it is of course a shock and an affront to us to notice how the power of the Bible is especially received among the powerless. But we can not avoid the evidence that it was especially the poor and powerless who responded to Jesus and who were able to trust God's promises

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.  Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?   But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?  Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?

Letter of James 2:5-7

Since I'm typing out so much of Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, I've decided to make it a sort of Advent meditation.  Here's another section of the First Chapter, The Possibility of a Fresh Perspective.  He's talking about the nature of the Covenantal-Historical model of life that comes from and provides a particularly potent reading of the Bible.  It is especially relevant in our current political situation in which egalitarian democracy, justice and decency are under full attack through the lies of the free press as told on behalf of billionaire oligarchs, American as much as in Putin's crime regime.

Moreover, this future, which staggers us by envisioning what we think not possible, offers the dynamic of a Promise-Maker and a Promise-Keeper, God himself.  That is what is covenantal about this tradition.  We are not in covenant with a good idea which is simply there or with our best intentions which depend on us.  We are in covenant with an active. caring, intervening God who keeps his promise.  Thus the Bible strangely  affirms that we are to embrace the promise of a quite different society which God himself initiates.  Yet this future to which we look forward is peculiarly historical,  which is to say the future is breaking in now, and when it breaks in, it does so peculiarly among the powerless, despised, and weak.  Bible reading is for the sake of remembering where we peculiarly come from and what is not peculiarly promised by this God who is graciously committed especially to those who have lot their utility and who have been written off by the world.  The future here envisioned is not a withdrawal from history,  but a renewal of humanness in history, so that the new humanness may emerge especially among those whom we treat with disdain.  It is of course a shock and an affront to us to notice how the power of the Bible is especially received among the powerless.  But we can not avoid the evidence that it was especially the poor and powerless who responded to Jesus and who were able to trust God's promises  It may give us pause to wonder that the poor may be strangely open to such promises, and perhaps in our affluence, it becomes more difficult and problematic to let God's promises have power among us.

Brueggemann's last clause is, of course, entirely consistent with the prophesy of the scriptures, from the earliest books, certainly from Exodus right through to the very last words of the second testament.  I wonder how that insight would stack up against the predictions of economics and sociology, only my wondering is about how much more impressive the imagined "bronze age goat herders" ideas were than the affluent members of university faculties have been.  I can't recall anything as clueless in the Scriptures as Alan Dershowitz's current line of bilge.