I am leaving out a paragraph here, for anyone who might be following in the print book, which I hope anyone reading this informal study of the book has gotten and is reading for themselves.
It may be that I have schematized matters too much, but I believe that schematizaion is evident in the text itself. The emergence of royal reality could have gone either way, and the tradition holds out a hope for faithful royal reality, even as late as Josiah. In fact it did not turn out that way, and that indeed presents a major problem for biblical faith. Royal reality rode roughshod over Moses' vision. The gift of freedom was taken over by the yearning for order. The human agenda of justice was utilized for security. The God of freedom and justice was coopted for an eternal now. And in place of passion comes satiation.
I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate. We do not need to review the literature of passion but only to make reference to Soelle, Moltmann, Weisel, and especially Heschel.* Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. The same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for - even Solomon in all his splendor.
In some of his more recent talks, Brueggemann talks about the twin temptations of nostalgia and forgetfulness, which are combined without regard to the irony of it in the undermining and debasement of not only the religious tradition of Christian (mostly in this context) but also in other religion but, generally, in our politics, "our" being that of the collective human population.
In the United States this nostalgia and forgetting is mostly created, instructed, lied into the minds of Americans through the media, the movies, TV shows, hate-talk and other radio narrative, which denies the hard reality of our own history and our own experience as it recreates a false, phony past for us to yearn for but which like all golden ages, was never what it was. The myths of the rugged-individual - OF WHICH THERE IS NO REGION, NO STATE, NO AREA WHICH IS NOT, IN ITS OWN MIND, FILLED WITH THE GRAVES OF SUCH MYTHOLOGICAL MEN (AND IT'S EITHER MEN OR WOMEN WHO ACT ACCORDING TO THE TRADITIONAL MASCULINE ROLE) is ubiquitious in that collectively believed in lie. That is the thing yearned for, especially, by white racists and those who Trump hopes to gull into voting for him out of fear for them losing what he has done more than anyone else to take from most of them.
Retrospectively, the "eternal now," the "world that never changes from generation to generation," the "fixed, closed universe," must have felt quite like the modern-industrial-scientific world we live in. In fact, I think the yearning for the eternal order that science is mistaken to provide for us, an imaginary universe of order according to human imagination in which there are unchanging laws, unchanging orders, an unchanging, fixed set of physical interactions, physical causation that was set into motion by the big bang, is the form of that which is ubiquitious, not only among the official champions of science but also in the fundamentalists who, like it or not, and so many of them don't, share in that same view of reality even as they don't like the present scientific consensus on what science shows is happening around us.
That is to say, you might not be either the great big opponent or supporter of what you believe you are. Donald Trump's fixed order is the vulgar form of that even as the materialist ideologues of contemporary scientism is the somewhat less vulgar form of it. So is a lot of what is mistaken as Christian religion.
I mentioned the theology of ends and its relation to the theology of creation and have to admit that that has become a big influence on me, now. The universe that was created is not static, it does not stay in a steady state, life doesn't stay the same it changes - whether it develops into something better or more complex or whatever is a trap of replacing human definitions for just seeing what it is - the human weakness to yearn for changelessness to insist on the security of what we know and are comfortable with and love is futile in view of the changing of the universe. That change is presented in the popular imagination, not a little of that based in a sensationalistic, comic book reading of the last book of the New Testament canon, as catastrophic but an older tradition of reading scripture sees it as not a catastrophe after which most of humanity is sent either to hell or obliterated into the completion of the creation of the universe in which there is universal reconciliation of us and our world of known experience with the Creator. One of the consequences of accepting that belief is to see any desire for a fixed, closed universe as wrong, even sacrilegious. We, ourselves, are not to stay the same as we are, either in this life or as we take up a new form after death. To want to is as wrong as insisting on a child not growing up and to stop being the same person they were when they were three or four. The same is true for human socieities, nations, the world. And it doesn't matter whether or not we like that or accept it, it's going to happen anyway. That would be unbearabe or even acceptable without faith that God intends an outcome that is better than what we could imagine. Or, at least, that's how I feel about it. It doesn't mean accepting "fate" this isn't a matter of fatalism, how people choose to act is as much a part of it as geological events and other movements of matter.
Justice in human terms is never a fixed matter of things, there is always, always some kind of change involved. The giving and receiving of needed charity, the payment of workers the wages they are worthy of (here's a clue, that is based on what is needed for life, not based on hours worked) the generous giving to strangers. And there will never be a schedule of regular rates at which those happen, there will never be total and full accord as to what is right, what should be done. There will always be give and take and push and shove and misunderstandings. But there is always the potential for understanding, agreement and acceptance and forgiving. And what comes after is not going to be just what came before. The only safe thing to do is to do it with that passion the "readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel," without which you will be as much a puppet of the gangsters who have power as the suckers who go to Trump's rallies and contract and spread Covid-19, the disease spreaders who went to that Sanford, Maine "Baptist" "church," the suckers who will vote for the "Peoples' Party" or not vote as seen on Facebook and the Twitter feed of has-been celebrities and today's disposable play-lefty hero.
*I will, this time give you Walter Brueggemann's footnote because perhaps you, as I, have not read the works he is signaling in that list:
See: Dorothee Soell, Suffering (Philadelpia: Fortress Press, 1975), Moltmann, The Experiment Hope; E Weisel in various works; and Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
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