Page 16 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xv

ship with God begins with people trusting that they do in fact
have a relationship with God. In a statement that could have
come out of recent anthropological investigations into religion,
Buber writes: “many true believers know how to talk to God
but not about him” (21). As the Stanford anthropologist
T. M. Luhrmann has put it in the context of her fieldwork
studying how God becomes real for American evangelicals,
“Faith is hard because it is a decision to live life as if a set of
claims are real, even when one doubts. . . . These are not in-
tellectual judgments on the same order as deciding how many
apples you should buy at the market. They are ways of expe-
10
riencing life, attitudes we take toward living in the world.”
As Buber recognizes, this is not a new insight but one that
religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christian mysticism,
and Hasidism, have long put forward.
It is important to emphasize that Buber’s claims about faith
do not oppose modern science or rationalist philosophy. This
brings us to the subtitle of this book, “Studies in the Relation
between Religion and Philosophy.” Buber does distinguish
between religion and philosophy, and understands philosophy
in a way that coheres with the new atheist’s understanding of
science. And Buber does cast philosophy in seemingly negative
turns: “I- It finds its highest concentration and illumination in
philosophical knowledge. In this knowledge the extraction of
the subject from the I of the immediate lived togetherness of
I and It and the transformation of the It into the object detached
in its essence produces the exact thinking of contemplated
existing beings, yes, of contemplated Being itself” (37). Nev-
ertheless, Buber does not dismiss philosophy or science. Indeed,
the subtitle suggests precisely this: despite their differences,

10 T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangeli-
cal Relationship with God (Vintage, 2012), xii.