The Economic Decoding of Religious Dogmas by Paul Fudulu

Author:Paul Fudulu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787149663
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

3.2.4.4. Salvation in Judaism

If one could take Herberg’s Judaism and Modern Man as an accurate description of Judaism, then in no other religion can one find an earlier and clearer description of salvation as being salvation from the sin of self-absolutization, making man the instrument of other men, or salvation from the exercise of coercive relative power. For the Jewish, salvation is not like it is in Christianity, that is, salvation from death, because salvation is in this world as well. Early on, Jews came to cherish the idea of liberty and to relate it to the idea of sin.37 The struggle with Hellenism produced Pharisaism — that is, essentially, monotheism — and the struggle with Pauline Christianity produced righteousness by the law of the Talmud (Sombart, p. 1913), without priests, church, and mysticism. About one and a half millennia were needed to get about the same kind of salvation through the evolution of Christianity toward Protestantism.

For the Jews, allegiance to God involves allegiance to no earthly relative power38 and, respectively, allegiance to some earthly relative power would mean no allegiance to God. Consequently, faith in God is attachment to earthly relative power equality or a rejection of coercive human relative power39 and is mirrored by the fact that the “Hebraic religion proclaims the law of love to be the final rule of life” (Herberg, 1961, p. 141). The fundamental Jewish commandment of equal love of one’s fellow man is nothing more than the principle of equal worth and, as such, of the fundamental equality of men. It is this normative perfect equality of Jews which produced their zero preference for relative power and exclusive preference for absolute wealth. It is for this same reason that “in all ages and in all lands Jews’ riches were proverbial” (Sombart, 1913, p. 293).

By what I have already said, Judaism’s single rival for the highest degree of consistency by this criterion is Protestantism or more precisely Calvinism. There are two points which seem to suggest a slightly different ranking for the two religions. First, salvation in Judaism is done by God and through human works, and because each way has its own dangers, “the Pharisaic position tried to hold the balance between man’s duty to strive to earn pardon and his inability to attain it without God’s gracious gift of it” (Abrahams, as cited in Herberg, 1961, p. 123). Because salvation through works was so dangerous for Protestants that they did their best to get rid of it, it might seem that Judaism is below the level of consistency attained by Calvinism. Although this is only apparent because while Protestants had to fight against the reality of a strong ecclesiastical relative power concentration — and works did pose a real danger — very early on Jews did away with priests, mysticism, and the institution of a church. Therefore, in Judaism, works as a means to salvation did not possess a real danger of promoting earthly authority.

The second point might very well put Calvinism on the defensive.

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