I-YOUniverse

I’ve found four references to Jesus of Nazareth in I and Thou:

• Jesus and love (not a feeling): his response to a demon-possessed man, to the beloved disciple; his bold risk “nailed his life long to the cross of the world…to love man” (pp. p. 66-67).
• The craving for redemption grows until “assuaged by one who teaches men to escape the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God” (p. 104)
• In the company of Socrates and Goethe is Jesus’ I-saying, the I of the unconditional relation in which a man calls his You “Father.” (p. 116)
• The gospel of John is the Gospel of pure relationship. “The father and son being consubstantial-we may say, God and man being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship.” (pp. 132-133)

Bare Essentials

Kyrios Christos!

If I strip Christianity bare, what’s left is the cry of the martyrs: Jesus is Lord. Close at hand is the history and experience to which the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament writings bear witness. But at the irreducible core is my experience of the Risen Christ:

You ask me how I know he lives-
He lives within my heart.

My spirituality for the past 20 years has centered on loss:

• loss of the mainstream Southern Baptist identity in which I was reared
• loss of the local church in a crucible of racism and parochialism
• a pastoral counseling residency which I would describe as a shamanic initiatory rite of being “cut up, cooked, and eaten”: loss of self, an internity of which my teaching colleagues were unaware

Anabaptists

Not surprising, then, in the years since to find myself drawn to the Anabaptists of 16^th century Europe, slaughtered by the tens of thousands for their simple insistence on adult baptism, symbolizing soul competency and liberty.

My church history course labeled these forebears as the radical reformation, and moved immediately to the English Baptists of the 17^th century.

But I’ve been drawn to these men and women who carried lists of scriptures in their boots and bore witness to the living flame of God’s love in their lives and deaths.

The Jesus whom they worshipped as Son of Man, Son of God, Savior, and the exemplary human Jesus of I and Thou are light years apart.

Spirit, which Buber conceived of as existing in between I and You, person and person, human being and God, is light years removed from the Holy Spirit of the New Testament.

How do I reconcile these two very different viewpoints?

Where does Jesus fit in

No need to. Buber wrote as a Jew, and as a Jew viewed Jesus in purely human terms, although his conception of Jesus is quite lofty. Jesus is one of humanity’s great religious founders of culture like the Buddha, one of history’s great philosophers like Socrates and Goethe.

Jesus also boldly risked loving humanity itself, and is an exemplar of the I-You relationship with God as of Father and son. There is not a hint of the Trinity. Spirit is not person, but the in between of an actual I-You relation.

The Jesus of the New Testament is not merely human, however exemplary he might be; he is God made flesh. You can’t work him into Buber’s ideas in some nifty fashion. But, as God-become-human he enters the human condition and relates to human beings as one among us.

However you fit the Logos and the man from Nazareth and the Risen Christ with Buber’s eternal You, Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses from inside our skin.

That changes everything.

Round 1

The sacred is here and now. The only God worth keeping is a God that cannot be kept. The only God worth talking about is a God that cannot be talked about. God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and be addressed by him, here and now-or, as Buber puts it, in the present.

I and Thou, Prologue by Walter Kaufmann, pp.25-26.

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response.

Prologue, p. 39

Who cares about Buber?

Like many today Martin Buber longed to release religion from institutionalism, to free God from theologians.

He stood apart from other Zionist leaders of his day by advocating an Arab state in Palestine.

Because he wrote prolifically about many subjects, people viewed him as a representative Jew in the 20^th century. His ideas about dialogue continue to wield a huge influence.

From wordslinger to I-YOUniverse

When I began this blog as “wordslinger,” an image from a poem I wrote in  college, I discovered there are dozens, perhaps 100s of “wordslingers” out there. So I tried “wordsLinger” which puts a different spin on it, the lovely sense of words leaving an afterimage like the flash of a camera does. It didn’t make that much difference, however. I wanted something unique.

I wrote something about speaking my words into the ether and stumbled on the idea of “e-thou” a play on “I-Thou” of course. Being a 60s child, I had taken part in encounter groups and sensitivity training, so “e-thou encounter” came easily to mind. I liked the assonance of thou and -coun-.

But people stumbled over it. I had to spell it, spell it again, then explain it. Although I liked it, I decided it might be dated. In a post on suffering I coined the word “YOUniverse” to celebrate God’s presence in the cosmos.

From there it was a short hop to “I-YOUniverse.” In the new translation of I and Thou, except in the title, I-You has replaced the older form.

Absorbing I and Thou

For a buck I had picked up a used paperback copy  of I and Thou, 2nd ed., translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (NY: Scribner’s, 1958). The brittle binding and stiff paper suit it.

The first owner underlined the first 34 pages copiously but left not a mark on the remaining 100 pages. I assume she gave up, having read more than I did.

When I started e-thou encounter, though, I felt an obligation to get past the jargon stage of I-It or I-Thou. If I named my blog for Buber’s thought, I ought at least to know it.

Encouraged by reviews of the new translation as being superior to the first, I ordered my copy from Amazon and, when it arrived, dug in. I was going to master this book!

It’s not a book you master, though. It masters you.

Wrestling at the Jabbok

 I read it half a dozen times, baffled by some passages. Kaufmann generously footnotes the German vocabulary, which helps you appreciate the verbal fog. Buber, like Shakespeare, could not pass up a good play on words, no matter what the context.

 Then, I caught myself striving to manhandle the book. Damn it! I was going to know this book inside and out.

I understand how to use knowledge as power. Except for writing a dissertation, I completed work on a Ph.D. in Hebrew and Old Testament.

Buber, like the wrestler at the fords of the Jabbok, refuses to be mastered.

Round 2 coming up!