Page 22 - Eclipse of God

Introduction to the 2016 Edition xxi

student of Buber’s and also appropriates Buber’s term “the
eclipse of God” in his own writings, links Buber’s dismissal of
Jewish law to what he contends is Buber’s “lifelong difficulty
with the recognition of evil. . . . [T]he celebrated ‘I- Thou/I- It,’
leaves room for decay and dehumanization, but not for an evil
16
that is truly radical.” For this reason, Fackenheim argues,
Buber is unable to provide an authentic Jewish response to the
Holocaust. Despite these criticisms, however, Buber remains
enormously influential in both Israel and the United States for
his writings on Judaism, Zionism, Jewish culture, politics, edu-
cation, and other subjects. But as Paul Mendes- Flohr notes, it
has largely been “post- traditional” Jews who have felt the pull
of his philosophical and theological claims. 17
It is perhaps because of his de- emphasis of law that Buber
has been far more theologically influential on Christian theo-
logians, including Walter Nigg, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and
18
Robert Merrihew Adams. Interestingly, these theologians
find in Buber’s “I- Thou” an important and moving account of
Christian grace. This is despite the fact that in many of his
other writings Buber is at pains to distinguish his conception
of faith, which he regards as Jewish, from a Christian con-
ception of faith, which he holds partially responsible for the
eclipse of God in the modern world. 19

16 Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post- Holocaust Jewish
Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 195.
17 Paul Mendes- Flohr, “Buber’s Reception among Jews,” Modern Judaism (1986)
6 (2): 111– 126.
18 For an overview of the Christian reception of Buber, see Maurice S. Friedman,
Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), chapter 27.
For Adams’s more recent Christian appropriation of Buber, see Finite and Infinite
Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford, 1999).
19 Various Christian theologians have also criticized Buber for his treatment of
Christianity. See, for instance, Emil Brunner, “Judaism and Christianity in Buber,”
in Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice S. Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber,
309– 18.