booke

xxxintroductionhimself to humans as God the Provider. That is, He continuouslyprovides the material existence of ‘being’, its constant ‘progressing’day by day, and the ethical standards or limits by which Creationrealizes its ‘becoming’. God provides the physical setting and eternallaws of nature that are scientifically discernable by the rational,human mind, enabling humans to pursue an ethical life which willculminate in the realization of the good on earth. In other words,Shahrur’s God is a different God from the one believers want toreach with their prayers and sacrifices (the God that Soviet atheismwanted to destroy). In his concept, humankind postulates its relationshipwith God through the realization of the ethical good, which ishumankind’s eternal and universal task, because both the ultimategoal and the limits set up by God to achieve such a goal areeternal.God represents what is eternal and immutable, while nature andhumankind are subject to change. And yet, because God has createdhumans and endowed them with reason, He has also created humans’innate disposition that allows them, even if finite, to translate theabstract, absolute ideals of ethics into concrete, actual reality. Thesedialectics of the divine-human relationship is at the heart of Shahrur’sepistemological, hermeneutical, and legal theories. On the one side,there is what he sees as descriptors of the transcendent God: immortality,immutability, absoluteness, infinity, abstractness, and sacrality;while on the other side, the exact opposite is true for nature andhumankind: mortality, changeability, relativity, finiteness, concreteness,and relatedness. Epistemologically, God’s knowledge of objectivereality (cosmos, nature, and society) is infinite and perfect, whilehuman knowledge is finite and deficient. Hermeneutically, God’srevelation to humankind is sacred, objective, and unalterable, but itshuman interpretation is contingent, subjective, and mutable. AndGod’s limits of law (its upper and lower boundaries) are immutableand absolute, but human legislation (the move between God’s boundaries)is changeable and relative. Yet, through humans’ rational faculty,which is God-given, human beings are able, though alwayslimited, to participate in God’s knowledge, to understand His revelation,and to follow His law, by which they submit to His ethical codeand bring about the realization of the good and sacred on all levelsof personal and societal existence. It is only when people forget thatthey possess such rational faculty—when, for example, dogmaticritualism takes priority over critical enquiry or when the dominance