Ezekiel's Awkward God: Atheism, Idolatry and theVia Negativa

Abstract

AbstractCan a biblical text be idolatrous? Ezekiel's God has always been theologically awkward and difficult to handle. For early Jewish and Christian readers of the book the most troublesome (and indeed dangerous) parts of the text were the prophet's initial vision of the divine glory and its subsequent reappearances. Voltaire was perplexed and revolted by God's command that Ezekiel eat bread cooked with dung.1For some twentieth-century Protestant commentators, Ezekiel's God is altogether too concerned with ritual at the expense of ethics.2But for contemporary readers it is the unrelenting harshness, violence and especially masculinity of Ezekiel'sYhwhwhich proves most problematic. My aim in this article is to examine some of the theological implications of this divine awkwardness. In what follows I will attempt three things. First, I will offer a brief examination of the problems Ezekiel's God poses and a few recent Christian responses. Second, I will outline Roland Boer's proposal that Ezekiel 20 (along with 16 and 23) tends towards a kind of ‘anti-Yahwism’ or ‘protest atheism’: a vision of God so appalling as to be impossible to accept. Finally, I will explore the value for theological interpretation of taking seriously such an apparently unpromising conclusion, and suggest that the apophatic tradition may provide resources for embracing such radical negativity within scripture.