It has been noticed that my approach to The Prophetic Imagination is not exactly unified, except in that I am relating the study by Walter Brueggemann to our contemporary world, our degenerating liberal democracy - as opposed to egalitarian democracy, which we have not achieved or much even aspired to - and the disasters in, especially the English speaking peoples and others who seem as hell bent on Pharonic-fascist-Stalinist gangster governance here and now in the modern, scientific, capitalist world.
In that I can cite words of Walter Brueggemann, certainly one of today's greatest scholars of the Jewish prophetic writings and tradition, from an interview he gave in late fall 2011 to Krista Tippett:
Ms. Tippett: If I asked you this way: In terms of your image of God, are there metaphors that have spoken to you across time or that speak to you now that didn’t before? Are there metaphors that have come to you in your life as a human being and in your study as a scholar and your work as a preacher to be more and more meaningful?
Mr. Brueggemann: I think they basically arise out of my continuing to look at the text. It depends on what text I’m looking at. Obviously, that is then related to what’s going on in my life that day. For example, if I take the phrase — and I can’t even remember where it is — “Let me be the apple of your eye.” That’s a very strange phrase, but what that pictures is a God who’s a big eye that looks at you caringly, treasuring you. What I imagine from that — it’s like being a little kid that’s lost in a department store, and you finally go around the corner, and there’s your mother looking at you, and you’re safe again. So I want to have God look at me that way.
I don’t want to construct the whole theology out of that phrase, but that’s enough for that day, and I’ll be given another phrase, another day like that. So that’s kind of how my mind works. It doesn’t yield a doctrinal package. It just yields a bunch of fragments that are not easily fit together. But the reason that works for me is that I am aware that I, as a person without entity, am essentially a collection of fragments that do not fit very well together. So that’s OK.
If that's OK for this foremost scholar of the literature, not only in an academic sense but in someone who really, truly believes and sees the need and necessity for presenting it as a means of understanding the terrible world we live in and a way to live. Read or listen to the rest of the interview, I could have produced a dozen pieces on different things he says in it, I don't feel too bad about this approach I'm using.
I'll leave you with one more snip from the transcript.
Ms. Tippett: You’re naming something when you call the prophets poets. You’re naming qualities of this text, this Bible that people think they know so well, but in fact and partly because of the way these things were translated and transmitted, I don’t think I grew up realizing how much of the Bible is poetry. The reason that also matters — and that’s true of the Hebrew Bible in particular — and also this realization, which is very simple but not brought home very often, is that this was the text of Jesus. This was his scripture.
Mr. Brueggemann: That’s right. He obviously knew it so well. But even in the more liberal theological tradition that I was raised, we only talked about the prophets as moral teachers, and there was no attention to the artistic, aesthetic quality of how they did that. But it is the only way in which you can think outside of the box. Otherwise, even liberal passion for justice just becomes another ideology, and it does not have transformative power. That’s what’s extraordinary about the poetry, that it’s so elusive that it refuses to be reduced to a formula. I think that’s a great temptation among liberals who care about justice — is to reduce it to a formula.
That's what I've found in this study of where American liberalism lost its way, where the "left" started out on a path that would lead to nowhere good. And don't get me started on conservatives and the right. Liberalism should have avoided becoming an -ism. I've lost faith in ideologies ever leading anywhere good. They become more about means of identification with a club than an aid to doing justice, of practicing love. That's how so much of "liberalism" and "leftism" became associated with consumer products of a higher end, "lifestyle" choices, educational status than they did with the very things the American liberal tradition either is about, equality, providing the destitute, the poor, the working poor with a decent life, care for the environment and our fellow sentient creatures, or it's just another -ism.
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