s first principle, Leibniz’s cosmological argument and so on, largely point to this God.
However, there are a few major problems with this model. Although the cosmological arguments are—to my mind—largely successful (with a few tweaks here and there), the largest problem for theism is theodicy: the problem of evil. The classical God contains all of time, all of history, from the beginning of creation to the eschaton and everything in between, God is the ground of all time all the world and all that happens in it. This includes the Holocaust, children dying of cancer, people being tormented to death, atomic bombs being dropped and so on and so forth. There have been many attempts to deal with this, without going into the weeds on the issue, I will just say that in the end, one is usually pushed into Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds; a claim that I for one, find phenomenologically extremely unpersuasive. Another problem is the bible, the God of the bible—YHWH—certainly seems like a God who is a person, who condemns Nineveh to destruction, and then forgives them after repentance, who pleads with his people, who grieves, who gives conditional commands, who prophesies conditional prophesies, and who acts within history. Another problem is that of love, love requires reciprocity and freedom; again, this issue has been discussed many times in many works, but it remains an issue for many.
Schelling proposes a different approach. For him, the ground of all being, the primal creator God of all reality, is the dynamic personal God. Jehovah is a god, a god with a future, a god who is not yet all he will be, but he is also the God. One cannot propose such a theology without a concomitant ontology, one that would without a doubt clash with the metaphysical tradition influenced by Parmenides. If the ground of being is in fact a dialectical and dynamic reality, which creates the world, but then interacts with it and it more because of it, if he actually becomes who he is through his creation, then creation is itself dialectical, undetermined, and essentially creative itself, determining its ground as much as its ground creates and determines in. One way in which Schelling develops this theology and ontology—a dynamic and dialectical theology and ontology of freedom—is in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. In that work, he sets up the problem with Classical theism in the following way:
Absolute causality in One Being leaves only unconditional passivity to all others. This entails the dependence of all beings in the world on God, and that even their continued existence is only an ever-renewed creation in which the finite being is produced not as an undefined generality but rather as this definite, individual being with such and such thoughts, strivings, actions and no others.
. . .
Is there any other way out of this argument than to save personal freedom within the divine being itself, since it is unthinkable in opposition to omnipotence; to say that man is not outside of, but rather in, God and that his activity itself belongs to the life of God?
. . .
God is not a god of the dead but of the living. It is not comprehensible how the most perfect being could find pleasure even in the most perfect machine possible. However one may conceive of the way in which beings proceed from God, the way can never be mechanical, not mere production or installation | whereby the product is nothing for itself; just as little can it be emanation where what flows out remains the same as that from which it flows, therefore nothing individual, nothing independent. The procession [Folge] of things from God is a self-revelation of God. But God can only reveal himself to himself in what is like him, in free beings acting on their own, for whose Being there is no ground other than God but who are as God is. He speaks, and they are there.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
The problem, as Schelling sees it, is that with the classical conception of God, all creation something like a machine, all facts about it being definite, passively caused by God. This includes rational beings, with all their thoughts, strivings actions, and so on, all of them are absolutely created definitely and determined by the one absolute causality in God. This is the classical ground of all being, the unmoved mover, absolute simplicity. This leads to another problem: that of creation ex-nihilo. Schelling claims that this “mechanistic” (I’m sure classical theists would object to this term, but in the way Schelling uses it—in the sense of effects being reduced to their causes and causes necessarily producing their effects—it seems appropriate) view of God reduces creation to emanation, in which what is called “creation” is really just an extension of God himself, not individual agents.
Some who argue for the classical conception of God use the analogy of a narrative: we are agents within a story, responsible for our actions within the story, yet the whole story, from beginning to end, is written by God, and is known by him. This analogy has many problems, but it demonstrates Schelling’s point. Any story can have many characters with many personalities, moral virtues and moral failings, with different passions, hatreds, relationship, goals, fears, and so on and so forth; however, all are ultimately reducible to the author’s imagination, the whole story is merely an extension of the author, a reflection of the author. The relationship between the author and the characters is not an “I-thou” relationship, at least not in any more than a metaphorical way, it is ultimately a subject-object relationship, although it is attempting to mimic and “I-thou” relationship in the minds of the reader.
Schelling finds this unsatisfactory, since as he says, “God is not a god of the dead but of the living,” and Schelling cannot see how this God could “find pleasure even in the most perfect machine possible.” Schelling wants to conceive of God in such a way that God can reveal himself to actual free beings, beings who can act on their own; he still wants to say that these free beings have their ground in God (saying otherwise would move one outside of Abrahamic theism, and would lead one to atheism, at least with regards to the creator) but that they are like God in that they can act in novel ways, act in ways in which they are the full cause of their actions. Schelling’s conception of God involves the conception of the ground of existence:
Since nothing is prior to, or outside of [außer], God, he must have the ground of his existence in himself. All philosophies say this; but they speak of this ground as of a mere concept without making it into something real [reell] and actual [wirklich]. This ground of his existence, which God has in himself, is not God considered absolutely, that is, in so far as he exists; for it is only the ground of his existence. It [the ground] is nature—in God, a being indeed inseparable, yet still distinct, from him.
. . .
Here there is no first and last because all things mutually presuppose each other, no thing is another thing and yet no thing is not without another thing. God has in himself an inner ground of his existence that in this respect precedes him in existence; but, precisely in this way, God is again the prius [what is before] of the ground in so far as the ground, even as such, could not exist if God did not exist actu.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
God has a ground of existence, he exists, and thus has a ground, yet that ground is in himself. Schelling here deals with God’s aseity, God’s self-existence. God cannot simply be conceived of as merely the ground of that which exists (for example, as Paul Tillich conceives of God), but as a real existence. Therefore, he has his own ground, in himself. This is not something separable from God—as though the ground could exist independently of the existence of God, or is somehow a different reality, or as though one can point to God without also pointing to his ground—but rather, it is dialectically related necessarily to the reality of God. This ground of God precedes God (not temporally, or sequentially, but logically), yet only exists, and can only exist, as that which grounds the reality of God, thus it depends on the reality of God.
One metaphor I might use is that of a tree (Schelling uses the metaphor of light and gravity, which I, being scientifically illiterate, found not all that helpful for me), the tree exists as rooted in the ground, the reality of the tree is grounded in the roots holding the tree in the ground, yet, the roots cannot exist without a tree, even if you cut down the tree, the roots will produce the tree anew, if the tree dies, the roots die, the tree requires the two aspects. Another metaphor might be that of color, each color exists as conceptually distinct from other colors, and each one grounds the others; so, if the entire world was red, the concept of red could not exist, neither could the concept of color, since there would be nothing outside of it determining it as distinct, so red is grounded in the concept of color itself, which can only exist insofar as individual colors exist distinctly.
Schelling, further on in the text, continues this conception:
We recognize rather that the concept of becoming is the only one appropriate to the nature of things. But they cannot become in God, considered in an absolute manner, since they are different from him toto genere or infinitely, to speak more correctly. In order to be divided from God, they must become in a ground different from God. Since, however, nothing indeed can be outside of God, this contradiction can only be resolved by things having their ground in that which in God himself is not He Himself, that is, in that which is the ground of his existence. If we want to bring this way of being closer to us in human terms, we can say: it is the yearning the eternal One feels to give birth to itself. The yearning is not the One itself but is after all co-eternal with it. The yearning wants to give birth to God, that is, unfathomable unity, but in this respect there is not yet unity in the yearning itself. Hence, it is, considered for itself, also will; but will in which there is no understanding and, for that reason, also not independent and complete will, since the understanding is really the will in will. Nevertheless it is a will of the understanding, namely yearning and desire for the latter; not a conscious but a divining will [ahnender Wille] whose divining is the understanding. We are speaking of the essence of yearning, considered in and for itself, that likely must be brought into view, although it has long been repressed by the higher things that have arisen out of it, and although we cannot grasp it by the senses but rather only with the mind and [in] thought.
. . .
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom.
But, corresponding to the yearning, which as the still dark ground is the first stirring of divine existence, an inner, reflexive representation is generated in God himself through which, since it can have no other object but God, God sees himself in an exact image of himself. This representation is the first in which God, considered as absolute, is realized [verwirklicht], although only in himself; this representation is with God in the beginning and is the God who was begotten in God himself.
Here we see more of what this “grounding” actually is: it is yearning. The ground is pure will directed words God, who is the object of that will, the understanding of that will. God is the will directed in understanding, intuition, intuiting an object (either God himself, or God in relation to creation). The yearning is nothing in itself, it must yearn towards something understood, yet there cannot be understanding without the yearning to understand without the realization of that will. God’s existence in himself is the yearning directed towards himself as absolute, the absolute unity of will and its object.
In this sense God is—for Schelling—even in himself, “coming to be,” Jehovah causing to become, willing to be, he exists, but not in the Parmenidean sense of immutable stable being, but rather as dynamic willing towards its object, its understanding, its realization. We have a hint, in the beginning, of the above quote, about how this relates to the creation of rational free agents: humans have the ground of their free agency, grounded in the ground of God, but not in God as God’s directed will entirely, their existence is certainly caused by God’s directed will in his realized understanding, but the direction and object of their own free will is not.
Here we have the German idealist dialectical approach giving us a conception of God which remains the ground of all existence, the pure yearning in God existing in (and only in) God’s representation of that will as directed understanding. All that exists, exists in God. But God himself is not absolute simplicity, not absolute “oneness,” not an unmoved mover, he is that which is constantly moving, he is a dialectic of yearning and understanding, of willing and realizing will. Thus, God is not pure actuality, he is pure potentiality, a potency which is constantly actualizing in himself, but not exhausting the potentiality (thus allowing the freedom for creation), he is A sei, infinite, absolute, yet absolutely free. Because God is free, he can also create free beings who, in a partial sense, can ground their own actions.
Musing on Theology 