Since the first week in Advent last December, I've been posting some excerpts from Walter Brueggemann's book The Bible Makes Sense as a sort of antidote to what I was reading about The Museum of The Bible opening in Washington, DC. I went to look at its website and, frankly, am kind of appalled by their presentation of their facility and program (for an extra $8 you can see The Valley of David And Goliath on temporary loan from "The Bible Land's Museum in Jerusalem". When I started it, I though it would last for the four weeks of Advent but if I posted what I thought was important from the book, I'd be going well past Lent, as well.
I think reading the 10th and final summary chapter of Brueggemann's book would do you entirely more good than going to all of the museums on the Bible you can find. He gives what he admits is only one of many perspectives to take on the Bible which is the POV of the book, he's nothing if not generous in granting there is something to be learned from other points of view. On behalf of his perspective, he says:
The preceding discussion presents a particular perspective on the Bible. It is not claimed that this is the only possible way of understanding the Bible, but it is urged that this perspective is both faithful to the character of the Bible and energizing for the faith and life of the church. Thus at the outset it is presumed that Scripture has to do with the fidelity and vitality of the church. Consequently, the perspective taken here leads to distinctive conclusions regarding each topic.
I'll give you points two and three of the points he stresses because they are useful to an understanding of why trying to read and understand the Books of the Bible as if they were modern history or science or even a "proof" of something is to boldly go futilely where so many others have gone before.
Second, the Bible is to be discerned as much as a set of questions posed to the church as a set of answers. To be sure the Bible provides an ultimate assurance to the issues of human history and destiny, the answer finally being that in God self-giving graciousness and undoubted sovereignty are identical. That is the central affirmation of the Bible which surely is an “answer” to the deepest questions of life. And nothing can detract from that.
But the Bible is often perverted when regarded as an answer book or security blanket. This is evident in a most obvious way when the Bible is treated like a rabbit's foot or like a holy relic upon which to swear. But it is the same if the Bible is seen as a resolver of moral dilemmas or as a code for proper conduct. Such an approach attributes to the Bible a kind of static absoluteness which presumes the fixity of what is proper,. It is the same when the Bible is seen as a collection of right doctrine which need only be “believed” without discerning its dynamic or historical character. These are all variations of the same theme, for each is an attempt to establish a norm beyond the demands and pressures of historical existence. The end result is to attribute to the Bible an absolute, unchanging quality (surely alien to its own evidence) which denies freedom to God and which denies our own historical responsibility.
The Bible finally is not concerned with right morality, right piety or right doctrine. Rather it is concerned with faithful relationships between God and his people, between all the brothers and sisters of the community, and between his community and the world he has made. Faithful relationships of course can never be reduced to formulae but live always in the free, risking exchange that belongs to covenanting. It is this kind of exchange rather than fixed absolutes which are the stuff of Biblical faith.
The central concerns of the Bible are not flat certitudes (even in the form of “eternal myths”) but assurances that are characterized by risk and open mystery. The quality of certitude offered by the Bible is never that of a correct answer but rather a trusted memory, a dynamic image, a restless journey, a faithful voice. Such assurances leave us restless and tentative in the relation, and always needing to decide afresh Rather than closing out things in a settled resolution, they tend to open things out, always in fresh and deep question and urgent invitation. The central thrust of the Bible, then, is to raise new questions, to press exploration of new dimensions of fidelity, new spheres for trusting. Such questions serve as invitations to bolder, richer faithfulness. Such questions also serve as critics exposing our easy resolution, our faithless posturing, and our self-deception. If the Bible is only a settled answer, it will not reach us seriously. But it is also an open question which presses and urges and invites. For that reason the faithful community is never fully comfortable with the Bible and never has finally exhausted its gifts or honored its claims.
Thirdly, the Bible is not a statement of conclusions but a statement of presuppositions. To treat the Bible as though it “proves” things is both to misunderstand it and to judge it by alien processes. “Proof” always belongs to the realm of scientific verification, either by empirical or rational investigation. Either way, it consists of amassing data so that a conclusion is mandatory.
But this is not the characteristic way of the Bible, even though there are some forays into such a method. The characteristic logic of the Bible is confessional, assertive, and unargued. The Bible does not examine creation and conclude that God is creator. It does not review Israel's history and conclude that God redeems. It does not probe the history of the church and prove that Jesus has been raised. That is a form of knowing quite dominant among us in our mode of epistemology. But it is alien to the Bible.
The Bible asserts that God is creator and then draws derivative statements about creation. It confesses that God redeems and then asserts what this means for history. It affirms that Jesus is raised and then makes claims for the church. It operates in a very different universe of discourse which will not come to terms with the epistemology either of a doctrinally careful church nor with a scientifically oriented culture. It is curious that even some who have zeal for the authority of the Scripture make the case in ways that concede other norms by which the Bible is tested rather than permitting the Bible its own assertive ground. The faith premise of the Bible starts the other way around. The central substance of the Bible is not based on proof but in the courage and sureness of witnesses who dare bring testimony. And that testimony is in the posture of confession, not proof.
Few things so effectively deny power and vitality to the Bible as forcing it to meet other standards of knowing. The central substance of the Bible is kerygma, i.e., proclamation which is never argued or demonstrated or proven, but only proclaimed as the bedrock of faith Reading the Bible requires getting into that epistemology which is already an act of repentance, for it is prepared to believe the proclaiming voice without appeal to other norms. Thus acceptance of the “authority of Scripture” is not based on a formal assessment of the validity of a book but on a faith-decision to take as binding the voice of faith heard in the text Such an assent of course does not ignore our ordinary experience, but without that initial assent there will be no serious facing of Scripture. It is urged here that the Bible is the beginning point and not the end result of faithful listening.
Off topic for the post but not the blog. An interesting review of a book by the conservative writer Leon Kass. What jumped out was that he was motivated by a rejection of scientific materialism. review His rejection took a very different direction, I suspect based on his secularism, whereas your writing has been motivated by Christian faith. I want to think it over more but I wonder if the almost polar opposite outcome is from the belief that God finds all worthy and equal of the same love. Still, the book appears to ask interesting and hard questions. Looks worthy of the time to read.
ReplyDeleteIn Brueggemann's book he points out that the blessing of God isn't confined to those we think are worthy of them and Kass and his sometimes collaborator Harvey Mansfield are all about excluding LGBT people, women who don't adopt traditional female roles, men who don't adopt their concept of masculinity. That's what I'm most familiar with Kass through.
DeleteI think it's ironic that the article notes that Kass's conservatism was based, partly, in his realization that his "liberal" colleagues at Harvard were snobs when he, himself, practices a different form of snobbery based on his preferences for things being the way they were when he was young.
Not that I'd disagree with some of his criticisms of consumerist, secular society but I think it's telling that he is not infrequently allied with some of the most vulgar of vulgar materialists. Even his "great books" concept of a liberal education would, I think in the end, amount to a sort of metaphysical materialism in which those "great books" and the exclusivity that largely if not entirely limits those to a small cannon of texts functions in a similar way to the exclusivity of fashion and pop culture.
I'm all for people reading The Great Books but I'm totally against only The Great Books being The Great Books. You wonder how the authors of most of The Great Books wrote Great Books since few of the could have read The Great Books on his list because a lot of them hadn't been written or weren't available to them.
I think he's become what he disdained.
In the 18th century the "unities" were discovered in Aristotle's "Poetics," and applied to tragedies like those of Shakespeare. Where these "unities" were violated, the plays fell short of greatness because, after all, Aristotle was The Philosopher since the Renaissance. He was the measure of all things he left lecture notes about.
ReplyDeleteThe same presumption infects the idea of the "Great Books." When I took German from a German professor, he told us once we could read all the known Greek literature in a summer, that it barely filled a bookshelf. I still haven't met the challenge (more fool me), but he didn't put it in terms of "Great Books."
I've always thought the concept was stupid. I also thought it was buried by the "multi-culturalism" phenomenon of the '80's. Ideas, unfortunately, are bulletproof; especially the bad ones.
Never heard of Kass, and I'm going to go read the review. Always good to read something from another point of view.
“Their trendy and shallow scholarship is bad enough,” he writes of stereotypical leftwing professors, “but they deserve the hemlock for corrupting the hearts and minds of the young.”
ReplyDeleteNever having read Kass I have to ask: he knows he's making a reference to Socrates. Does he understand the irony of the reference?