Piety as Participation in the Divine Concern

Download or read book Piety as Participation in the Divine Concern written by Joseph Harp Britton and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word "piety" is often used with a pejorative connotation : a pious person is thought to be observant in the extreme, perhaps supercilious or even hypocritical. Classically, however, piety has referred to the virtue of a greteful sense of obligation to one's origins, both familial and cultural. This thesis seeks to analyze the significance of such a virtuous piety as a privileged site of theological reflection, arguing that it in fact represents a synthesis of the insights of systematic, moral and ascetical theology as they are embodied in the life of ordinary believing individuals. The basis for the argument is the work of the american jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972), who himself made extensive use of piety to describe the intersection of human life with God. Born in Poland into the hasidic tradition, Heschel was schooled in the neo-kantian environment of Berlin in the 1930s, where he was influenced by the phenomenological school of Dilthey, Husserl and Scheler. He first deployed this approach in an examination of prophetic consciousness, where he argued that the prophet sympathetically encounters God's pathos, or transitive concern. Analogously, his studies of the phenomenon of piety articulated the manner in which it contributes both to the understanding (Verstehen) and virtuous moral character of the individual -a theocentric integration which may be described in Heschel's polar terms as a "mystical realism". This analysis of piety, which connects at significant points both with otherthinkers significant in Heschel's intellectual milieu, as well as the contemporary concern to resist the priority of ontology by describing the moral significance of the other (Lévinas), supports a description of human life as fundamentally participatory in God, a participation which Heschel locates in a relational enactment of the divine concert.