98 - Creation and the Persistence of Evil

Creation and the Persistence of Evil
By Jon D. Levenson
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1988. 182 pp. $18.95.

"The world is not inherently safe, it is inherently unsafe." With words such as these, Jon Levenson, associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Harvard University, carefully and artfully examines the relationship between creation and theodicy in the Hebrew Bible. The book is divided into three parts. The first speaks of the "survival of chaos after the victory of God." In this section, special emphasis is given to the presence of chaos battle texts in biblical and Near Eastern contexts. The second part is a discussion of the alternation of chaos and order in Genesis 1:1-2:3. In the third section, Levenson discusses the tension between submission to and arguing with the covenant God.

Levenson demonstrates the way in which biblical texts evidence an

100 - Creation and the Persistence of Evil

original and ongoing conflict between God and chaos. Chaos was present at the creation and survived after it. Levenson speaks of the "vitality of evil and the fragility of creation." The creation of the world was an act of God by which chaos, variously symbolized in the Bible, was given boundaries and limited but not eliminated. Chaos survives the creation, and, to the extent that it periodically rears its head, it calls forth laments intended to taunt and awaken God. Accordingly, the deity Israel knows is not omnipotent but potentially omnipotent. Israel is aware of God's past acts of greatness and proclaims them especially in its liturgy, but Israel is also aware of the present chaos. Israel then calls on God to live out God's potential as creator and keeper of covenant. As Levenson says, "The God to whom this theology bears witness is not the one who continually acts in history, but one whose acts are clustered in the primordial past or in the eschatological future, or both, that is, the God who will reactivate his mighty deeds and close the horrific parenthesis that is ordinary history." Levenson believes that such an understanding of God came into the fore "whenever the disjuction of the old rhetoric of recital and the harshness of contemporary experience became too great to repress."

Most impressive is his discussion of the dialectical relationship between God and Israel. In the section entitled "Argument and Obedience," Levenson discusses the covenant relationship between God and Israel as a tension involving "autonomy and heteronomy." On another level, autonomy and heteronomy apply to the way Israel addresses God. "It is … the autonomy of humanity over against God that accounts for one of the most remarkable features of the Hebrew Bible, the possibility that people can argue with God and win." The biblical text portrays "both the necessity and the absurdity of a person telling God what to do."

Levenson has given us much to think about. To scholars who have not paid sufficient attention to the questioning of God in the Hebrew Scriptures, this book will spur further investigation. To those who still believe that God created the world out of nothing, this book will function as a necessary corrective. To those who are tired of theodicies that ignore the biblical text and neuter the deity in order to make God more palatable to our experience, this book will be refreshing. Finally, to pastors who tire of official party line platitudes about the victory of God in Christ over evil, especially in the age of Auschwitz, this book will speak honestly about the presence of chaos in the world and God's relationship to it.

Murray J. Haar

Augustana College
Sioux Falls, South Dakota