Answer To A Question: Why Are You Going Over That Stuff?

Among other things, this series I stumbled into doing about a section of The Bible Makes Sense could be considered a long ad for the book or, really, for reading it and using it as suggested, as a sort of at-home course on The Bible, in lieu of going to the recently open Bible Museum.  It was the first of Brueggemann's book I read, one of the most striking things about it was how he could seem to get inside my own experience, how he knew what things had influenced me in life, a much different life, in some ways, than the one he had led.  I wouldn't be surprised if his study of the Bible and other things ( Brueggemann, in his writing and talks references an amazing range of scholarship and thinking ) didn't give him those insights that secular scholars miss on account of the nature of what they read and study. 

I have given a long part of the first chapter here before, going over the various models or frames of considering life that he gave in it.  But even before then, from the first paragraphs of the book, it was clear that he was not your usual kind of narrowly focused, scholar but someone whose knowledge of people was wide and deep.  Perhaps I should have started with his suggestion of why studying the Bible, taking it seriously, is important.  How that  could produce a real, authentic counter-cultural, counter-political, etc. mindset that that official, "radical" "secularist" eventually commercialized "counter-culture" which the more easily attractive and easily taken for sophisticated framings produced.

It is strange that the Bible is our most treasured book,  and yet it seems so difficult that we don't find it very helpful.   Perhaps we have expected the wrong things of it;  we have asked of it what it cannot do  We have expected the Bible to keep promises it has never made to us.  The Bible cannot be a good luck piece to bring us Gods blessing.  Nor can it be an answer book to solve our problems or to give us right belief.  So the first question about reading the Bible is what we can indeed expect of it. 

I suggest that the Bible is precious to us because it offers us a way of understanding the world in a fresh perspective, a perspective that leads to life, joy, and wholeness.  It offers us a model, a pattern, through which we may think about, perceive, and live life differently.  Each of us has adopted one or more models for living our lives, even though we didn't do it consciously.  We learned a certain perspective by living in certain contexts and listening to certain voices.  Those might have been the voices of fearful parents of of calculating peers.  They might have been the voices of grudging tradition or euphoric dreams.  Among the voices of many of us listened to were the smooth seductive voice of television commercials.  Each of these shaped our consciousness and urged us to a particular notion of life.  They gripped our lives and shaped our experience, and we didn't know it was happening.  Yet over a period of time they came to have great power over us and finally to define our identity and destiny for us. 

The model which I regard as central to the Bible and which I will present here, is what I call a covenantal-historical way of understanding our life and faith. By covenantal I mean an enduring commitment by God and his people based on mutual vows of loyalty and mutual obligation through which both parties have their lives radically affected and empowered By historical I mean that these covenant partners, God and his people, have a vast deposit of precious memories of decisive interactions. These interactions, which run the gamut of love and hate, affirm to us that our whole existence depends on staying seriously and faithfully involved with the covenant partner, even at some risk. 

To bring out the uniqueness of this model, I will first sketch out several ways of understanding life which are shaping people in our society. In some respects they have points of contact with the model here proposed and are reflected in the Bible. But on the whole it is clear, as I will try to show, that the biblical view is quite distinctive from the others. The reading of the Bible can offer to us ways of understanding our life which are quite different from our own ways and perhaps seen in contradiction. Exposure to this literature may challenge our imagination and present to us ways of thinking and perceiving and knowing that have been denied to us by other lenses of perception. 

Brueggemann not only got my many decades of experience in that description, especially during my conventional secularist, agnostic decades - he also got my parallel track of transcendent thinking nailed down later in the chapter - he also got what would come about thirty years later as I did start to take The Bible, theology, more seriously, which, oddly enough, I date from my reading of John Dominic Crossan's, The Historical Jesus (which I find myself to largely be at odds with, now).   In my case, it came directly from a political consideration of the effects of higher-brow materialism and scientism and the catastrophic results those had for traditional American Liberalism.  That's where it started, but consideration of the texts, considerations of the kind that are taught by this book, the kind of way it advocates reading and understanding those produced real faith in a central kernel for me, a belief in how we are to act towards each other because that is what God wants.

I can't stand with Paul in making the truth of the Gospel contingent on a belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, though I certainly believe that the apostles were reporting their real experience of those,  Different people will have different reasons to believe.  I don't believe that the truth of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you,"  "remember the Lord your God is one and you are to love God with everything you are and your neighbor as yourself" "What you do to the least among you you do to God" "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" and the commandment of Jesus,  "love one another as I have loved you" would have been different if the crucifixion and resurrection didn't happen.  They were true before Jesus was born, indeed, some of those sayings are taken from or based on the Hebrew scriptures.   I don't think those are true because Jesus said it, I believe Jesus said it because it is true.  That is a continuing job, to try to do those things better and to push for them to be made real in human societies and human governance and among that collection of self-regarding, self-serving, would be demi-gods in the judiciary and in academia.  I've known store clerks, and home makers and dirt poor bums who were better at it than people with academic credentials and a big income. I think a lot of them know more about it than I'm ever going to read from even a great scholar, keeping in mind I'm not including Brueggemann and some others in that.