But our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases. Psalm 115:3 NASB
Whatever – Richard Nisbett’s book, The Geography of Thought, is a contemporary study of ancient differences in worldviews. Contrasting the Western Greek view with that of the Chinese, Nisbett’s analysis demonstrates that our “world” is hardly uniform in conception or observation. It is simply not the case that all human beings understand the world in the same way. Ancient thought patterns continue to alter perception and unless we recongize this we will often be stunned, preplexed and perhaps shocked when we discover that the “other” person can’t even fathom what we are talking about.
Nisbett’s contemporary analysis, although dealing with Asian thought patterns, is an enormously helpful tool for anyone who wishes to enter into the ancient Semitic world of the Bible. How the Chinese think is much closer to Hebrew patterns than to the Western world. There may be many cultural, linguistic and historical reasons for this, but no matter why this is the case, the revelations from Nisbett’s study illuminate just how different the biblical worldview is from the way Christian Western thinking has developed.
David’s verse from Psalm 115 opens the door for this deeper investigation. David literally says that all YHVH takes delight in He does (kol asher-hafetz asa). We might also read this as “YHVH delights in whatever He does.” If you think about this, it contains a paradox. How can YHVH delight in the extermination of the Amalikites? Or how can His chastisement of Israel be a delight? The language cries out for logical correction. But that wouldn’t be Hebraic.
I have extracted dozens of citations from Nisbett’s work that may help us come to terms (I did not say “explain”) statements like this verse. You can access all of these extracts HERE. Nisbett speaks about Chinese but in nearly every case you can substitute Hebrews. For those who don’t have interest in the lengthy version, I leave you with this:
“Greeks were independent and engaged in verbal contention and debate in an effort to discover what people took to be the truth. They thought of themselves as individuals with distinctive properties, as units separate from others within the society, and in control of their own destinies. Similarly, Greek philosophy started from the individual object—the person, the atom, the house—as the unit of analysis and it dealt with properties of the object. The world as in principle simple and knowable: All one had to do was to understand what an object’s distinctive attributes were so as to identify its relevant categories and then apply the pertinent rule to the categories.
Chinese social life was interdependent and it was not liberty but harmony that was the watchword—the harmony of humans and nature for the Taoists and the harmony of humans with other humans for the Confucians. Similarly, the Way, and not the discovery of truth, was the goal of philosophy. Thought that gave no guidance to action was fruitless. The world was complicated, events were interrelated, and objects (and people) were connects ‘not as pieces of pie, but as ropes in a net.’”[1]
Can you imagine that David’s statement is not a piece of theology but rather a way of acting in the world?
Oh, yes. Just this one addition.
“Christianity is the only religion that finds it necessary to have a theology specifying essential aspects of God and that this insistence on categorization and abstraction is traceable to the Greeks.”[2]
Topical Index: Nisbett, delight, paradox, Psalm 115:3, hafetz, whatever
[1] Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought, p. 19.
[2] Ibid., p. 200.
