Chapter 3 The Living God: on the Perfection of the Imperfect
In: The Question of God's PerfectionSearch for other papers by James A. Diamond in
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The cost of constructing a deity as an archetype of perfection was the sacrifice of much of the divine character that constitutes God as a living God of Judaism and Jews. The biblical portrait of God patently belies every one of those philosophically construed perfections attributed to God in the rationalist philosophical model. There is a mythic continuum of an imperfect divine personhood that stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, Kabbalah, and onward to the present. This chapter focuses on one facet of biblical and rabbinic theology that was instrumental in the near schismatic differences between the God of philosophical perfection and the living God of imperfection. The most crucial sources for divulging knowledge about the nature of God and his relationship with his creation the various names by which God is identified throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic corpus. For Jewish theology, retrospectively and prospectively, the divine names cohere holistically to capture the elusiveness and dynamism of a God evolving, in tandem and reciprocally, with His creation and His creatures.