Theologian · Contemporary
Abraham Joshua Heschel
1907–1972 · Depth theology; prophetic Judaism
Scion of Hasidic rebbes, professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Jewish interlocutor of Cardinal Bea and Paul VI during the drafting of Nostra Aetate, whose silence on any mission to the Jews he did much to secure.
Heschel escaped Warsaw in 1939 and lost his mother and sisters in the Shoah. Man Is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1955) begin from radical amazement before the ineffable and argue that the Bible is not man's theology but God's anthropology: God is in search of man, and the prophets, studied in The Prophets (1962), are those who share the divine pathos, God's passionate concern for the world. The Sabbath (1951) reads the seventh day as a palace in time, and Heavenly Torah sets the schools of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Ishmael side by side as two standing ways of receiving revelation. He marched at Selma with Martin Luther King, opposed the Vietnam war, and insisted that “no religion is an island.”
Why he matters: He is the Jewish theologian most read in Catholic seminaries, whose depth theology John C. Merkle and others have made a Catholic subject; his meetings with Bea and Paul VI shaped Nostra Aetate 4, and his Prophets gave the biblical theology of the social encyclicals a voice. His doctrine of the divine pathos is the modern challenge to the impassible God of the schools that Catholic theology, from Maritain to Weinandy, has had to answer.
Where to be careful
He denies the Incarnation and the Church's reading of the prophets, his God of pathos is hard to square with the simplicity and immutability defined at Vatican I unless read as the language of revelation rather than of metaphysics, and his insistence that Jews not be objects of mission goes beyond what Nostra Aetate said. His aniconism, his theology of wonder, his Sabbath and his prophetic ethics are nourishment for any Catholic, and the Church's rejection of antisemitism is in part his legacy.
Reading
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God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of JudaismAbraham Joshua Heschel · Radical amazement, revelation and the deed; the central statement.
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The ProphetsAbraham Joshua Heschel · The divine pathos and the prophetic consciousness.
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The Genesis of Faith: The Depth Theology of Abraham Joshua HeschelJohn C. Merkle · A Catholic theologian's study of his thought.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.