Hebrew Theology (III)

There are many expressions about modernity, but the most obvious characteristic of modernity is the forgetfulness of the first cause and the entity.

Interestingly, presentness always boasts of rationality, when in fact the bearer of modernity is the subject, not the entity. How is it possible for a non-entity to have rationality to speak of? Likewise, non-entities cannot understand faith.

This limitation is detrimental to both faith and reason, and the omnipresent nothingness that modernity brings obscures the true realization of the human being.

However, modernity is also capable of realizing its own nothingness. Thus, along with modernity comes a renewed search for faith and reason, but this search is carried out independently.

Only when faith returns to faith and reason returns to reason can we see the integration occur again.

When nominalism broke down the Platonism in Christian theology, then it was possible for faith to return to itself, though not to the reason that the theologians had originally inspected.

This is the reason inherent in the Reformation. The leaders of the Reformation advocated a return to the Bible, but a return to the fact of faith itself.

That is, a return to the intrinsic immediacy of Augustine. Now, there again, the problem arises that only reason can identify God in intrinsic immediacy - the First Cause - otherwise, it remains in faith. This is the limit of faith, and further on is reason.

It can be seen that the later theologian Schleiermacher was within this boundary of faith, except that in the Romantic movement this Augustinian inner immediacy was called sameness, the immanence of the infinite in the finite.

This same sameness was pursued by the Romantic philosophers, although they carried it out within the incompleteness of art. And the confirmation of this sameness is in fact the confirmation of reason, only that these philosophers failed again.

It is another approach and brush with reason by faith. Faith has returned to its fact, and reason actually finds its own reliable foundation through art, and thus the confirmation of reason itself is achieved first and foremost through art.

This is achieved by poetics. Poetics ultimately confirms the transcendent-poem through non-complete art, and this transcendent-poem is the first cause, which in turn is revealed in its implementation as the complete world, the inner world of Augustine.

Here, the transcendent-poem does not exist alone; its existence simply implies the existence of a specific action - making phenomena manifest as phases. It is through this particular action that man exists as an entity.

That is, the transcendent-poem exists, but God does not. Or rather, God is the transcendent - the poem.

In this way, the entire religious culture based on the First Cause is questionable and needs to be reevaluated.

The prophet must have set up God only after he had mastered the transcendent - the first cause. Thus, it is certain that there was a transcendent, the First Cause, before there was God. Why then did the Prophet set God on the First Cause? Because the First Cause is in fact associated with natural law.

Only the universal knowledge of the First Cause was never realized, and at the same time led to the universal knowledge of the natural law being unrealized. Here, although the first cause is the foundation, the natural law is even more pivotal, for man can only attain his true realization through the affirmation of the natural law.

How, then, can man attain his own realization when neither the first cause nor the universal knowledge of natural law exists? It was out of this that the Prophet introduced the primitive religion, and he tried to solve this problem through God and the divine law. Of course, the gods of the new religion are distinguished from the primitive religions by their association with the first.

This association is symbolic in the sense that it emphasizes the uniqueness and transcendence of God, which is expressed through the first three commandments of the Ten Commandments. Only when the authority of God is established is it possible for man to submit to the divine law.

This God and divine law is also expressed in Christianity, as stated by Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest of the commandments. The second is similar, that is, to love your neighbor as yourself. These two commandments are the general outline of all the truths of the law and the prophets." These commandments correspond to the Ten Commandments, whose purpose is to consolidate God and the divine law in order to ensure the possibility of moral life.

This new religious culture unfolds by way of faith, but the facts about the First Cause are implicitly present. That is, the first cause is not directly associated with God, fundamentally in the sense that faith cannot be directly associated with the first cause. Then it is possible that a situation arises in which God and the divine law seem to be self-contained in themselves, but exist externally to the first cause and natural law.

This means that it is possible for the divine law to become a kind of other law, and true freedom would become no longer possible. This is the moral nihilism of religion.

In fact, God and the divine law have constituted a specific political form and have had a lasting influence on human civilization, but it is not, after all, a radical form of civilization.

For the prophets were intended to be only natural law, and the divine law is but a transitional alternative. As long as universal knowledge exists, the choice can be made anew.

Since universal knowledge of the first cause, the knowledge of poetry, is confirmed, then universal knowledge of natural law becomes possible. The confirmation of the first cause is the confirmation of nature-the entity, and the law established by the entity through the moral law is the natural law.

Thus, the first cause and natural law in fact replace God and the divine law.

This still goes back to the prophet's original choice there, religion or knowledge. Now that knowledge is realized, one can decisively choose knowledge.

When knowledge is realized, then the entire culture of religion based on the first cause can also go into history.