Abstract
The Church Father Tertullian (160–225), like many others who wished to strengthen the orthodox faith of the Church, was concerned with currents in the emerging Church considered to be heretical, including the doctrine (effective at the time of Hadrian) of Marcion, who made a distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and “the one whom the Creator God destined for transferring Judaism into its last state and who will someday return.” The Gnostic critique of the Creator God of the Hebrew Bible has a history of nearly two thousand years and lives on a Platonic motif, which in this tradition was read contrary to its original sense. In the Timaeus, in the speech of the dialogue participant with the same name, Plato develops an extensive cosmic speculation, in which a creator with the name of “demiurge” creates the cosmos in accordance with present examples or models, according to the discipline of a craftsman. Finding this originator and father of the universe would be just as difficult as making him known. Gnostic speculation later identified this demiurge with the Creator God of the Hebrew Bible, but also concluded from the experience of evil in the world that its creator must have been malicious. This idea-figure shaped all of Western history up to Martin Heidegger, who postulated a God who should liberate existing entities from the abuse of the machinations. Possibly, the identification of the Creator God and the merely technically-effective demiurge led to an anti-Judaic idea-figure in such a way that the God of the Hebrew Bible and those who professed him, the Jews, became the initiators of a process of domination, according to which human beings are the enemies of nature.
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Reference
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Brumlik, M. (2001). Humankind’s Relationship with Nature and Participation in the Process of Creation Through Technology in the View of Judaism. In: Koslowski, P. (eds) Nature and Technology in the World Religions. A Discourse of the World Religions, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2394-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2394-7_2
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