IN HIS DISCUSSION of the historical-political context of the Book of Jeremiah, in the context of the turbulent three decades of the last five kings of Jerusalem (though the ones before were generally pretty turbulent, too) before the pivotal and shattering event of the destruction of the kingdom of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians and the exile of the royals and elites of Jerusalem, Walter Brueggemann drew a number of parallels between that ancient event and the United States of our time
Well, I read a book review this week, it's called "When The Money Runs Out." And the thesis of the book is that Western affluence will never come back and he names five things that will never happen again that produced our affluence. So what we get in the body politic is denial, despair, anger, fear - I think that our current unworkable political situation is probably a lot like that [gestures at his timeline of the last kings and other events] So I think reading the Book of Jeremiah works pretty well.
And with that Brueggemann makes the turn to analyzing the book not as history, not as reportage or even theology but as literature, even though the book as it comes down to us contains all of those. He stresses that it is artistic imagination as all of those (and science) are, anyway.
Brueggemann mentions the Jesus Seminar, which claimed to come up with a more historically accurate picture of who Jesus was and, I'd guess on their reconstruction and little else, what he was supposed to have said and what they didn't like him saying as a critique of that method of reading this literature. His major criticism of that effort at modern textual criticism of Scripture is that it didn't understand the nature of the literature which is not a pure, first-hand narrative, a would-be objective listing of events and quotes, but Gospels with other ends than those. Even Luke, the Gospel that starts out asserting something closer to a modern notion of what a prose text is supposed to be for is from start to finish a theological presentation that puts other things ahead of the reportage. I have mentioned that the work of one of the scholars who was a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar was important to my reconnecting with monotheism, John Dominic Crossan, whose work, especially in the historical and social context in which Jesus and his first followers lived and what we might understand of their point of view I still find very valuable, though I think far less of his reconstructed list of sayings than I once did. And he was far from the most presumptuous of them.
From here, Brueggemann goes on to considering the literary aspects of the text. I find listening to him, going over parts of the lecture a few times before going on can help enormously in understanding what he's saying and what he is saying is very useful for reading and considering other people on the same text. I will be going over that section of this first lecture in the coming days.
I find it very helpful to keep an outline of what he said in the earlier section on the history handy very useful to understanding what he said. The list of the kings and some of the commentary about them, their dates and other dates important to understanding the chronology as well as on the geography, Bruggemann's comments and insights on various aspects of that. Stopping the video to write those down and typing them into place on a listed timeline has helped to understand his points. Typing out passages where important and interesting things were said. Having it recorded you get so much more out of it than if you're sitting in the room hearing it go by in real time as you miss the next thing said while writing it down has led to me believing that this might be a far better way to take in a lecture or a sermon. You get a lot of the benefit of reading a text from it, this way.
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