Israel’s Difference

Robert Jenson writes, “the identity of Israel’s God, his difference from other gods, is precisely that Israel’s God is not eternal in the way other gods are, not God in the same way.  That the past guarantees the future is exactly the deity of the gods, but Yahweh always challenges the past and everything guaranteed by it [including, Jenson points out, the past of His own people], from a future that is freedom . . . . Yahweh is eternal [in that] He is faithful.”

Israel needed no grounding in a mythic past, an unalterable tradition, in any notions of fixed substances to guarantee a future.  Israel was instead grounded in midair by the reliable Word of Yahweh, whose continuity was not that of sameness through time but a “personal” continuity of Hos “words and commitments, by the faithfulness of later acts to the promises made in Yahweh’s earlier acts.”