Creation Theology, The Bad And The Good Of It Depends On What It Is Made To Serve

We may discern two major theological contributions from the period, both of which are important for biblical faith and for the Christian tradition. First, there is little doubt that creation faith is fully and formally articulated by the Jerusalem establishment. Viewed negatively, creation faith is royal propaganda, daring to claim that the king-temple-royal-city complex is the guarantor of both social and cosmic order, and that center of reality protects persons and communities from the dangers of anarchy. Positively, creation faith speaks to a community that has lost interest in survival questions and that is prepared to think more broadly about large issues of proportion, symmetry, and coherence. Thus it is precisely creation faith that rescues the Bible from a parochial discernment of human issues. However, from the point of view of the prophets we are put on notice. In fact, creation faith tended to give questions of order priority over questions of justice. It tended to value symmetry inordinately and wanted to silence the abrasive concerns of the have-nots. It wanted to overlook the angularities of historical brothers and sisters and focus on large issues over which the king could preside. Hence a prophetic alternative knows that creation faith brings with it certain costs and that these costs are paid by marginal people who do not figure in the ordering done by the king.

This, of course, is not to imagine that creation faith was first articulated in tenth-century Israel, for there are certainly older evidences. But it does seem likely that in the tenth century creation faith first received its programmatic statement in Israel. And as the Mosaic community had sought and worked a sharp discontinuity with the imperial consciousness, now the theological enterprise involved a return to those very imperial perceptions and concerns.

I would expect that you think I'm going to go into the parallels between the Solomonic establishment that, according to this very well informed point of view, fixed the form in which the creation account is passed down in scripture and which has such an inordinate hold on the conventional profession of faith among the discredited "white evangelicals" and the Mammonist Republican-fascist party which used the resentment of biblical fundamentalism (itself a modern, political reaction to modernism) as a means of gaining and cementing political power for itself. Which certainly could be where this is going and which could have a lot to be said for it. But I'm going to go into two different aspects of the uses of creation theology.

The fact is that the opponents of the "evangelicals" also hold their own, rigidly insisted on, rigidly ideological creation faith which has been the focus of a lot of my debunkery here. Modern, materialist, scientistic atheism and even religion which holds with scientism and, to an extent they won't admit, materialism shares that same faith. "Darwin Sunday" is an expression of that and in the context of the contrast between the prophetic voice and that of the royal establishment in all of its in-egalitarian injustice and service of the rich, the educated, the famous, it couldn't be more telling.

Of course, I'm not equating Darwinism, natural selection, with the fact of evolution which is far better established in both paleontology and genetics than in Darwinism, I have always fully accepted that evolution is solidly established, though I have come to believe natural selection is not, in fact, a real thing, that it is, as Darwin, Wallace and so many others admitted, a theory fully founded on the assumptions of Malthusian economics, claiming that the totally artificial, totally man made laws that created and maintained the British class system were natural laws when they were nothing of the sort. As Karl Marx astutely pointed out in his reassessment of natural selection, even as it invoked Malthus's economic dogma based in the self-interest of Malthus and the British elite who adopted it, Darwin had to invert the meaning of Malthusian economics to impose the British class system on the entirety of life on Earth. And, I'll note in passing, Marx was one of the most effective of the critics of both Thomas Malthus (he pretty well established that he was a plagiarist) and his theory. Though I think hardly more penetrating than the English radical William Cobbett.

And this Darwinist incarnation of aristocratic creation theology, whether taken up by a professed "christian" or a scientistic materialist whether it is the Hoover Institute Radiologist playing an epidemiologist for Trump, Scott Atlas or the NYU Law professor Richard Epstein who practices, "Darwinist economics" and whose disastrously wrong paper making predictions about Covid-19 are said to have been highly influential in influencing the Republican-fascists' radical negative eugenic policies, aka "herd immunity". Of course that assumes that a very large percentage of "the herd" is going to die of it just as Malthusian economics encouraged policies that would increase the number of dead among the poor and destitute.

The intersection of those two types of "creation theology" can be seen in the well known, and if not radically altered, abominable 1848 hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander

1.

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

2.

Each little flower that opens,

Each little bird that sings,

He made their glowing colours,

He made their tiny wings.

All things bright ...

3.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate. . . .

Well, no, the laws of Britain did, as those did in Ireland, where she was born the daughter of the agent of large estates of Irish lands held by an English earl, then a duke. That she wrote those words at the height of the potato famine makes me wonder how much food was exported  from those estates as ordered by the British government to keep the price of food in England low and to maximize the profits of the "rich man in his castle", even as millions starved.

So, yes, there are dangers inherent in creation theology, though I think those under the modernist version of that are far greater as can be proven through the history of governments that held with Malthus, first, then Darwinism.

--------------------------

But there is another side of creation theology that is, in its effect as in its motives, far different. Theology of the creation influenced everything from St. Macrina's very early opposition to slavery, her brother Gregory of Nyssa in that and in his universalism was clearly influenced by her. And there are many other lines of creation-based theology that are certainly anything but a boon to the wealthy and powerful. Off the top of my head, much of environmental theology centered on the stewardship of the natural world, the conservation of environments and species, the kindness to animals, the egalitarian theology based on our common heritage regardless of ethnicity, race, gender, gender orientation, class, the abolition of class, etc, the universalist egalitarianism of so many others is frequently expressed in terms of not only creation theology but in the hope of universal reconciliation, identification, with the Creator.

Brueggemann's excellent point that though the expression we have of creation theology in the book of Genesis, and I'd guess elsewhere it is mentioned, was almost certainly not the origin of it but used it to the ends of those who wrote it down is an essential part of this study. These texts are the product of a very long development and transmission, they went through many hands, some of them altering them for their own purposes or remembering them or commenting on them to reflect their own point of view. The reading-writing class generally not being the destitute and the impoverished or even the working poor, you have to read the texts keeping that in mind, just as the fact that the writers and tellers were almost certainly 100% or nearly so is essential to having a real understanding of what they mean. If that means the texts are "tainted" that's true of virtually every text published, today. Modern as well as ancient and translated. But to refuse to consider them because of that loses you a lot more than an informed and cautious reading of them will.

There is every possibility that the facts that Brueggemann sets out as to this particular writing of creation in the Solmonic period is, to an extent, an accident of history and not a definitive characteristic of creation theology in general.  Like the theology of ends, whether of an individual or the entire biosphere of the Earth, it can both originate from and end in quite different places and for quite different ends.  There are things in it that do both, or, rather, can serve both.  Whether or not it does that is a choice we make.  Whether we fall into temptation or are delivered from evil may depend on divine assistance but we're not helpless to choose.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Jim Nolan - Moby Dick

 

Moby Dick 

The might-have-been of a human life is much more real to us than its routine dailiness. In a Brooklyn brownstone room, an elderly Irishman, more emigrant than ex-pat, dwells on a freeze-frame moment from half-a-hundred years before. The Americans are shooting Moby Dick on the harbour-front in Waterford in the Marian year, and a teenage thirty-bob film extra is about to fall for another. It's not as vast a venture as Captain Ahab's Odyssey. Even so, the boy from the borstal and a girl called Clara dream of the big-time, if not the big screen, and a new life in the New World. But there's only a hairline fracture on the lens between Once Upon a Time and Then One Day.

Brendan Conroy is Bernie Rivers in Jim Nolan's poignant one-person flashback

Moby Dick by Jim Nolan 

I'm still listening to these monodramas, which, I guess, is any first person narrative read aloud, what difference is there between the two?    They have the virtue of being pretty good and quite fresh.   Again, I've posted to the RTÉ podcast site where you can access a long list of their radio dramas, from this series and others.

Elizabeth Warren: "Donald Trump Knew"

 

He had replaced covenanting with consuming and all promises had been reduced to tradeable commodities

While the late critical dating of Ecclesiastes is not to be doubted, one may hypothesize that the tradition was intuitively correct in assigning that teaching to Solomon. I believe that the mood of world-weariness, satiation, boredom, and vanity in that literature is reflective of the Solomonic situation. To the extent that Ecclesiastes reflects a situation of alienation, it likely speaks to a situation like that of Solomon. Solomon had set out to counter the world of Moses' community of liberation and he had done so effectively. He had traded a vision of freedom for the reality of security. He had banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He had replaced covenanting with consuming and all promises had been reduced to tradeable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely. 

That is to make a harsh judgment upon a cultural reality which can, on the other hand, make certain positive claims for itself. But we are not engaged in a study of the royal consciousness on its own terms. We are here considering the meaning of prophetic alternative, an alternative to a social world void of criticism and energy. At the same time we must at least pay attention to the theological contributions of this period in order to be alert to what is there so as not to overstate the prophetic perspective. 

Following this passage is a deep, at times troubling critique of the theology of the creation and messianic faith, which is both insightful about the dangers of those topics as well as admitting their value. It is one of the most impressive things about Walter Brueggemann and many other writers on these topics in religion that their insider critiques are so much deeper than outsider critiques. 

They realize that if their insights, their own prophetic imagination is to find solid footing that they need to be even recklessly honest in bringing up problems and finding them. What is left of your faith after going through that is both more informed and safer but it is also stronger. At least that is what I've found. 

The same is true of testing other areas of human thought, I've tried that, to the lesser abilities that I can bring to it, in areas of politics and science, looking critically at, for example, my formerly fellow leftists, socialists, liberals. I found out that both through that exercise and the religious testing over the course of my public writing on this, that I came out a lot farther "to the left" than I ever was as a secular socialist. 

I would recommend it but I would warn you that you will want something to keep one foot on while you tear at and tease out your faith that there are two different things to always ground yourself in, one really. 

It's no big secret, it's in the Scriptures, love God and love others as you love yourself. And one thing I've come to find, increasingly, those are the same thing. At least when it's this God you're to love,  God as presented by the tradition of Moses and Jesus. 

When you pray "your kingdom come, your will be done" that kingdom consists of YOU doing what Paul, what Jesus, what a random Pharisee answered Jesus was the greatest commandment, what Leviticus said what Hillel said The Law consisted of (albeit, according to tradition in a less direct and negative expression of it), Love your neighbor as you love yourself, your neighbor being everyone. And, as you can tell from what I write, it's no easy thing to do. I fail at it constantly, publicly.  I'm sure the Prophets, especially in their often furious assaults against the established powers in the court and in the Temple among the weak and corruptible People, had a hard time doing it. And, getting back to that negative expression,  it isn't merely a question of not doing to others as you would not have them do to you, the famous negative expression of it. 

I will go on with Brueggemann's critique, I'm finding it very difficult to leave any of his text out of this study of it because it is a masterwork of organized articulation. I would recommend not only reading the whole thing but copying it out, typing it out. That has been forcing me to read it at a far deeper level than just reading it. And looking up all of the cited Scripture and reading those. If nothing else, this has been helping me cope with the disaster we are encountering as a result of The Law being rejected, of being gulled and suckered into accepting its inversion of what's in it for me? as the basis of our government, our society and, most of all, the media that has constructed the corrupted minds of so many Americans.   I really do believe that until people really are convinced that there is more than a merely conventional or utilitarian interest in doing whats right, it will always be found to be too easy to do evil.  It's the conventional way of life in contemporary American and British culture, and elsewhere, and wherever it takes, equality and democracy, justice, even the very concept of the truth being better than a lie that temporarily works, is lost, utterly.

Susan Collins Is An Opioid Profiteer

 

 

I was almost not going to post this but then I recalled how Maine has one of the worst opioid problems in the country, neighboring New Hampshire having one that is even worse.  I have a great nephew there who has needed to be revived from a heroin addiction twice that I know of, my sister, his grandmother stopped telling us about them.  

I've been telling people that Susan Collins was a fraudulent "moderate" for as long as she's been in politics, that illusion created in and peddled by the Republican dominated media in my state, including the "public radio" network.  She is no different, she just plays different on TV when her playing different makes no difference for the outcome.  Otherwise, she's all in on the party of those who benefit from the deaths of Americans. 

We Are In That Fire Next Time

The day that was yesterday brought so many revelations of the moral atrocity that is Donald Trump that it's hard to get a hold of it. The revelation that back in early Spring he was telling Bob Woodward that he knew the extent of the dangers of Covid-19 but he, the man who never saw a fascist conspiracy theory he wouldn't shout out to terrorize the stupid and gullible into going with him, claimed that he didn't want to create a "panic" in the American People by telling us the truth, the many and other moral atrocities that Trump, Barr, McConnell, DeJoy, etc. govern us with.  If Trump told the truth his tongue would ignite. 

I was especially interested in it also being the day that Susan Sarandon style Never Dems bullshit broke on the play-lefty social media, she supporting some non-entity called @ProudSocialist's declaration that he'll never vote for Biden, reminding everyone that she assured us that Trump would be less bad than Hillary Clinton, declaring that if Trump hadn't been installed that we'd be at war, as if we're not, wars resulting from the 2000 version of Never Dems "socialist" purity leftiness.

It is worth remembering that both Trump and Sarandon come to public notice through the medium of entertainment, the movies, TV, Hollywood, the NYC tabloid and other media and Trump entered politics through the love child of entertainment and, um, "journalism" the cabloids, the spill over into the morning newsy talk shows and from there into what is to be mistaken for reporting. Trump is every bit as much a product of the "journalistic" side of TV as he is the depravity of the gangster ridden big figure real estate market and international finance. His political career was a publicity stunt as much as it was him giving full vent to his clearly visceral and heart felt racism, one of the few heartfelt things within him, it is certainly a deeper passion than even his feelings for his own family. As an aside, the view of Melania that she is a hapless victim should have been completely set aside as it was revealed she wouldn't move into the White House until the toilet that Michelle Obama used be replaced. THAT is racism at its most atavistic. That a European child of communism would fit into that world so well is no shock to me anymore. It is just a different brand of the same thing that is labled "fascism" or "Nazism". And with the like of @ProudSocialist I'm ready to say that secular socialism is not as distinct from that as it should have been.

I will repeat something I've been saying more and more. The fact is that even as we are going through this crisis brought on by an effective wedge of voters who were gulled into voting for Trump in a few upper mid-western states or into voting for Jill Stein by the Sarandon type of purist lefties, the alleged protection of The Constitution has failed, utterly, entirely and catastrophically.

The myth of presidential impeachment, itself, still a weapon of the purity play left against the only Democratic leadership with any power in Washington, the Democratic House Caucus, didn't protect us as anyone with any knowledge of its serial failures of removing criminal presidents of the past would have known would happen. It failed due to the anti-democratic structure and organization of the Senate and the utter and complete moral atrocity that is Republican-fascism. The one time the threat of it worked, to convince Nixon to resign before he was impeached had everything to do with Republican senators worried that they would lose their election, NOT BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT HE SHOULD BE REMOVED FOR THE HIGH CRIMES WHICH NOW ARE DWARFED BY THOSE OF TRUMP. And yet the Republicans in the Senate, with one sole exception, voted to keep Trump the traitor and openly criminal gangster in office. As should have surprised no one.

And Trump and Barr and DeJoy are trying to ratfuck the election, with their open support of Putin, once again, using our "free press" our "free speech" to lie us into four more years of Trumpian treason. And he is helped by that even more powerful foreign force, the Australian-Brit Murdoch family and their media empire, joining with America's indigenous criminal class, the super-rich.

Our Constitution has been successfully gamed to produce this by Republicans, those in journalism, those in the legal profession, those in alleged law enforcement, those in the judiciary and, especially, those on the Supreme Court. The lines and the words and the slogans that got us here are still there, the habits of thought that got us here, the empowerment of lies in an "enlightened" hands-off, "just calling the hits and strikes" pose of judicial restraint and refusal to admit that they can tell when a lie is a lie, pretending that is beyond their abilities as judges, all of that bullshit is still there and it will be until the words of the Constitution, ESPECIALLY THOSE DEALING WITH PRESIDENTIAL POWER AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS THAT ALLOWS THE MEDIA TO LIE FOR ITS OWN AND ITS OWNERS BENEFIT WITH IMPUNITY ARE CHANGED TO DISALLOW THOSE THINGS.

William Barr and the rest of the "unitary executive" fascists in the "Justice" Department and on the Supreme Court will always have access to the same words in that document that they invented their scheme to impose Republican-fascism on us with. If, as, I am sure, even the estimable Charles Pierce will rightly point out that a Constitutional Convention at this time under billionaire and multi-millionaire propaganda governance is extremely perilous BUT SO IS LEAVING THE MEDIA WITH THE PERMISSION TO LIE WHICH IS THE SOURCE OF THAT BILLIONAIRE-MILLIONAIRE DANGER IN THE FIRST PLACE. So is leaving the terribly written sections they used to invent the "unitary executive" so is the serial abomination of the Electoral College and the anti-democratically structured Senate.

We got here through lies, little ones, big ones, huge ones, "white lies" and the kind that Trump's entire public persona is constructed of. We got here through the lies of the play-lefties and the lefty media, Jill Stein and the Greens seem to be being eclipsed by the "Peoples' Party" in the fever dreams of that group of too-affluent to be trusted bunch.  Too Ivy League, too ideological to care about real people except as a play thing of their theory or a means to an end.

Until the fact that we will never be able to demonstrate the truth we need to continue living with the precision that mathematicians can use to make statements about numbers and the operations they go through in their imaginations or even the reliable things "proven" with the even less rigorous methods of the real sciences, which is what the absurd pose of "the Enlightenment" from Jefferson and Madison to Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. and the kind of "scientific" economists who inform Republican-fascism today, until all of that bullshit is overturned by mere honesty and an acceptance of the truth that the truth will set you free if you know it and you accept its moral status but that lies will lead us into where we are now, and worse, until that is embedded into the Constitutional requirements that govern the government and our law, we won't be anything like safe from this happening again. There has been a steady stream of ever worsening criminal malgovernance, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I (he and his ambassador to Iraq actually did incite a war as part of his re-election strategy), Bush II-Cheney and now Trump. They're getting better at imposing it on us, the fire next time will consume American democracy, entirely.

 Just had a call from my brother that his son, my nephew has been exposed to Covid at work, his entire workplace was shut down.  He told my brother that minutes later his co workers were standing having face to face conversations without masks and not distanced.   I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't contact traced to the Sanford Baptist Typhoid Marys,  his workplace is in an adjoining town.   

It's a minor incident compared to what the Governor of South Dakota did, leading to close to 20% of current cases in the entire country but it's the same thing.  

No church, no governor of any state should have the power to spread a deadly pandemic disease.   If our Constitution says this is OK our Constitution is a danger to life, without which there will be no liberty or pursuit of happiness or even stupidity. 

Why hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and to this house?

 It need hardly be added that the Solomonic regime was able to silence criticism.  There are two ways to silence criticism.  One is the way of heavy handed prohibition that is backed by forceful sanction.  The treatment of Jereboam in 1 Kings 11:40 [Solomon sought therefore to kill Jeroboam; but Jeroboam arose, and fled into Egypt, unto Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt until the death of Solomon.] suggests this way of handling criticism,  which is consistent with the style of bloodbath with which the long reign began (1 Kings 2).  It is curious that, given the extended criticism of Ahijah the prophet in 1 Kings 11, Solomon makes no response.  Indeed the prophet is ignored.  That is the second way of handling criticism;  develop a natural immunity and remain totally impervious to criticism.  The narrator seems to present that response of cold, resistant silence in deliberate irony.  The same response is evident after the strong warning of 1 Kings 9:1-9.  Immediately the narrative responds:  "At the end of twenty years in which Solomon had built two houses . . . King Solomon gave to Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee."  The royal consciousness was completely contained.  Criticism had no viable alternative ground and did not need to be taken seriously.  If Solomon had had television at his disposal he would have managed to buy the harshest critics and make them talk-show celebrities.

I'm going to pause here not only because it is deep with textual citations that I hope everyone is looking into.  But also because Walter Brueggemann's translation of the "wisdom of Solomon" into the understandable language of our common as dirt experience with the method silencing them by killing them or threatening them as Trump and his supporters do, (as Putin or Duterte do with far more deadly results, or as the Kim regime in North Korea does to Stalinist levels of oppression, all making Trump envious) or doing it the modern "democratic" way  of co-opting the opposition or, going with the television parallel, ignoring them into insignificance, which was a brilliant sharp and astute observation to have been made in the late 1970s.   It is a practical example of how the deep study of scripture is anything but irrelevant, it gave him insight into things that the secular left still hasn't figured out in any effective way so as to counter the very same thing done by our imperial establishment.   Indeed, the most prominent secular opposition media has enabled the imperial system in knee capping the only real political alternative to it.

The Democratic Party, after the Dixiecrat migration to the Republican Party in the 1960s, has, indeed been anything but perfect but it was in 1964 as it is today the only alternative to Republican-fascism.  The fascism which Trump, Barr, McConnell and the fascists on the Supreme Court are doing their best to install is, in fact, the fascism of, by and for the wealthy which Nixon clearly hoped to deliver and which his own appointments to the Court aided and furthered, often with the "liberals" on the court going along so that they could fulfill the slogans of "civil liberties" as imagined  by the ACLU and "liberal" law scholars.  The "liberals" believing with the same late 18th century faith as the founders imposed some of the worst features in our Constitution that "nature" would sort it all out.  As if "nature" has produced egalitarianism anywhere in any known species.  That that regime of lies and envy and resentment and temptation and totally unrealistic dreams was made the equal of hard truth in the eyes of "justice" is certainly to blame for where we are now.

Even the line of disastrous rulings overturning the campaign finance reform that Democrats AND SOME REPUBLICANS! tried to correct the system with in the revelations of the crimes of Nixon, John Mitchell et al was accomplished by the Courts, proto-fascist as well as "liberal" equating money with speech and, in the fullness of that line of rulings, in such things as Citizens United, that corporations enjoyed the same rights as real human beings was, for all intents and purposes, supported by the "liberals" and, especially, the "leftists" sold with the words of the First Amendment so divorced from any reality and so any meaning.  I suspect that the very people who brought Israel from the egalitarian commonwealth of Moses to the imperial inequality of Solomon used the most piously beloved and revered of phrases of The Law as support for what they were doing.  It's one of the easiest ways to co-opt the opposition, to use the words they revere to peddle their complicity with the very thing they are supposed to oppose.   You see it all the time with "liberals" and "leftists" in the media, you can read it in the lefty magazines, even as they ignore the lessons of their own RECENT experience, as in their enabling the installation of Trump by pushing the Greens or discouraging lefties from voting for Hillary Clinton.  If I were within an arms length of someone who said, "You're not going to scare me for voting for the Dems with the Supreme Court," as I've heard play-lefties say for a quarter of a century, I can't guarantee you in 2020 that they wouldn't get a smack in the face.  

There is no concrete evidence about the loss of energy in the regime.  Indeed, the narrative suggests a remarkable level of energy toward all kinds of state developments, especially in economics and architecture.  But one may at least wonder about the "happiness" of Solomon's community (1 Kings 4:20, 10:8), which reflects the happiness of satiation.  It is at least thinkable that happiness characterized by satiation is not the same as the joy of freedom.  It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion.  And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy. 

 "It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion.  And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy."

It is tempting to focus solely on the general apathy that characterizes the American public, 40% of which is clearly OK with any outrageous thing that Trump and his gang of gangsters do because their only motive is hating on their perceived enemies in the population, the same percentage who, it is increasingly pointed out, voted for Herbert Hoovers disastrously principled and scruples observing handling of the Great Depression several years into it.  But I'll focus instead on the opposition which I have been focusing on so much because I think in that passage Brueggemann points out an inherent self-defeating property of the American left, "immunity to any transcendent voice" which, no matter how much of a profession of regard of neighbor is made, will de-energize and dis-empower the opposition.   In this paragraph Brueggemann points out that the results of Solomon overturning justice took four decades to bear the full harvest of rot, even as that description characterized the regime.  It took seven decades for Communism to officially rot out and the rot continues as Putin tries to establish himself as Stalin II and, this time, the American Republican Party is his client, so degenerate is our system.  

The secular American system was always bound to become corrupt through, a rejection of "any transcendent voice"* as, in fact, it immediately was through the institution of slavery and the genocidal imperial expansion of the country, first across the continent and then in foreign adventures as it became a world-power.  The levels of happiness in the country has certain depended on the race of the person living here, as it has their class, their gender, their ethnicity and gender-orientation.   And all the while we are to sing its praises, praise for the scripture of the secular regime, the Constitution, its attendant slogans and narratives, false as those are, as much in service of injustice as they are.

*  I will remind you that Brueggemann noted at the beginning of this that he and other scholars had, in a different context, called the Solomonic period a kind of "Enlightenment."  I can't resist pointing out that the American Constitutional system, the French Republic, the habits and clap-trap "Constitution" that is not unfairly called the product of "a nation of shop keepers" has that materialist habit of thought, the practical and utilitarian and not the transcendent to it, indeed it mocks and rejects any notions of transcendent reality, any of that in the Declaration of Independence skated over in the prefatory section of the Constitution as the "founders" freed by the success of the revolution they got the common people to fight for them, can pursue their slave-based wealth and their aspirations to take the entire continent without bothering with such stuff.  

I will also recommend the astute observations of RMJ in the comments. 

Update:  Someone indicates that I should have been more specific in my "nation of shop-keepers" comment that I was referring to Britain and its own appalling situation which has produced, in the fullness of time, Boris Johnson.

a remarkable continuity with the very Egyptian reality that Moses had sought to counter

 Solomon was able to counter completely the counter-culture of Moses.

(a) He countered the economics of equality with the economics of affluence.  The contrast is clear and sharp.  Mosaic experience had this kind of vision:   "He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack;  each gathered according to what he could eat" (Exodus 16:18).  Here there is no thought of surplus and the accumulation of consumer goods, for that is all over by the time one sits at the royal table in Jerusalem.

(b) He countered the politics of justice with the politics of oppression.  Mosaic experience had this kind of vision:

And if your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you,  you shall maintain him  as a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you.  Take no interest from him or increase,  but fear your God;  that your brother may live beside you. . . . . For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt;  they shall not be sold as slaves.  (Leviticus 25:35-42)

That is all over by the time Solomon gets around to forced labor to enhance his rule.

(c)  He countered the religion of God's freedom with the religion of God's accessibility.  Mosaic experience had this kind of a vision of God's freedom.  Moses had insisted on God's presence:  "Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct,  I and thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth?"  (Exodus 33:16).  But Yahweh answers in his uncompromising freedom,  "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,  and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.  But . . . you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live."  (Exodus 33:19-20).

Solomon managed what one would think is not possible, for he had taken the Mosaic novum and rendered it null and void.  In tenth-century Jerusalem it is as though the whole revolution and social experiment had not happened.  The long sequence of imperial history went on as though it had not been interrupted by this revelation of the liberating God.  Solomon managed a remarkable continuity with the very Egyptian reality that Moses had sought to counter.

I have been relating this to our own experience in today's United States and change the words a bit and you have the same thing.  No doubt the pious Temple goers and those who liked to monitor the sex lives of other people felt themselves to be the real, authentic bearers of the torch of the old time religion even as they wallowed in the privileges they got from the corrupt neo- Pharonic regime of Solomon even as the white-evangelical Trump voters support his even more vulgar corrupt anti-democratic and openly criminal and treasonous regime.  And we got here in pretty much the same ways that are described in the books carrying the stories of Saul and David and Solomon and the long succession of corrupt kings that followed them.

I remember when, back when Carter, probably the most idealistic president in our history,  was president noticing that the TV seemed to be carrying a lot more of the kind of adoration of the rich and famous and what was newly called their "lifestyles" and how, unsurprisingly, that paved the way for the Hollywood royalty of Reagan and then the Bushes more conventional old-money royalty to have now had that been reduced to the most degenerate of all of them ( SO FAR) Trump.  

When I am at my most pessimistic I think that the introduction of television and, now, the internet into the lives of billions around the world is an irredeemable act of "progress" that is and never can be made compatible with egalitarian democracy, with morality, that the programming, the domination of malicious gossipers and liars which has been substituted for a culture of daily human experience in reality instead of what is as stupidly called "virtual reality" as "artificial intelligence," computer scientists inventing imaginary, "interactive" friends and pretending they are real.   I know people in their 20s whose lives and minds are dominated by their vicious circles on Facebook where they are prey to the billionaires' propaganda, foreign and, as dangerously, domestic.  And I'm not talking about stupid kids in their 20s, I'm talking about those with educational credentials who are as credulous about what they see on the screen as geezers my own age and olders who fall for FOX on TV.  

I look at the de-religionized "evangelicals" and "traditional-Catholics" and the degenerate "Orthodox" such as the Kuschners and I despair at what can be done to counter them and their admittedly secular degenerate buddies.   

But there is no alternative to trying, the alternative to countering them is to give up and die, bodily, in time, spiritually, immediately.  

I really, really do mean it when I say I hate Hollywood and everything that has issued from it. But not only them, all of the sources of corruption, all, when you dig a little way down, out of the same motives of affluence that powered the corruption of Solomon, secular and which get to call themselves "religion" out of the irresponsible shirking of responsibility as found in the First Amendment.  Yeah, I'm still pissed off over Calvary Baptist in Sanford, Maine which should be shut down for spreading Covid-19.  They've got one of those millionaire funded "civil liberties" outfit going to court to help them, one which is religion themed.  I really do mean it when I say I hate the "civil liberties" industry, who were so lavishly paid by the media and Hollywood so they could get them the ability to lie with impunity and to corrupt sex by getting everyone hooked on porn.   They're all essentially the same, secular and "religious,"  the "secular" as insufferably self-righteous as the "evangelicals" and "traditional-Catholics". 

Johnny Mercer Henry Mancini - Moon River

After I posted that radio play that used the name of the song I realized I was going to have it going through my head over and over again till I did something about it.

I've posted this version of it before, the lyricist Johnny Mercer who was rare in that he was also a very fine singer and the composer, Henry Mancini doing a demo of the song that they wrote for Audrey Hepburn to sing in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.

I used to say that Audrey Hepburn's non-singer singing of it was the best version till I heard Johnny Mercer sing it. Knocks ol' Blue Eye's crooning of it out of the water.   I prefer a singer to sing words as if they meant something.  Mercer knew how to do that, so many didn't.

 

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.

Nothing But Bad News Here

The past two days I've been preoccupied with worrying about one of my young relatives who is a teacher back in the classroom and who has been sick.  She hasn't been tested for Covid, they  said they weren't testing on the weekend!  I'm very close to her, she's more like a daughter to me than a niece.  I  am afraid and angry.  

In other news, the death tole from that wedding and the idiot "pastor" who officiated and whose flock is trying to spread it as far as they can, apparently, is three and well over a hundred fifty known cases traced to it. That should be illegal and any "religion" that maintains such ministers of mortality should be considered criminal enterprises.  That goes for political parties who and media outlets who contribute to killing people. 

I've obsessively played the checkers game on my computer about a hundred times and I have decided that I'd better do something about it before I became obsessed with it so I removed it permanently and have broken the disc it came on.  It's friggin' dangerous.  

I doubt I'll sleep much tonight, again.  I'll get back to posting from The Prophetic Imagination tomorrow.