Knowledge of God in the Church

Harrelson, Walter (Divinity School, Vanderbilt University) Interpretation 1976, 30 (1) 12-17

Allen Johnson

Rt. 1, Box 119-B

Dunmore West Virginia 24934

Theology of the Minor Prophets

EBTS

Dr. Tom McDaniel

Fall, 1994

"There is no faithfulness or kindness, and no knowledge of God in the land...

Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish" (Hos. 4, excerpt) (p. 12).

"There should be knowledge of God in the land; and there would be, had not priest and prophet actively rejected knowledge in favor of an easy religious teaching and practice that assure their own prosperity and place in the society" (p. 12). The correlation of accountability of religious leaders to the state of a nation is threaded throughout Hosea, according to author Walter Harrelson, who takes focused bead on Hosea 4:1-10 as a paradigm for our contemporary U.S. church scene. Harrelson finds in Hosea the first prophet to comprehend religion as a technique to aggrandize power (p. 13).

Hosea knew what modern sociologists and psychologists often today critique about religion, that it creates an anxiety and then proffers the salve, albeit through a conduit advantageous and profitable to the professional religionists (and generally to the political powers as well). I am reminded of Karl Marx charging religion as the opiate of the people.

It is regarded as a truism that most people have a religious impulse. Hosea wants to push past baneful superficiality and artiface to the heart of religion. Hosea proclaims that right knowledge of God is fundamental to penetrate into the core of proper relationship with God, otherwise the people's religious impulse strays amiss.

What is knowledge of God? For Harrelson it is "almost the equivalent of our term 'theology' ... knowledge interiorized, knowledge issuing in conduct: conduct determined by fundamental understanding" (p. 13). The responsibility of priest and prophet is to guide the people into the way of this right knowledge. Instead, as Hosea laments, priest and prophet have stumbled in their charge (5:6).

Walter Harrelson cites scholar Hans Walter Wolff in asserting that the basic meaning of knowledge for Hosea involved commitment to the basic conditions of the covenant faith such as the decalogue. Hosea sees that the murder, theft, adultery, cheating pervading his society are due to lack of religious teaching. The land, the community thus suffers the effects of moral breakdown.

Harrelson conjectures that knowledge of God might expand to a broader meaning that recognizes the power of religion to satisfy through ritual, half-hearted sacrifice, and superficial moralism. I am quickly reminded of Jesus' vitriolic critique of religion during his earthly ministry. Soren Kierkegaard's polemic Attack Upon Christendom is a more recent classic expose of religion as masquerade for self-deception and power aggrandizement.

Harrelson also posits a narrower meaning for knowledge of God in an Hosean sense, citing in particular the betrothal passages that reveal God as a lover with passion, emotion, and hope. In this sense, knowledge of God means to enter into this intimacy in communion with God in His pathos. Hosea intimates Christ.

Having developed a wonderfully succinct, clear interpretation to Hosea's concept of the knowledge of God, I am somewhat let-down by Harrelson's concluding inferences for today's contemporary scene, not so much in his conclusions (which may or may not be valid) but in his methodology. Harrelson appears to fit his own contemporary theology to Hosea, that is, Harrelson leads and Hosea must fit.

For example, Harrelson writes, "Knowledge of the Holy ... sparks an interest in an appreciation of other forms of religious knowledge" (p. 16). By this he obviously means what he herein lists, "Islam, Buddhism, North American Indian religion, and any and all other religions..." (p. 15). Harrelson makes this inference from Hosea's revelation that God desires intimacy, and that being ultimately drawn into the center of God "we find nothing any longer alien" (p. 16).

Would Hosea approve of Harrelson's projection? If Harrelson would only continue in Hosea chapter 4 (4:12-14), he would have seen the prophet's blast at Israelite idolatry in obeisance to foreign gods. Did Hosea mean for his listeners to understand knowledge of God to include respect for Canaanite and Assyrian religious practice?

Harrelson constructs a plausible interpretation for Hosea's knowledge of God, and he rightly interjects this same prophetic word for our time. He would do well, however, to let Hosea do the leading.