Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism

by Donald J. Moore

In this study of Martin Buber's life and work, Donald Moore focuses in on Buber's central message about what it means to be a human being and a person of faith.

298 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Giovanni Generoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin Buber was a human being who thought that we should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience others - and that this is where God's revelation is known. As he said, "A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for." There is no universal, absolute set of laws or doctrine that can protect us, individual persons, from the responsibility to live here, now, in this present moment, faced with dilemmas and uncertainties that we could not foresee. True humanity is embracing risk, uncertainty, unfamiliarity, with one's whole being. "All real living is meeting" - with God, with others, with the world. True religion pushes believers into the world, always into humanity, always into life - not beyond or away from the world. Insofar as organized religion or religious creeds protects persons from the riskiness of concrete encounters with God and other human beings - by giving us a preconceived script of ethics or whatever - such is actually the evacuation of true religion, of revelation, of being.