ipl-logo

What Is The Theological Statement For God's Existence Of God?

620 Words3 Pages

The Old Testament narrative has a complex and rich, almost elusive, understanding of God, yet it does not contain the explicit doctrine of the Trinity, it only contains the doctrine after reflection upon God’s continual revelation. In light of this, Moses’ theophany of the burning bush gives the first claim of God’s identity as Yahweh, or better understood in the Exodus narrative, as “I am what I am” (Exodus 3:14, NRSV). This rich statement of God supposedly gives God some mysterious ontological claim about the God Israel understood through their forefathers’ own encounters with this God. Yet, Israel’s own theological statement about God comes through the Shema found in Deuteronomy 6:4. In this statement, Israel proclaims with one voice, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” A condensed theological statement up till now condenses the story of Israel’s past, present, and future through the unified statement of God’s singularity. Within the time and place of Israel’s setting, the Shema counters the claims of the polytheistic societies surrounding Israel. Instead of being a multiplicity of divine essences capable of vying for divinely hierarchy, Israel combats this narrative producing this succinct communal theological statement of …show more content…

Yet there comes a problem when digging deeper into the narrative of the Old Testament: there is no explication of what kind of being is Yahweh. There are multiple metaphorical depictions of Yahweh throughout the prophetic and poetic literature of the Old Testament, yet substantive descriptions of Yahweh, like people might have of Dagon, Marduk, or Enlil. The Shema and Exodus passage capture the elusive, but grounded ontological claim of God’s existence and singular nature but fail to understand what kind of being is God. Yet, as a person studies the Old Testament there are peculiar instances of God and the possibility of gods within

Open Document