Abstract
The “same God” discussion takes as its starting point our own understanding of God and seeks to match it with the religious datum of another religion. Accordingly, it identifies aspects in the understanding of God in that tradition that allow us to proclaim God, as recognized in that tradition, as the same as our own God, in full or in part. A large part of the previous discussion hinges on recognizing the one God, known in Judaism, in the various configurations of Hindu religion. What this means is that in some important ways, Hinduism is declared to be, just like Judaism, a monotheism. As statements of contemporary Hindu leaders suggest, reading Hinduism as a monotheism is indeed an option.1 But it is not so simple to apply a single label to Hinduism, certainly not the “monotheism” label. Some would distinguish between Jewish monotheism and Hindu monism, thereby drawing a distinction between the personal God of the Bible and the more philosophical view of the underlying unity of all reality in Hindu philosophical systems. Philosophically there is, of course, merit to the distinction. I fear, however, that it may not be as helpful to the present discussion as one might think at first sight. Underlying the distinction, as applied to two religions, is the attempt to capture “correctly” what one religion is versus another. Thus, a formula or term is applied to one religion, while another is applied to another. The problem is, as we know, that it is difficult to sum up an entire religion simply under one “ism.”
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Notes
Jan Assman, Of God and gods: Egypt, Israel and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2008.
Consider, however, the fascinating possibilities opened up by the discussion of Yehuda Gellman, Names and Divine Names: Kripke and Gikatillia, Sefer Higayon: Studies in Rabbinic Logic, ed. M. Koppel and E. Merzbach, Zomet Institute, Alon Shevut, 1995, pp. 51–60, especially p. 60.
Ausonius, Epigrammata no. 48, brought in Assman, O f God and gods, pp. 55–56. See further the text in Mozart’s cantata K. 619, discussed in Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 136.
Detailed references are provided by Brill, Judaism and World Religions: Encountering Christianity, Islam and Eastern Traditions, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, p. 204 and notes, p. 276.
Some scholars have considered this to be the dividing line between Judaism and early Christianity. While there is a common conceptual background, according to which other beings are acknowledged alongside God, offering worship to one of these, in this case to Jesus Christ, constitutes the real dividing line between acceptable faith, in Jewish terms, and heresy or the beginning of a new religion. See Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, SCM, London, 1988.
Contrast this with Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2004, pp. 119, 295. In his abstract to Beyond Judaisms: Metatron and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism, Journal for the Study of Judaism 41, 2010, pp. 323–365, Boyarin shifts from belief in a second divine person to perhaps a cult, to a cult of the second person. The article itself does not explore this distinction in any way.
For the association of monarchy and the gods in an Indian context, see the summary of Christopher Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004, p. 38ff.
Yair Lorberbaum, The Image of God: Halacha and Aggada, Schoken, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 2004 [Hebrew].
Of the vast literature on the subject, see Veli-Matti Karkainen, One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification, Unitas Books, Collegeville, 2004,
and Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov (eds.), Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology vol. 1, James Clarke, Cambridge, 2010,
and Vladimir Kharlamov (ed.), Theosis: Deification in Chrisitan Theology vol. 2, James Clarke, Cambridge, 2012.
Crispen Fletcher Louis, Humanity and the Idols of the Gods in Pseudo Philo’s Biblical Antiquities, Idolatry: False Worship in the Bible, Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Stepen Barton, T & T Clark, London 2007, pp. 58–72, presents us with an interesting ancient argument that contrasts the worship of idols with God’s true image in humanity. If God’s real presence is within humanity, this allows us to distinguish between different expressions of what is typically considered under the one umbrella of Avoda Zara.
Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World, Mohr Siebeck, Tubingen, 2008.
M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, Asia Publishing House, New York, 1952.
See Saxena Neela Bhattacharya, Shekhina on the “Plane of Immanence”: An Intimation of the Indic Great Mother in the Hebraic Wholly Other, Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies 12, 2012, pp. 27–44.
Indeed, from such a perspective, imagination and idolatry are related. Both serve purposes related to controlling masses, based upon a false understanding of reality. See Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 127ff.
Diana L. Eck, Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Anima Books, Chambersburg, PA, 1981, p. 28.
This is the conceptual thread that informs Elliot Wolfson’s Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994.
Translation by Israel Zangwill, brought by Arthur Green, Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997, p. 108.
It is useful to reference broader theories of the imagination, as these have found expression in the history of philosophy. Daniel Reiser, To Fly Like Angels: Imagery or Waking Dream Techniques in Hassidic Mysticism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, PhD, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2011, pp. 301ff. [Hebrew], suggests three models for understanding the human imagination. The first is the mirror model, dating back to Plato. According to this model, the imagination is charged with copying and representing the original. A second model is the light-bulb model, according to which the imagination is active and productive in and of itself, and not only by force of its representational power. This is the romantic model. A third model, a postmodern one, is the multiplication of mirrors, so that each reflects the other, ultimately leading to a collapse between reality and imagination. Recognizing these different models is helpful in appreciating some of the texts brought in the present discussion. One recognizes that it is only within a very specific understanding of the imagination that one can even think of critiquing other religions as erroneous, due to the workings of the human imagination.
See Daniel Reiser, To Fly Like Angels. See also Zvi Leshem, Between Messianism and Prophecy: Hasidism According to the Piaseczner Rebber, PhD, Bar Ilan University, 2007 [Hebrew].
From Kalonymus Kalman Schapira, Experiencing the Divine: A Practical Jewish Guide, unpublished translation by Yaakov Shulman, 2002, pp. 25–26.
A less precise transla-tion of the same text is available in Andrea Cohen-Kiener, Conscious Community: A Guide to Inner Work, Jason Aaronson, Northvale, NJ, 1996, pp. 23–24. Thanks are due to Zvi Leshem for sharing translations and sources relevant to the work of Rabbi Schapira with me.
Likutey Moharan II, 8, end subsection 12. Translation taken from Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness: The Religious Thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, Continuum, London, 2009, p. 178.
On the imaginative power in R. Nachman’s teaching see Zvi Mark, Mysticism and Madness, especially Chapters 1 and 5. Mark’s discussion provides references for some of what follows. Mark’s project in Mysticism and Madness is to explore how ordinary consciousness and its rational constraints are transcended in the teachings of R. Nachman. See further Yaara Levitas Bibas, Imagination in the Thought of R. Nahman of Brahslav, Phd, Bar Ilan University, 2008.
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© 2016 Alon Goshen-Gottstein
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Goshen-Gottstein, A. (2016). From Hindu God to Hindu gods: Confronting the Particularity of Hindu Deities. In: Same God, Other god. Interreligious Studies in Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-45528-4_12
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