The Psalms have never been my favorite part of the Bible, in this past seven months of reading and listening to Brueggemann, I can see that's because I had an entirely superficial view of them. That could be due to most of my exposure to them having been those chosen for the Catholic lectionary, just about always in abbreviated form and recited with an repeating response said by the congregation. It had never occurred to me to ask the question that he starts off with, asking who had said this, originally - having to imagine what in someones life would elicit that kind of poetry - and imagining who I know who might say it today. As he also says, this particular Psalm is full of contemporary relevance in our lives, attempting to live the right way in a society in which "the good life" is a life of consumption based on a regime of exploitation, plunder and destruction. He mentions Donald Trump prominently in the course of the lesson.
As so many of these lectures and talks and sermons, I'll be listening to this a number of times.
I went looking the other day: Psalm 73 doesn't appear in the Revised Common Lectionary. Granted, you can't squeeze everything into the RCL, so a lot is left out. But the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, and the heart, and the voice of the people, and so many things.
ReplyDeleteI came to my appreciation of the Psalms late, but I've found they are worth reading in their own right. Took people like Brueggemann to make me understand that, though.
They're constantly gone through in the Office Hours but it's mostly priests and religious who do those.
DeleteI'm finding that I'm too ignorant and, so, superficial to read the Old Testament without reading what scholars have learned from studying it in depth. It's just so complex and fraught with implications that you don't know are there unless you've studied, long and hard. I think I could say that just about every atheistic or impious or disregarding view of the scriptures I've ever read, heard or been exposed to, but, especially the Old Testament, is based on ignorance and superficiality, often by people who have never read any of it but have depended on atheists' claims about it in junk printed by Prometheus publications or the such. The problem is that too many who believe they believe it also have such a concept of it.
They're constantly gone through in the Office Hours but it's mostly priests and religious who do those.
DeleteI'm finding that I'm too ignorant and, so, superficial to read the Old Testament without reading what scholars have learned from studying it in depth. It's just so complex and fraught with implications that you don't know are there unless you've studied, long and hard. I think I could say that just about every atheistic or impious or disregarding view of the scriptures I've ever read, heard or been exposed to, but, especially the Old Testament, is based on ignorance and superficiality, often by people who have never read any of it but have depended on atheists' claims about it in junk printed by Prometheus publications or the such. The problem is that too many who believe they believe it also have such a concept of it.
Well, start with the label "Old Testament." My Hebrew Scriptures professor was a student of Brueggeman (he took over the position at the seminary from WB), and the first thing he told us was that the Hebrew Scriptures were not a prelude to the New Testament.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, it's complicated as hell, and hard to get a handle on. You need to understand the history of Israel, to begin with (if you want to place Solomon in perspective, and understand Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and the Prophets), and then temple worship, and the era of the Judges. Then there are the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, the laws (always misrepresented and cherry-picked by Christianity), etc., etc., etc.
You first have to understand that, as God said to Isaiah, the ways of the HS are not your ways, its thoughts not your thoughts. You have to make it other in order to learn to be intimate with it. And yeah, most representations of it, including recent ones like that idiotic "biography" of God supposedly based on it, are usually ignorant mis-readings. We all read such works as members of a community (atheists; ignorant; pew-sitters, etc.). You don't fully appreciate it until you are in the right community.
Oddly enough, and not to diminish it, it's like learning art or music appreciation. You don't know what you're missing until you learn to see and/or hear fully. And once you do hear/see fully, you can never be so clueless again.