Divine Haecceity: Reclaiming the Literary Character of God in Hebrew Scripture with Rosenzweig and Miskotte

Abstract

The present article first summarizes the results of literary scholarship on the character of God in Hebrew Scripture: authors such as Jack Miles, W. Lee Humphreys, and Avivah Zornberg discern a ‘round character’ in biblical texts, a divine persona who acts and reacts from out of particular desires, wants, and insecurities. The second section indicates a few factors explaining why constructive Christian theology typically finds this literary God-character unusable. The third section makes an argument for the usability of the God-character in Christian theology. The term haecceity—Latin for this-ness—epitomizes its proposal, which retrieves two twentieth-century thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and K. H. Miskotte.