The denial by Jews and Muslims of God’s Trinitarian nature leaves them with a Transcendent yet impersonal God. They retain a “outsided-ness” in their theology but that” outsided-ness” is a Transcendent abstraction that cannot come in contact with humanity and as such all man has left is a humanistic monism and so man must live with a functional outsidelessness.
If they try to cure this lack of existential outsidelessness that occurs with their Transcendent yet impersonal God by making God dependent upon the creature for His actualization unto a personal being then God ceases to be God as he is dependent upon man for His reality.
Rabbinic scholar Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) rightly critiqued Islam for seeing God as ‘unqualified Omnipotence,’ who can never be the ‘Father of mankind,’ and thus is radically impersonal. (See Heschel, ‘The Prophets,’ [New York: Harper, 1962,] pg. 292, 311.) Yet post-biblical Judaism cannot escape Herschel’s critique entirely. The medieval rabbi Maimonides, for example, also confessed an “absolutely transcendent God who is independent of humanity.” (See Reuven Kimelmen, “The Theology of Abraham Heschel,” First Things (Dec. 2009). On the other hand, Kimelmen notes that Heschel commits the opposite error to that of Maimonides (and Islam), namely that of making God dependent on man in a covenantal relationship that both God and man need in order to be who they are. Heschel adopts the rabbinical concept that it is a human witness that in some sense makes God real (Kimelmen, “The Theology of Abraham Heschel”). Once more, God is dependent upon humanity. This is the classic dilemma of a monotheism without the Trinity. Because Heschel does not believe God to be Triune, God depends on man to be personal and therefore cannot be “Wholly Other,” in relation to Creation.
So, it seems, if you are a strict Monotheist you can have a Transcendent God that must be impersonal because He can not have contact with man or you can have a Transcendent God who is only personal because of His dependence upon man. The problem here though is that a God who is dependent upon man in any shape, manner, or form, for His being is neither truly transcendent nor truly God.
It should be said here that this is not only the problem of the Muslim and the Jew, it is also the problem of the neo-orthodox who have so emphasized God’s Transcendence that it is only by a completely subjective encounter with God whereby God can find a subjective status of the personal.
Parts of this Inspired, Parts Paraphrased, and Parts Quoted from
Peter Jones — The Other Worldview — pg. 199-200 (footnote — 27)
