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(from Sh'ma 13/243, December 10, 1982)

A Monotheism Which Compels Pluralism

By Roger C. Klein

One might think that no idea produces excesses like fanaticism, hatred, and religious wars so much as monotheism. Mono-theism, so the argument might go, proclaims the existence of one supreme being who commands a certain set of intelligible and achievable norms which divide the resultant activities of man into the exhaustive categories of acts of obedience and acts of disobedience. Either one is on God's side or he is not; one moves in the right direction or the wrong direction. One God, one revelation, one morality, one right way to conform. Those who don't conform may justifiably be reviled -- or worse.

The foregoing line of reasoning has the ring of plausibility to it. Plausibility aside, history is replete with illustrations of its logic. After all, each of the three major western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, gained its foothold among the religions and among the nations through words of revilement and acts of war, all justified by "God's command." And still today the word of God, clearly and distinctly understood by so many, is employed by one religion to attack another and by denominations within a given religion to assail each other. These important facts notwithstanding, it seems to me that there is another way we ought to understand the idea of monotheism, a way which shows the more common understanding to be a perversion of the idea.

The God of Scriptures is not just another being in the universe, distinguishable from others only by the extent of his power and wisdom. Though the Psalmist extols man as but little lower than the angels, it is clear that the difference between God and man is one of kind and not of degree. God is utterly unique, quali-tatively distinct from everything else.

We Can Never Know God

The Adon 0lam states the point succinctly: "He is One, there is no second; no one to compare with Him and none to place beside Him." No person can be like God, no person can truly know Him or fully understand His ways. God says to Moses: "You can not see my face, for no man shall see me and live" (Exodus 33:20). To Job's request for comprehension of the ways of the divine, God replies: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.… Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this" (Job 38:4,18). No matter how much man accomplishes in discharging his obligation to "fill the earth and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28); no matter how much he comprehends through his "knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 3:22), he can never know God nor span the chasm between them.

Herein we can see the essence of the revolutionary monotheism of the Bible. To claim to have closed the infinite chasm between man and God is, by putting man in God's mind and in God's place, to render God superfluous. The prophet Isaiah puts the matter thus: "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9) .

Thus Scripture conjoins the idea of one God with His irreducible transcendence. But it does not leave us with that alone. As Jakob J. Petuchowski has pointed out, "...this biblical attitude would never have become biblical religion had not recognition of the existence of this gulf been supplemented by the certainty that it can be bridged, and by the knowledge that, on occasion, the gulf has been bridged." The idea of monotheism, implying as it does the ultimate inaccessibility of God's will and plan, must permit the closeness of God if it is to be more than a philosophical abstraction, if it is to have significance to particular religions as they are lived.

Our Knowledge of God's Will is Limited

The Jewish tradition, like the other great western monotheistic faiths, rests strongly on the availability of God's will to man, whether the source of His nearness be sacred writings, His mighty acts in nature and history, the pious deeds of righteous individuals, or the stirrings in the human heart. Part of what distinguishes one religion from another, and denominations from each other within a given religion, is that each has its own sense of the sources and content of God's revelation. Each group has consequently developed a unique historical community and outlook. However the balance between God's role and man's is understood, the combination of perceived revelation and subsequent response forms the substance of the community of faith -- its institutions, its language, its energies, its purposes.

Yet we must ask: what is the status of that which religious communities or individuals "know" by virtue of what God has revealed to them? This is where a properly transcendent idea of monotheism reenters the picture. Though the religious claim access to the mind of God on the basis of which they form their communities, that access is of necessity limited because the immanence of God is circumscribed by His transcendence. Our knowledge of His will is framed by our ignorance of His will. Our fundamental and irrevocable ignorance limits decisively what we can and do know. In this sense, all true monotheistic faiths are equally close to and equally remote from God's truth.

The idea of monotheism does not supplant or ridicule the presence of God in all its perceived variety. The idea of monotheism does not banish God from the world and replace Him with a relativizing agnosticism. We do have evidence of the presence of God -- in nature, in history, in the inner and outer communal life of the individual; this evidence is simply hard to evaluate objectively and it cannot lead to certainty. The transcendence of God does not mock the resolve to live a life of intensity and meaning. Yet, that resolve entails a risk and an uncertainty that can never be dissolved.

The Claim to Full Knowledge is Idolatry

The true religious life is dialectical in the extreme, for it is animated by and caught within the tension between the Yes of knowledge and the No of ignorance, between the fullness and richness of our communal and individual forms of life, and the necessary limitations on the cosmic pretensions of those forms of life. We both know and don't know. Though the claim to full knowledge can only be idolatry and the claim to complete ignorance cynicism, true religion finds its place among the continuum between those two extremes.

Here I am emphasizing the centrality of one of these features of the idea of monotheism. For though the Yes of revelation leads us to the development of communities of faith within the circle of faith, the No of ignorance leads us to another, equally compelling and equally necessary religious commitment: tolerance of the beliefs of others. This tolerance, I claim, has as its basic justification not expediency, not the requirements of democracy nor the desire to get along with one's neighbor, but the very essence of one's religious commitment to the one Master of the Universe.

Thus, when we speak of God, His commandments, His actions, His purposes, we must never forget the kiv'yachol, the "as it were." The inevitable partialness of my claims about God, and of my understanding of His claims on me, compels me to acknowledge that what someone else says when he disagrees with me may be correct. A true monotheism necessitates tolerance of the opinions of others as well as the provisionality of our own truth-commitments. That this necessity clashes with yet another implication of monotheism, commitment based upon the accessibility of God's ways, does not undermine so much as challenge the faith and faithfulness of the truly religious individual. For though I must suspend, as one expression of my faith, my tentativeness and epistemological humility and act as if the truth I proclaim is the truth God proclaims, yet I will pervert another expression of true faith if that suspension becomes absolute, uncritical, and final.

Intolerance: Monotheism Misunderstood

Thus, when we find so-called "monotheists" involved in acts of arrogance, intolerance and, in extreme forms, persecution, we may be sure that such actions are the products of a radical misunderstanding of one of the critical elements of religious monotheism. By acting with certainty and by categorically denying value to the opinions of others, one erects an idol inasmuch as he closes the chasm between man and God, forgets the kiv'yachol, purports to confine the universal to the particular, and claims to know perfectly what can only be known imperfectly. The true monotheist never knows the whole truth and therefore can never say that another has no truth. The true monotheist can be nothing but a pluralist.