Chapter 04. The Two Servants of Jahweh (The Shaking of the Foundations) (Tillich, Paul)

Now, the Eternal cries, bring your case forward. Now, Jacob's King cries, state your proofs. Let us hear what happened in the past, that we may ponder it, or show me what is yet to be, that we may watch the outcome. Yes, let us hear what is to come, that we maybe sure that you are gods; come do something or other that we may marvel at the sight! Why, you are things of naught; you can do nothing at all! Here is one I have raised from the earth; I have called him by name from the east. He shall trample down rulers as morter, like a potter treading clay, now, we predicted this beforehand. Who foretold it, that we might hail it true? No one predicted it, no one announced it, not a word ever fell from your mouths. As for your idols, I see no one, not a prophet in their midst to answer my inquiries. They are all an empty nothing; all they do is utterly inane. Their metal images are all futile, all vain. Isaiah 41:21-26, 28-29.

A dramatic scene is described in the words of the prophet. Jahweh, as judge and party at the same time, calls the gods of the nations to a heavenly disputation, to be witnessed by the peoples of the world. They are to discuss which god has proved to be the true God. The true God must be He Who is the Lord of history. The final decision is that Jahweh is the God of history, and therefore the god who is really God. Jahweh is the God of history, because He has shown through His prophets that He understands the meaning of history, and that He knows the past and the future, the beginning and end, of all things. In showing that, He proves that He makes history, and that it is He who has raised Cyrus, the destroyer of the power of the Jewish nation and the liberator of its remnants. The gods of the nations cannot answer. For they did not know of that act; they did not predict it; and they did not perform it. The disputation ends with the pronouncement that these gods are all vain, that their works are as nothing, and that their images are as mere wind and illusion. It is Jahweh alone who is God, for He is the God of history.

Seldom in history have men been as disturbed about history as we are today. We desire urgently to catch at least a glimpse of the future, of wisdom and prophecy. It is not just a few thousand Jewish exiles, to whom our prophet speaks by the rivers of Babylon, but ten million exiles from all over the world, who try passionately to penetrate the darkness of their future. And with them, a great many other men long for a strong, inspiring word concerning the future of mankind. But those who have the power to shape the future fundamentally contradict each other. Political leaders declare solemnly that it is almost impossible to carry the burden of their office at this time. Ministers at home and in the army can only describe in negative terms the object of their people's death and sacrifice. Those who have to speak to the people of the enemy soon realize that they can say nothing of real promise on the political plane. Only the prophets of disaster-without- hope give evidence of complete certainty. But they are not the prophets of God.

We should not expect the darkness of our history to be dispersed soon, either by new conferences or by clever political strategy. Our darkness, uncertainty, and helplessness in regard to the future have depths that are more profound. We do not receive an answer concerning the future, because we ask questions of those who cannot know the future, the gods who are as vanity, the gods of the nations, who are as nothing beside the God of history. Every man tries to wrest an oracle from the god of his nation through the mouths of his priests, the mighty and wise. And every man succeeds. All men throughout the world are flooded with oracles from the gods of their nations and the gods of other nations. All men compare their oracles with others, and attempt to determine the most credible ones. But the darkness simply increases. All men speak of the future in terms of their own nations. Yet even the greatest nation is as nothing to the God of history. For no nation or alliance of nations can say that it is the meaning,the purpose of history, that it is the nation or alliance which holds the knowledge of the past and the power to shape the future. The entire assembly of national gods must fall finally under the Judgment of Jahweh, which condemns it as a thing of naught, as a thing incapable of doing anything at all. We receive so many oracles, but no prophecies, only because we refuse to turn to the source of prophecy, the God of history.

Jahweh revealed Himself through Israel pain as the God Who is the first and the last, the beginning and the end, of history. A complete national breakdown alone made the remnants of Israel ready to receive this revelation in its universal significance. But whenever the Jewish nation used that revelation as an excuse for national pride, and transformed Jahweh into a merely national god, another breakdown followed. For Jahweh as a national god is always condemned by Jahweh the God of history. The mystery of Judaism today lies in that fact. Our prophet describes two very great figures: Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire, the world-figure of his time, called by the prophet, the shepherd and the anointed, the man of God's counsel; and the servant of Jahweh who represents the saving power of innocent suffering and death. The glorious founder of the Empire had to be the servant of the servant of Jahweh. He had to liberate the remnants of Israel, out of which the suffering servant arose.

I feel that the only solution of the historical problem today lies in that prophetic concept. For there are two forces in our battered world. One is the force of those who, like the suffering servant of God, exist, unseen, in all countries. We do not know where these servants live, or what they will make of the future. But we know that they exist, and that their suffering is not vain. They are the hidden tools of the God of history. They are the aged and the children, the young men and the young women, the persecuted and the imprisoned, and all those sacrificed for the sake of the future, for one small stone in the building of the Kingdom of God, the cornerstone of which is the perfect Servant of God. And the second force of the world is the force of those who, like Cyrus, rule Empires, and incorporate all the shame and greatness of Empires. They are the men of God's counsel, because they carry through His purposes in the service of the suffering servants of Jahweh. But they are not aware that they are instruments, as Cyrus was not aware that he was God's man of counsel. They do not know what shall become of their deeds. And if we look to them in our attempts to grasp the future, we shall not know either; if we look to them, we shall always remain in darkness. But if we turn to the true servants and to the true God whom they serve, the God of history, we shall know of the future. We can find the solution of the riddle of history as a whole, and of our particular istory, in the figure of Cyrus in the service of the servant of Jahweh.

If we turn to the true servants and to the true God whom they serve, the God of history, we shall know of the future. For example, we can find the solution of the riddle of history as a whole, and of our particular history, in the figure of Cyrus in the service of the servant of Jahweh. Chapter 5: Meditatioin: The Mystery of Time

Let us meditate on the mystery of time. Augustine points to the depth of this mystery, when he says, "If nobody asks me about it, I know. If I want to explain it to somebody who asks me about it, I do not know." There is something unspeakable about time, but this has not prevented the most profound religious minds from thinking and speaking about it. It is not vain speculation when the writer of the first part of the 90th Psalm confronts the eternity of God with the transitoriness of human existence. The melancholy experience of human finiteness drives him to utter the tremendous words of the psalm. It is not empty curiosity when Augustine tries, in his most personal book, the Confessions, to penetrate the ground of our temporality. We are not making an abstract statement, but are rather expressing a profound religious feeling, when we sing, "Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away." It is not mere philosophy, but a tragic feeling of life, which impels the earliest Greek philosophers to say tat all things must return to their origin, suffering punishment, "according to the order of time." It is not merely in the interest of systematic theory that the Fourth Gospel uses again and again the phrase "eternal life" as the expression of the highest good, which is ever present in Christ. It was a religious event when Meister Eckhardt pointed to the eternal now within the flux of time, and when Soren Kierkegaard pointed to the infinite significance of every moment as the now of decision.

Time is as inexhaustible as the ground of life itself. Even the greatest minds have each discovered only one aspect of it. But everyone, even the most simple mind, apprehends the meaning of time namely, his own temporality. He may not be able to express his knowledge about time, but he is never separated from its mystery. His life, and the life of each of us, is permeated in every moment, in every experience, and in every expression, by the mystery of time. Time is our destiny. Time is our hope. Time is our despair. And time is the mirror in which we see eternity. Let me point to three of the many mysteries of time: its power to devour everything within its sphere; its power to receive eternity within itself; and its power to drive toward an ultimate end, a new creation.

Mankind has always realized that there is something tearful about the flux of time, a riddle which we cannot solve, and the solution of which we could not stand. We come from a past which is no more; we go into a future which is not yet; ours is the present. The past is ours only in so far as we have it still present; and the future is ours only in so far as we have it already present. We possess the past by memory, and the future by anticipation. But what is the nature of the present itself? If we look at it closely, we must say: it is a point without extension, the point in which the future becomes the past; when we say to ourselves, "This is the present," the moment has already been swallowed by the past. The present disappears the very instant we try to grasp it. The present cannot be caught; it is always one. So it seems that we have nothing real neither the past nor the future, nor even the present. Therefore, there is a dreaming character about our existence, which the psalmist indicates, and which relgious visionaries have described in so many ways.

Time, however, could not even give us a place on which to stand, if it were not characterized by that second mystery, its power to receive eternity. There is no present in the mere stream of time; but the present is real, as our experience witnesses. And it is real because eternity breaks into time and gives it a real present. We could not even say now, if eternity did not elevate that moment above the ever-passing time. Eternity is always present; and its presence is the cause of our having the present at all. When the psalmist looks at God, for Whom a thousand years are like one day, he is looking at that eternity which alone gives him a place on which he can stand, a now which has infinite reality and infinite significance. In every moment that we say now , something temporal and something eternal are united. Whenever a human being says, "Now I am living; now I am really present", resisting the stream which drives the future into the past, eternity is. In each such Now eternity is made manifest; in every ral now, eternity is present. Let us think for a moment of the way in which we are living our lives in our period of history. Have we not lost a real present by always being driven forward, by our constant running, in our indefatigable activism, toward the future? We suppose the future to be better than any present; but there is always another future beyond the next future, again and again without a present, that is to say, without eternity. According to the Fourth Gospel eternal life is a present gift: he, who listens to Christ, has eternity already. He is no longer subject to the driving of time. In him the now becomes a now eternal. We have lost the real now, the now eternal; we have, I am afraid, lost eternal life in so far as it creates the real present.

There is another element in time, its third mystery, which makes us look at the future; for time does not return, nor repeat itself: it runs forward; it is always unique; it ever creates the new. There is within it a drive toward an end, unknown, never to be reached in time itself, always intended and ever fleeing. time runs toward the future eternal. This is the greatest of all the mysteries of time. It is the mystery of which the prophets, Christ, and the Apostles have spoken. The eternal is the solution of the riddle of time. Time does not drive toward an endless self-repetition, nor to an empty return to its beginning. Time is not meaningless. It has a hidden meaning salvation. It has a hidden goal the Kingdom of God. It brings about a hidden reality the new creation. The infinite significance of every moment of time is this: in it we decide, and are decided about, with respect to our eternal future.