"Yahweh MAKES POSSIBLE AND REQUIRES an alternative theology and an alternative sociology."

The program of Moses is not the freeing of a little band of slaves as an escape from the empire, though that is important enough, especially if you happen to be in that little band.  Rather, his work is nothing less than an assault on the consciousness of the empire, aimed at nothing less than the dismantling of the empire both in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions,  Israel emerged not by Moses' hand - although without Moses' hand - as a genuine alternative community.  The prophetic tradition knows that it bears a genuine alternative to a theology of God's enslavement and a sociology of human enslavement,  That genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is.  Yahweh makes possible and requires an alternative theology and an alternative sociology.  Prophesy begins in discerning how genuinely alternative he is. 

Someone asks if I had read a post at the blog Eclectic Orthodoxy about God not being Odin or Zeus or Marduk for that matter and the answer is no but I wish I had, it would have given me a recent citation to prove what I'd concluded from yesterday's portion of The Prophetic Imagination had multiple support as not being merely my own idea.  I don't get how when it's anything else, multiple attestation is considered to be supportive of a statement's reality  but in religion, especially Judaism or Christianity, it's considered to be discrediting of the idea. 

As I also said this week, it was through my study of the failure of the American left that I came to a conclusion which is also multiply concluded and attestable that the genuine form of modern, egalitarian, democracy, certainly as it is aspired to in "the West" is a product of exactly what Brueggemann is talking about here, it is not rooted "in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism," it is rooted in the conception of God which Christianity inherited and rephrased through the Jews who founded Christianity from the Mosaic religion and social-political expression of who God is how the universe was created by God, how it continues and how human beings are to behave in accordance with that God.  

It was, so far as I knew, my own conclusion that without that belief being sufficiently firm to at least sometimes, preferably most times, among a clear and effective majority lead a society to something along the same line as the great commandments of the Old and New Testaments,  Love God with all of your being AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, then all secular and supposedly scientific notions as supporting that would always fail.   The imagination of most of the secularists I've encountered is so thoroughly domesticated in the middle-class to affluent milieu (and not a very probing or critical view of that milieu) ESPECIALLY AS FOUND AMONG THE FACULTIES OF UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES that they cannot understand that the contented cattle of their class is not how most people experience life and, when the chips are down and the pink slips are out and the decisions on who gets tenure or funding comes to the crunch, neither are they in the majority reliably so content.  If I had the time I would compile a lexicon of academic depravity that asserts the nihilistic denial of the reality of the morals that they give lip service to when it suits them, I'd go from today retrospectively into the past because whenever modernism, atheism, scientism, materialism have been articulated they ALWAYS come with a denial of such moral obligations as egalitarian democracy depends, absolutely, on.  Not to mention anything like a decent life among people who behave decently.