This Isn't The God You Pray To For Candy

I believe that these factors necessarily go together and that no one of them would occur or endure without the other two

[These three items are presented in a triangular diagram with double pointed arrows pointing to each of them. I won't try to reproduce it here.]

An Economics of Affluence (1 Kings 4:20-23)

Politics of Oppression (1 Kings 5:13-18, 9:15-22)

Religion of Immanence (1 Kings 8:12-13)

Obviously oppressive politics and affluent economics depend on each other. Nevertheless it is my urging that fundamental to both is the religion of the captive God in which all over-againstness is dissipated and the king and his ideology are completely at ease in the presence of God. When that tension concerning God's freedom has been dissolved, religion easily becomes one more dimension, albeit an important one, for the integration of society. That was not new and Solomon is hardly to be celebrated for his appreciation of religion. The oppressive Pharaohs before him, of course, never doubted the importance of religion, but it was a religion of compatibility in which abrasion was absent. It provided a God who was so present to the regime and to the dominant consciousness that there was no chance of over-againstness, and where there is no over-againstness, there was no chance of newness. This, of course, is discerned as a danger and a threat.

This God is no court of appeal for the marginal ones over against the king, for he is now completely beholden to the king. The essential criticism of Marx is obviously pertinent here. It is precisely religion that legitimates and makes possible the economics and politics which emerged. And prophetic faith knows that if a criticism is mounted it must begin in the unfreedom of God, which in turn results in a royal order quite from now to serve its own narrow interests.

In nothing so much as this point does the radical departure of Walter Brueggeman's kind of religion differ than from what most people think of when they talk about religion. It is religion that really takes the Mosaic view of reality in which justice and compassion, the value of life over things as the ultimate and proper concern of human activity over the childish attempts to curry favor with the gods or even what in the Solomonic system was substituted for the God of Moses, this god of utilitarian utility, a great cosmic gumball machine that you put your fee in and you get what you want, only the color and flavor somewhat variable. The material gods of both polytheistic religion and this odd pagan monotheism that both Solomon and so much of current Christianity profess to believe in, the god of Bush II and Cardinal Burke and, I guess, Falwell jr. mean is not the same as God as we are told Moses encountered and worked for and with and begged on behalf of the Children of Israel but who let it be known was not their good luck piece and that the concerns of the God of creation were universal, requiring in The Law that the Children of Israel do good not only to the lowest among them and the illegal alien among them and the escaped slaves but to animals, domestic and wild and to the land itself.

The god many professed Christians and even many Jews and Muslims really believe in is not this God of freedom but is god conceived of as an agent of their personal desires. That is not God, that is not real, that is the god that most of the enemies of religion insist that you have to believe in because it is the god who is most obviously false. It is the god that Soviet children were discouraged from believing in according the the rumors that children were taught that praying to God wouldn't get them candy while praying to Stalin would. I never knew if that story was true or not, I haven't bothered to fact check it but that's definitely the kind of god that is encouraged by seeing him (and it's always a "he" in this conception of god) as the somewhat capricious gift giving entity of such conventional profession.

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After writing what I did last night I was mocked that my God is letting me down. Only I never figured that I and my most beloved loved ones are in any way made special because I believe in God and advocate for the reality of the God of Creation who is free of the vicissitudes and conditions of human experience and human imagination. I have no illusions about being special and getting special treatment. Even the Psalms that promise the most out of observing the law, Psalm 1, for example, doesn't make absurd promises of special treatment, it's just a practical observation that not being a selfish, self-indulging, jerk tends to lead to a more healthy life than selfishness does. The Prophets didn't end up on easy street. Moses is one of the few who seems to have died a natural death ripe in years.

If there is something that regularly lets us down it is the secular law which is so routinely corrupt and corrupted that we don't even notice or find it surprising when it is corrupt. That both the United States and Britain are in such un-correctable decadence right now, even as the period of expansion of "rights" and "freedom" is imploding in on itself. Yet that is another of the henotheistic gods of American paganism, much of it calling itself "Christianity" even as they call their "god" God. Even their Jesus is a fake.