Disapperance Of God, The » (1st ed)

At the beginning of the Old Testament, God manifests himself through miracles and direct intervention, but by the Bible's end, he has withdrawn from sight, leaving humans on their own. In this thought-provoking book, Bible scholar Friedman probes a chain of mysteries, from the diminishing visible presence of God in the Bible, to the Divine's disappearance in Nietzsche's famous "God is dead" declaration, to the quest for a hidden God in modern physics. The result is a bold and stunning work that dissects our contemporary moral ambivalence, identifying it as the spiritual crisis it is. 335pp.

Library Journal

Arguing that "the disappearance or death of God is a substantial part of this century's philosophical and literary legacy," Friedman (Hebrew, comparative literature, Univ. of California, San Diego) probes what he calls three mysteries: the gradual disappearance of God in the Hebrew scriptures, a topic recently considered by Jack Miles in his God: A Biography (LJ 3/1/95), a book Friedman refers to approvingly; Nietzsche's dictum, "God is dead," relating it admirably to the works of Dostoyevsky and the problem of ethics without God; and the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the Big Bang theory. Avoiding the type of Zen and... approach that degrades both religion and science, Friedman offers a credible discussion of contemporary physics and the return of the divine, doing no disservice to either but actually enhancing the relationship between them. For general readers as well as specialists.Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey, N.J.