A Just God?

One answer has to do with our historical situation. We live under the reign of secular enlightenment, and the seriousness of modern religious faith in the West seems to dissipate with every passing generation. Faith is typically treated as a matter of lifestyle or dismissed as fundamentalism. Toleration has become relativism, and religion is in danger of becoming a fixture in what Pangle calls our “cultural amusement park.” Modern humanity seems less and less capable of taking the most important things seriously.

Pangle has written previous books on Montesquieu, Locke, the American founding, postmodernism, and the moral aspects of international relations. In all of these, Pangle pursues a course informed, above all, by the critical perspective of ancient philosophy opened up anew by his teacher Leo Strauss. Pangle is less interested in the historical and literary claims of higher criticism than in learning the truths the Bible has to teach. In addition to being a study of the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis, Pangle’s book provides an enticing introduction to the richly provocative debate about fundamental questions of faith raised among the Bible’s greatest students–Augustine and Aquinas, Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, al-Ghazali and Averroes, Luther and Calvin–and an array of writers from ancient and modern philosophical traditions as well.

But Pangle’s career as a political philosopher might seem to raise the question of his trustworthiness as a guide to the Bible. In a discussion of Kierkegaard’s radical challenge to rationalism–in Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham as willing to sacrifice Isaac because “he believed by virtue of the absurd”–Pangle himself asks whether the appeal to sophisticated and doubting reason isn’t at the opposite pole from the simplicity and purity of faith. Is not faith a mystery?

Of course, the tension between theology and philosophy has been exacerbated of late: A change in the self-understanding of philosophy in modern times has led to an exaggerated rupture between science and faith that has been detrimental for both.

Pangle’s alternative response to the challenge of faith is thus not, to begin with, an attempt simply to explain away the experience of faith. He focuses where reason and revelation meet: on matters of justice and morality. The Bible does not leave human beings in the dark about these matters. As Pangle puts it, “Now, it is in regard to the right and the good–that is, in regard to justice or righteousness–that political philosophy and scriptural piety have the fullest basis for a conversation that may well be mutually illuminating. For righteousness, or justice in the fullest sense, is the theme of political philosophy, the cynosure of its meditations, even as righteousness (or justice in the full sense) is among the highest and most essential themes of Scripture.”

TO BE SURE, reflection on the Bible cannot be neutral or uncommitted, and Pangle seems to present his own meditation as the perspective of a “Socratic philosophy” that is “obliged to look upon its own religious experiences” in a philosophical way. But the spirit of Pangle’s approach is far from the rationalism of, say, Hobbes or Spinoza, who sought mainly to transform and ultimately subvert the teaching of the Bible, making it more hospitable to their political project. At the same time, Pangle does not attempt to provide a Socratic or ancient rationalist interpretation of the Bible, an approach taken recently in Leon Kass’s “The Beginning of Wisdom.”

Instead, Pangle brings into conflict the most powerful competing philosophical and theological interpretations of the Bible’s moral vision, providing a truly philosophic introduction to centuries of debate. What is the ground of justice in God’s eyes? What is the meaning of a perfect and omnipotent God’s care for man? What is human sin, and why are human beings sinful? What is the meaning of the Fall? How do freedom, obedience, knowledge, and faith combine in piety? Pangle insists that justice is the core of what the biblical God wishes for man. Indeed, in his discussion of Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac, Pangle seems almost to suggest that God is the justice on which Abraham relied.

“Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham” seeks to illuminate and evoke above all the moral force of the foundational teachings of Genesis. The creation story shows the unfolding of an increase in freedom and thus the possibility of moral responsibility. The faith associated with the Fall is one that “guides us toward putting the concern for retributive justice in the foreground of our own existence.” The virtue of Abraham is “that dignified humility that the Bible regards as the mean between the extremes of haughty arrogance (or hubris) and vileness or abasement.” For Pangle, the moral foundation set down in Genesis frames all that follows because “the teaching of justice is the heart of Abraham’s, and the chosen people’s, mission.”

No one who follows Pangle’s investigation could fail to be moved by the weight and force of the deeply serious moral world of the Bible, a world we moderns can barely recollect or imagine. The book’s emphasis on the Bible’s moral core helps to explain the absence of any extended discussion of politics in a narrower sense (of Israel under the prophets and judges, and then under the reign of kings, for example). Similarly, Pangle passes over relatively quickly the cosmological and metaphysical issues raised in the creation story.

HIS DISCUSSION OF THE FALL is especially effective. Pangle begins by entertaining the possibility that the story suggests a kind of necessary education for human beings, an education out of their childlike simplicity. This interpretation seems initially attractive because in it humanity’s departure from the garden amounts to a beneficial progress and maturation. Without knowledge of good and evil, human beings are innocent and sinless, but they also seem incapable of moral action. Viewing the Fall as education is the interpretation of Herder, for example, who sees in “the punishment of God (and how else can the all-Good punish?)” only “a new, merely more severe, blessing.”

But Hobbes, who had already taken a similar line, makes clear its radical implication: If truly in need of education, Adam and Eve were not in fact responsible. The sin was not sin, and any punishment by God unjust. Hobbes concludes, outrageously but perhaps typically, that human mortality is not therefore a punishment but, somehow, a gift of God. But “from the very outset,” Pangle writes, “Scripture is speaking to humans as to beings who see in their earthly mortality a horrible and unnecessary rupture of existence–and who thus hunger for subtle signs of hope that for the purified and godly, at any rate, the breach can somehow be healed.” The pedagogical interpretation of the Fall fails to take seriously all that is at stake.

How then is the story of the Fall to be understood? A different perspective is St. Thomas Aquinas’s insistence on the moral meaning of the Fall, emphasizing the weakness of man’s reason, whether from some ignorance or from the influence of his “animal propensities.” These failings, in turn, cannot be attributed to man’s essential nature, since God’s omnipotence and benevolence rule out this possibility. Adam and Eve must have been deserving, in some sense, of God’s punishment. Other important questions continue this meditation on the story of man’s fallen state. What was the sin of Adam and Eve, exactly? Did they understand good and evil before their temptation and, either way, how is their choice explicable and blameworthy? What is the meaning of obedience and what are the implications of obedience for human freedom and responsibility? How can God’s omniscience and omnipotence be reconciled with man’s failure?

Pangle does not attempt to judge all these questions in any final way. He does, however, reject both Pascal’s view that the Fall be left an “unintelligible mystery” and Rousseau’s pessimistic suggestion that the authority of Scripture itself must be questioned when it cannot be rendered simply reasonable. At most Pangle insists on one key premise, which cannot be abandoned without abandoning faith itself: We hold “a manifestly coherent or fundamentally unmysterious awareness of goodness and righteousness, as divine attributes, essential to our recognizing God as God, even in or at least behind His most perplexing demands and interventions.”

It is this absolutely crucial assumption, an assumption that is itself a postulate of justice, that guides Pangle’s account of the centrality of the question of justice in the Bible’s presentation of Abraham. Abraham stands, of course, for unquestioning faith in God and God’s commands, but Pangle claims that the heart of Abraham’s faith is trust in God’s justice. This helps explain Abraham’s willingness to bargain with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah: Man is permitted, it seems, even to interrogate God if that interrogation presupposes and seeks to clarify God’s justice.

Finally, orchestrating again a dialectical encounter between the text and its great commentators, Pangle approaches the question of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. If we begin by assuming the goodness and justice of God, how is this astounding command to be understood? Moreover, how is Abraham’s faithful obedience itself to be understood? How can the faithful man devote himself to “a good that will accrue to him only if he does not aim at or devote himself to attaining that good”? How can devotion remain free from the taint of any but the highest motives? If piety is above all belief in and faithful adherence to God’s justice, Pangle makes clear not only the seriousness but also the severity of piety.

Is it possible that we moderns can rise to the level of the seriousness of the Bible? We live in a world that teaches the importance of things only here on earth and, for the soul, the satisfaction of cruder, more readily met needs. Can the image of Abraham be anything more than a display at our cultural amusement park?

Thomas Pangle’s “Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham” suggests we can. His grappling with the Bible is not simply identical with belief. But his effort is clearly undertaken in the spirit suggested by Pascal: “There are only two kinds of people that can be called reasonable: either those who serve God with all their heart because they have knowledge of him, or those who search for him with all their heart because they do not have knowledge of him.”

Thomas F. Powers teaches constitutional law at the University of Minnesota Duluth.