God in Search of Man in Abraham Joshua Heschel

The human person, by nature, is capable of raising ultimate questions. Metaphysical inquiry enabled exploration of the alleged immaterial aspect of the world, from ancient archetypes to the medieval absolute spirit, devoid of matter, thereby leading to the Scholastic ultimate answer to certain ultimate questions. Modernity had to reclaim the relevance of the material world, creating a dualism that burdens the contemporary believer. This paper is an attempt to explore Abraham Joshua Heschel’s concept of the Crisis of Religion as the forgetfulness of the ultimate questions that give way to religion. Without the question, the answer is irrelevant—a part of knowledge but never a creative force, especially in the context of the post-modern world. This paper argues first that post-modern human persons find themselves in a religion that is concerned more with establishing their answers as absolutely true while forgetting the ultimate questions that gave rise to it. Second, it explores the human situation as naturally open to the intimations of the divine; that the human question on God is actually an answer to a more primordial question already addressed to him—revelation. And third, it concludes with the recovery of the ultimate question that gives way to religion raised by the ancient encounter with the mystical world, answered by the medieval metaphysical assent to the spiritual realm, denied by the modern reliance on empirical tools, but burdens the spiritual person living and challenged by the contemporary world in the hope of proposing a contemporary belief in God for the contemporary person experiencing contemporary problems.