  In 1914, already under Cohen’s influence and unmoved by the romantic theology of Martin Buber popular at the time, Rosenzweig wrote his first essay in Jewish theology, “Atheistic Theology.” The article criticized as atheistic those tendencies of contemporary Jewish theology, Buber’s foremost among them, to conceive of the idea of God as an expression of the vital Jewish aspiration for unity. Such theology, Rosenzweig argued, reduced the divine to no more than a human projection. In lieu of such contemporary trends, Rosenzweig insists that theology in his time cannot avoid taking seriously the notion of revelation: the notion that God, transcendent to and independent of the human being in the world, at once enters into relation with the human being in the world. Indeed, Rosenzweig claims here that only by taking the transcendence and at once the revelation of God seriously—rather than reducing the divine to an expression of a Jewish life force—can we grasp the split the human being experiences in history, between his personal self-realization and the realization of the world. It is the notion of revelation, Rosenzweig suggests, that allows us to view history along an absolute redemptive trajectory, established by God’s relation to the human being in the world. Such a notion of revelation would reappear at the center of Rosenzweig’s systematic work, The Star of Redemption, a few years later. 