Do It - How To Know God

I am planning on going back to the Prophetic Imagination project after Christmas and New Year are over, I will post an index to all of the previous posts on it - I hope I get them all in - and continue.   At least that's the plan.  I'd originally hoped to go through it all before the start of Advent but illness and politics intervened.   

Being pretty impetuous, I'm preparing better for the continuation than I planned the beginning of it, I hope it's worth your attention.  What Brueggemann said certainly is.  It is remarkable how this forty-two year old book is still found to be current, I would bet that it is as much a matter of reading, consideration and discussion as it was in the first two years after its publication. Of course you can read the book yourself or re-read it and you can think it over, yourself.  If the publisher is looking, I intend this as being a long recommendation to buy the book and read it.

Until then, from time to time,  I'm going to be falling back on my practice of posting videos of lectures, sermons, interviews and there is no better way to start than with a 2015 talk that Walter Brueggemann did, starting with his lecture Justice: From Zion Back to Sinai.  He started by saying, "How about this. Justice is the maintenance of social relationships that keeps life viable and human. And injustice is the practice of social relationships that make life not viable and not human," and ending with the challenge for someone who thinks in English presented in God saying in Jeremiah 22 to the unjust king Jehoakhim, the son of the just king King Josiah,

 

 Are you a king
    because you compete in cedar?
Did not your father eat and drink
    and do justice and righteousness?
    Then it was well with him.

He judged the cause of the poor and needy;
    then it was well.
Is not this to know me?
    says the Lord.

 

Brueggemann's unsurpassed close reading of the text, his finding so much nuance in it that a "literal" "fundamentalist" reading is likely to miss, points out that God doesn't say you'll observe The Law and by doing that you'll know God, or that you'll understand The Law and get the reward of knowing God but that it is in the actual doing of it that you know God. Which is certainly not a modern conception of how you know something through analysis of fact or something that fits easily into English. Presumably, if that's the way to know God the only way to know God is to do it. Which is certainly as if not more radical than any secular articulation of either knowing something or doing what is right. The definition Brueggemann gives for justice is, in every way, superior to the legalistic notion of following a law code, which turns out to be inadequate as Lawrence O'Donnell and Lawrence Tribe's discourse over the lawless Emily Murphy of the General Services Administration whose violation of the law, based on the "honors system" carries no criminal penalty though she will just about certainly be responsible for thousands of deaths. The inadequacy of law writing under the Constitutional system is ever more clear.

 

Listen to this and see which approach you think is more reliable.