the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us

The alternative consciousness of Moses was exceedingly radical in its implications both for religion and for the social and political order.  First, the notion of God's freedom probably is more than any religious movement can sustain for very long.  As Karl Barth has seen, the dispute between revelation   and reason concerns not only other or false religions but the very "religion of Christian revelation."  Second,the notion of human justice and compassion is rarely a foremost factor in ordering a community.  Indeed, most communities find ways of treating it as the last question and never the first question about human reality.  It could well be that the possibilities emergent from the ministry of Moses are too radical for any historical community, either in terms of theological presuppositions or in terms of societal implementation.

By way of analogy, it is clear that the militance and radicalness of the early Christian community was soon compromised.  Indeed, John Gager has argued that if it had not changed to embrace culture to some extent it would have disappeared as a sectarian oddity.   Perhaps it must be concluded  that the vision emerging from Moses is viable only in an intentional community whose passionfor  faith is knowingly linked to survival in the face of a dominant, hostile culture.  That is,  such a radical vision is most appropriate to a sectarian mood which is margina in the community.  Such situations of risk do seem to call forth such radicalism.  And, conversely, situations of cultural acceptancece breed accomodating complacency. 

Thus, in our utilization of sociological insight concerning the social dimensions of knowledge, language and power,we must not be inattentive to our very own sociology and the ways in which it commandeers both our faith and our scholarship.  Perhaps the minority community of slaves and midwives was able to affirm the freedom of God just because there was no other legitimated way to stand over against static triumphal religion, for every other less-free God has already been co-opted.  Perhaps the minority community of slaves is able to affirm the politics of justice and compassion because there is no other social vision in which to stand in protest against the oppression of the situation.   As George Mendenhall has urged, the social purpose of a really transcendent God is to have a court of appeal against the highest courts and orders of society around us.  Thus a truly free God is essential to marginal people if they are to have a legitimate standing ground against the oppressive orders of the day.  But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessarily, desirable, or perhaps even possible. 

Wow!  As true today as it was when he wrote this and, I'm certain, as it will be years from now.  And such density of content.  From pointing out that making it so in human society for long periods is very difficult because the conception of God necessary to sustain it is one that everything from human inattention to the far easier way of first compromise with and then total acquiescent surrender to "the oppressive orders of the day".  This way of reading the Scriptures with eyes open to the terrible truth that while The Truth is a force that will have to be not only reckoned with but ultimately answered to, it is not the foremost focus of human attention and is so difficult, especially in resisting our inevitable weaknesses and follies and selfishness and fear and envy - the whole host of deadly sins - that we have to always expect it to give way.

For any atheists and "skeptics" who read this and scoff that such a truth is hardly worth considering because it isn't reliably accessed and guaranteed to be permanent, the same is true for every single alternative and far more quickly exactly because those all lack the central motivating and initiating origin of this vision, the free God who Moses discerned.  I think the radicalness of his prophetic imagination is one of the most convincing things about it.  As is the, I would assert, even more radical interpretation of it as found in the Gospel of Jesus.  

There is no mystery about how the most impressive social change in the United States in my lifetime happened, it was the result of the religious vision of those in the great civil rights struggle of the 20th century, I would argue primarily fueled by those who acted in just this Mosaic tradition, whether in the Black Christian churches or in Malcolm X's motivation in Islam. both sharing in the heritage of this conception of the free God as declared by Moses in the Shemot, the book of Exodus. The failure of the Supreme Court to sustain the Voting Rights Act and other reforms of civil government in the subsequent period, the naked attack on that progress from that era, especially in the present Roberts Court, proves the absolute need to sustain or even start that requires a "higher court" of appeal than are found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and certainly in the moral character of the Supreme Court and the other branched of government.  Our election of a series of media supported gangsters and goons proves you even need one against We The People.   Relying on the "free press" is even more absurd.   

I would predict that we are going to see virtually every sentence of this passage come into view during the Republican-fascist convention, including, of course, the elevation of the anti-Christ who is the material and unfree God of so many of those "white-evangelicals" and "traditionalist-Catholics" and members of "Orthodox" synagogues who are funding the Trump-facist campaign and who are appealing to the gullible. Not to mention the Putin regime basking in the praise of the thoroughly compromised Moscow patriarchate of "Christian" orthodoxy.   I wonder if Timothy Cardinal Dolan will offer up a prayer.   I haven't checked the schedule to see what goons and freaks will show up.  Though I had heard that Scott Baio, child star in that 1970s nostalgia TV crap I mentioned here the other day is on it. I swear I just heard that this morning.  TV and ephemeral pop culture being the substitute of low to middle-brow secularism as science and explanations out of the social sciences (yeah, just another line of fashion) are the more intellectually up-market idols.  

 But then it follows that for those who regulate and benefit from the order of the day a truly free God is not necessarily, desirable, or perhaps even possible.