Time&Eternity

260 notes to chapter 2
willen, .l.l. der in dem wandellosen Bestand der Ordnungen der Natur wirkt und
erkennbar wird.” Von Rad, Das erste Buch Mose, 92; Genesis: A Commentary, 123.
53. Ibid., 134. Von Rad’s tendency to harbor underlying value judgments that prefer a
linear to a cyclical concept of time and the historical to the natural is also evident here:
“Die durch Gottes Wort gefestigten natürlichen Ordnungen sichern ja nur geheimnisvoll
dienend eine Welt, in der dann zu seiner Zeit Gottes geschichtliches Heilshandeln einsetzen
wird” (The natural orders that were established by God’s Word only safeguard, in a mysterious
way, a world in which God’s historical acts of salvation will begin in God’s good
time). Von Rad, Das erste Buch Mose, 101. It seems to me that the basic error lies in his juxtaposition.
Von Rad starts with an antithesis rather than with a parallelism or merging,
which, among other things, results in an instrumentalization of nature and a forfeiting of
its history. Westermann more appropriately emphasizes that in the Yahwist account, precisely
here, in the Flood narrative, with its climax in Gen. 8:20–22, the world is granted its
own life.
54. “.l.l. das kosmische Geschehen in zeitlicher Erstreckung als Ganzheit gesehen.”
Westermann, Genesis, 613; trans., Genesis 1–11, 457.
55. Rendtorff, “Genesis 8,21,” 195ff. Also here, it seems reasonable to suspect an underlying
value hierarchy that is more concerned about collecting the most evidence possible
for the superior uniqueness of belief in Yahweh than about tracking down the commonalities
and parallels that may have evolved organically.
56. Eichrodt, “Heilserfahrung und Zeitverständnis,” 105.
57. Westermann also shares this opinion (Genesis, 614; trans., 458). In his commentary
to Gen. 8:22, he understands God’s acts of blessing as being effective in the rhythms set
here, whereas he sees God’s redemptive work being effective in contingent events. This approach
allows a parallelism that seems to be more productive than the antithetical, underlying
hierarchical train of thought in von Rad. (Cf. with this also Westermann’s account of
the Old Testament experience of time in Westermann, “Erfahrung der Zeit.”) The problem
with von Rad’s thinking in this context can also be elucidated by using an example
from Cullmann, who reasons in similar ways about the New Testament: The reception of
the Old Testament into the New, he says, means that Christian belief is belief in a salvation
history, which means “daß der christliche Glaube wie der jüdische sich von allen antiken
Religionen der Umwelt gerade durch diese heilsgeschichtliche Ausrichtung unterscheidet”
(that Christian faith, like Jewish faith, was distinguished from all other religions of this
time by this salvation-historical orientation). Cullmann, Heil als Geschichte, 7; trans., Salvation
in History, 25.
58. Gorman, The Ideology of Ritual, 227.
59. In this context, one can also discuss the relationship of the past, the present, and
the future in Hebrew thought. In opposition to the theories of Marsh (a melting together
of present, past, and future in realistic time), Boman (argues with the temporal bi-polarity
of the Hebrew language; the ability of the Israelites to consider past, present, and future as
a totality has essentially to do with their psychological uniqueness; this predestined them
to become the people of revelation; cf. Boman, Das hebräische Denken), and Ratschow (the
two-tiered concept of Old Testament time compared to our three-tiered concept, see n. 9
above), Eichrodt stresses (in “Heilserfahrung und Zeitverständnis”) the awareness of the
future that is expressed in explicit admonitions (Deut. 6:7, etc.), the emphasis on genealogies
(in P) as the expression of the consciousness of linear time, the consciousness of
epochs in the Deuteronomistic corpus, the juxtaposition of present and past in view of the
future in prophetic proclamation, and the marking of “today” as the time of decision.
Thus, Eichrodt prefers to account for the Hebrew understanding of time (as a three-tiered
concept) neither as something coming from a special psychologically determined sense of