Kev's Musings and Shared Journal

Harold Bloom and Jesus and Yahweh.

I recently read Harold Bloom's 'Jesus and Yahweh the Names Divine'.

Bloom confuses me. To be fair, any literary critic applying the literary lense to Divinity would confuse me.

Literary criticism for me ultimately is two dimensional. Ultimately, the critic judges words on paper, not living, breathing characters.

As I believe both Jesus and Yahweh are each living and presumably breathing, I believe any two dimensional analysis is incomplete.

But Bloom seems to believe this sort of judgement is complete. Does he have a personal relationship with Jesus? Does Bloom pray? Does Bloom worship?

The most Bloom will own up to is that he views Gnosticism to be the religion or worldview of Great Literature.

Bloom, analyzing Jesus and Yahweh, each on terms I think they would find absurd, allows Divinity to be created by the 'Old Covenant' and 'Belated Covenant' writers, as if they were two characters out of any popular novel.

As a result, there is no unified theory for Jesus or Yahweh. Mark's Jesus is different than Matthew's Jesus, etc. etc. etc.

But for me, human personality transcends literary criticism, as it's aspects are more than manifold and too numerous to literally count.

And if human personality is manifold, how much more so is the Divine Personality?

Where I see Jesus and Yahweh as being greater than human understanding, and as a result only grappled at by the best means possible, Bloom finds literature to be the know all be all Truth.

I am of the mind that the Biblical Literature serves to illumine the modern day Christian, not to replace saving Faith for the modern day Christian.

Jesus spoke in a dynamic way, his parable anchored in the dynamism of Nature and the Pastoral. His Gospel was decidedly to be rooted in action for the early Church, not to be rooted in intellectualism. Yahweh, whether commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son, or destroying the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon is utterly incomprehensible to me as a literary character. Motivation, environment, parentage and political circumstances, just a few of the literary devices, simply do not apply to the Creator.

Bloom is not going to answer if the 'Old Covenant' and the 'Belated Covenant' are spiritually true, only if they are existentially true. And I am of the persuasion that God chose not to reveal Himself in these terms.

If God had wanted to be critiqued literally, I believe He would have chosen the urbane Greeks and Romans to write His story as opposed to the disciples, most of whom were uneducated in rhetoric, grammar and so forth.

I think Bloom gets the cart before the horse. The Scriptures are there to serve the Faithful, and not vice versa, and I don't see much Faith in Bloom.