ONE OF THE THINGS that I've been using as an aid in reading the entirely topical Book of Jeremiah more deeply is the set of four lectures Walter Brueggemann gave over the course of a month at an Episcopal Church in Cincinnati, Into and Out of the Abyss. This comment touches on a seemingly unrelated piece of hate mail I got on another site over the dispute over free will, so I'll take it up as an example of the opportunity you get for usefully thinking about and changing behavior in the Jewish tradition and how the materialist-atheist-scientistic tradition, with supreme irony, considering the motivation behind the human invention of scientific method to enhance the effectiveness of human agency, leaves so many of its most dedicated ideologues claiming that we are mindless robots whose actions carry no consequential meaning or import, that we just do what we are programmed to do by our molecules, the complicated ones we pick out of our DNA and call "genes," which, as genetics becomes more aware of the enormous complexity of those molecules and the very ambiguous nature of those "genes" which we specify, abstracted out of those enormously long and complex molecules and their frequent impossibility to read and accurately specify as to their results.
I will also point out that I have identified "DNA" as being one of the unadmitted material gods of materialist-atheist-scientism so I think the comparison with the God of Abraham, Issac and Jesus is quite apt. As is so often true, this is my transcription from the posted video so any problems with it should be attributed to me.
- Q. Could you comment a little bit more about something you talked about earlier, about God changing God's mind? Especially in response to how the People requested (?) God to change God's mind. Would you comment more on that?
- Well, what that teaches is that we have impact on our futures, what we decide matters. God in the Old Testament never subscribed to the idea that God is immutable, unchanging and all that, so God is a character in the transaction and how we act causes God to position God's-self differently. That's how they imagined God. And so, if this is the Lord of the Covenant, this God is going to give blessings to People who obey Torah and not for those who don't. You know, that's the reasoning.
If you look in Jeremiah 18, I mentioned this I think another time, but there's a very clear case of it. Verse 18:7 "I will pluck up and tear down and destroy, but if that nation turns from its evil I will change my mind." But then, negatively, I will plant and build but if they do evil, then I will change my mind. So this is a God who is engaged in the Covenental conflicts. And, you know, in some ways that's kind of how we conduct some of our most important relationships. And so on.
Want to come back on that?
- I think what I [honestly meant] it scares me that my actions could change God's actions.
- Yeah, but you see the alternative to that is to say "My actions are irrelevant." It doesn't matter what I do, what the hell. So this tradition takes human conduct very seriously.
Over here what you tend to get is the promise that there is nothing you can do that will make me stop loving you. So they are in tension. And I think it's very useful for us to reflect on which one of these practices we were nurtured as Children on. It's amazing how many People who grew up in ferocious homes, for whom the Good News of Marcus Borg and so on is very welcomed. I think Marcus Borg grew up in such a home. And so on, and so on. So we're all living out our nurture and the way we got situated before we knew we were getting situated. So, I think this stuff rings true. It is an endless interpretive negotiation about that.
I will point out that Brueggemann does what I have never heard an ideologue of materialist-atheist-scientism do, admit that the focus of his thinking is a product of human imagination and, so, is subject to all of the conditions and vicissitudes, including being wrong, that our imagination of things outside of us, and all that is unseen within us, is exactly that, our trying to cope with our experience. Of course science is no less a product of the same human imagination subjected to a different set of filters in order to gain a possible enhancement of accuracy on the basis of a collective narrowing of focus and testing the rather pedestrian results about what it has narrowly focused on.
I have, since well before the internet was invented, rejected the pseudo-science that pretends to do what works on molecules and atoms quite well and with increasing difficulty subatomic particles, and with such things as planetary and stellar movement, about other aspects of human reality which cannot be subjected to that kind of filtering and the other genuine aspects of scientific method. What you can say with great confidence about some, especially non-organic, simple molecules and atoms and, to an extent, subatomic particles, you cannot now and I doubt ever will on things of anything from a relatively small to an enormously vast order of complexity and those things which it is impossible to actually observe. The mitigation of human imagination possible when scientific method is applied honestly and modestly becomes as open to ideological and self-interested pollution when you pretend to do science about things like human behavior, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, etc. as the disputes between Jeremiah and Hananiah when it was the experience of the People of Judea at the end of the monarchy and the period of exile.
One of the worst things about our current political peril are the huge numbers of Americans who are unengaged, uninterested, unwilling to learn and discern reality as opposed to being entertained by the unreality of movies, TV, games and the various species of social mental disease distributed by the internet. I think that one of the most dangerous aspects of that is the nihilistic belief that what we think and do is of no import, something which the social sciences have certainly stressed since the 1970s when Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology gained ideological dominance within those sciences which pretend to do science about their subject matter. Since then those have dominated in all of the college programs I'm aware of and through those media babblers and scribblers brought up on that nurturing, has filtered down, often unrealized, in their babblage and scribblage.
I think the nihilism of the post-WWII period even before that was a direct result of the rejection of the Jewish religious tradition, of consequential and real morality, both among gentiles and People who identify as culturally Jewish but who reject the religion. Secularists, in short. As Brueggemann points out, there is Biblical precedence for that, to some extent, in the false prophets who may have been held in favor by the political-Temple establishment and it is certainly one of the temptations of those whose lives are in despair as they, far more understandably than those reared in affluence, give up on the idea that what they think and do matters. Not a little of that giving up on the part of the underclass cultivated by those who make money off of them in the college-credentialed media, especially in entertainment media. He points out that that temptation is not unknown to those who engage in religion talk and alleged practice. I am never left unimpressed with the internal critique that much of religion practices but is rarely practiced to the same extent in much of science and hardly ever in secular ideology. In the case of those like Brueggemann, even noting the part that their academic training plays in the temptation to do evil or to quietly accept it as a fee of going along to get along.
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I have consciously decided to read translations, all claimed to be made from the "original" Hebrew, from decidedly different theological-ideological traditions to see what I notice of the different interpretations and am finding the Easy To Read Version, I believe made under the right-wing Church of Christ to, none the less carry almost the same information as the Catholic liberation theology inspired Christian Community Bible (with very interesting commentary). I chose the Easy to Read version because I am very sympathetic to its stated goal to give those who are not proficient readers the chance to engage with Scripture, it having been started as an attempt to give a written text to deaf users of American Sign Language who often find it difficult to read an English text. I don't know the extent to which that original attempt worked as intended, I'd tend to think an edition in ASL would be the way to go with that, of course, it would have to be published as a video, ASL being so tied with physical gesture that is printed with difficulty. I think in some ways it might be an edition more in keeping with what must have been, for most people, an orally transmitted text.
Having started with the Easy To Read text, finding its use of anachronistic pronouns and verb forms annoying, I started using the famous Good News version, which I suspect unskilled readers would find far easier, though they don't distinguish between the verse from the prose in the layout of the text in the online. Considering how much stress especially Bruggemann puts on the "original" poetry of Jeremiah and the later commentary that has been inserted in the book as we have it, I'd prefer them to distinguish that in the layout of what seems to me to be a very readable text. I'm also including one of the Revised Standard texts with another commentary, one that minimizes the use of linguistic anachronisms. I don't have any trouble with the anachronisms, having been brought up on the antiquated English translations of the Vulgate, which brings another whole bunch of issues.
The fights and brawling over most of the modern translations are generally much ado about little in most cases. I have found even the King James translations, there being a number of those, are useful but none of them are as useful on their own as reading several at a time, though it certainly goes a lot slower when you read the same chapter three or more times. I have found having help from commentaries, a number of them, to also be indefensible. Especially when they don't necessarily agree or come with the same agendas.
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