the prophetic purpose is much more radical than social change and, second, because the issues that so concern the Mosaic tradition are much more profound than the matters we usually regard as social action

Chapter 2  The Royal Consciousness; Countering The Counter-Culture

We have tried to suggest that Moses was mainly concerned with the formation of a counter-community with a counter-consciousness.  In making that claim for Moses I have carefully avoided any primary link between prophetic imagination and social action, for I believe that Moses did not engage in anything like what we identify as social action. He was not engaged in a struggle to transform a regime;  rather his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible.  I do not deny that specific actions of a political kin dare at times mandatory according to the gospel.  But they are not inherently linked to nor the focus of prophetic ministry any more than is a hospital call or a service of worship.  Moses was also concerned not with societal betterment through the repentance of the regime but rather with totally dismantling it in order to permit a new reality to appear.  Prophetic imagination as it may be derived from Moses is concerned with matters political and social, but is as intently concerned with matters linguistic and epistemological - all of which may be to engage simply in verbal distinctions. But I stress the point for two reasons;  first, because the prophetic purpose is much more radical than social change and, second, because the issues that so concern the Mosaic tradition are much more profound than the matters we usually regard as social action.

When I read this the first time I found it somewhat shocking, maybe even, out of my traditional lefty background, even scandalous.   That was due to the shallowness of the language and methods of thinking that conventional, American secular "liberalism" of the 18th century kind had provided for me to think about these things in.   I have, witnessing not only the depravity of "Constitutional originalism, literalism"  but the actual language and epistomological basis of American producing the history of the United States but also the utter and repeated impotence of the so-called "counter-culture" of secular liberalism against what should have been policies and legal rulings favoring the rich elites that should have been easily overturned.

After I got over the shock of the language Walter Brueggemann used in this chapter, I realized that what he was saying were the very same things I had noticed in my more than a decade of trying to figure out why the American left could not seem to really make change that favored the welfare and lives of the overwhelming majority of  People but also the very basis of life on Earth. The secular "civic piety" of the idolatry of the Constitution and the piety of secular liberalism, the language of it had blinded me to, not only its inadequacies and contradictions - why so much of it benefited billionaire liars and their millionaire minions in the media, in Hollywood and entertainment AND THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS WHO SERVED THEM - as the lawyers of the ACLU said all they wanted to do was "level the playing field" ignoring the fact that on one side were the starved poor and on the other side heavily armed thugs and their lawyers and those of their lawyers elevated to the judiciary as the official and binding referees.  Somewhere along the way I noticed that the ACLU style civil libertarians and judges were often good buddies with the opposition, having gone to the same law schools and being of the same class and living in the same communities of privilege.

Long time readers of what I've written here, and I know there are a few, will know especially how I have repeatedly, from the start targeted the regime of lies and gangsters facilitated by the "free speech-press" rulings that were championed by secular liberals and lefties and the scribbling professionals, especially those who make a lot of money in hardly counter-culture media.  In virtually every way the history of the so-called "counter-culture" that, no doubt, Brueggemann was thinking of in the late 1970s, as its failure to be counter enough was leading us into Reaganism, which we have not only not overturned but which is growing ever worse, is exactly the failure of "social action" as contrasted with the radicalism of the Mosaic faith, especially as extended through the teachings of Jesus.  

I have emphasized the epistemological inadequacy and moral treachery of a scientistic, a materialistic and atheistic "liberalism" or would-be radicalism which rests on the same bases as vulgar materialistic Mammonism, even that calling itself "evangelical Christianity" or "traditionalist Catholicism" or "Orthodox Judaism"  or "Islam" and which does, in fact, reproduce in contemporary and local terms a Pharaohism or a Roman imperial rule.  When that has been practiced by 20th and 21st century "civil libertarians" who, in the name of "liberty" bring interpretations of the First Amendment that inevitably empower and favor the billionaires and millionaires, even opening up the place where civic life impinges on what might be its sole means of obtaining legitimacy, our elections, to those who lie their way to the top, domestic, certainly, but in the past two decades, even foreign dictators.   

The American "counter-culture" as officially called by mid-brow scribblers in mid-brow commercial magazines in the 1960s was nothing like a real one, it was just a different variety of consumerism and fashion.  Which is why it was so easily toppled with some of those slogans and jingles and PBS putting on Milton Friedman to counter the previous airing of John Kenneth Galbraith (and if you don't think that, how TV and pop-culture were one of the keys to explain how Reaganism was brought it, you are a dope) and TV shows promoted 50s nostalgia.  I remember the 70s, each awful year of it.   Jimmy Carter, probably our most truly idealistic president, stood no chance against that because the secular left was in no way capable of countering it.  It didn't even really want to.