The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery

by Richard Elliott Friedman

Overview

Friedman probes a chain of mysteries that concern the presence or absence of God, including the connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky who each independently developed the idea of the death of God.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316294348
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/01/1995
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	825,486
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Editorial Reviews

Arguing that "the disappearance or death of God is a substantial part of this century's philosophical and literary legacy," Friedman (Hebrew, comparative literature, Univ. of California, San Diego) probes what he calls three mysteries: the gradual disappearance of God in the Hebrew scriptures, a topic recently considered by Jack Miles in his God: A Biography (LJ 3/1/95), a book Friedman refers to approvingly; Nietzsche's dictum, "God is dead," relating it admirably to the works of Dostoyevsky and the problem of ethics without God; and the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the Big Bang theory. Avoiding the type of Zen and... approach that degrades both religion and science, Friedman offers a credible discussion of contemporary physics and the return of the divine, doing no disservice to either but actually enhancing the relationship between them. For general readers as well as specialists.Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, N.J.

Library Journal

"The Disappearance of God", at once scholarly and popularly accessible, is packed with wonderful insights into scriptural narrative, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and cabala. Friedman notes that the narrative structure of Hebrew Scripture is marked by a disappearance of God--God's hiding of God's face to see what our end will be--that corresponds to an increasingly important role for human beings, a "coming of age" in Bonhoeffer's apt and often cited phrase. Each of the three parts of the book addresses a mystery related to the title (the disappearance of God in Hebrew Scripture, the death of God and madness in Nietzsche, and the relationship of religion to science), but it is the one mystery of the title, the disappearance of God, that binds the whole together. The disappearance is akin to what Thomas Sheehan earlier referred to as "the absolute absence of God," and it points Friedman toward a concluding moral reflection in which he maintains (as does cabala) that the structure of morality inheres in the structure of the universe. God's absolute absence is a paradoxical revelation: "There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God."

Steve Schroeder