Tuesdays Are My Mondays

RMJ put me on to the Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann the other day.  I've been listening to his lectures and interviews and sermons and am finding that, as usual, good theologians are people of remarkable breath of learning and depth of thinking.  The typical atheist slams against theology are made in total ignorance of the literature by people who usually couldn't master enough of the topic to understand what is being said.  After several years of reading theology more seriously I don't find it is usually an easy read or listen.  It's like reading serious philosophy with an additional layer of prerequisite material on top.

Here is an address he gave at the General Synod of the United Church of Christ in 2007.  It is on the same material covered in an address Brueggemann gave earlier that year which RMJ wrote about.  I'm intending to read some of his books and articles.  I don't believe that history is cyclical but we seem to have made the same mistakes, over and over again.  It is one of the conceits of atheists that there is no reason to listen to what "bronze age goat herders" wrote thousands of years ago.  Other than to show that atheists don't know the first thing they're talking about - these were iron age people as  the most superficial reading of the Old Testament proves - and that their kind of arrogance prevents us from learning things that they had figured out way back then and which later generations valued enough to copy, preserve and study seriously.

We are in a period which is remarkably like the one he talks about.