LOOKING BACK AT what I've posted here since the start of December, when things have gone back and forth between falling apart and ineffectively trying to pull it back together while responding to provocative responses, it does make some kind of sense that I didn't realize as it was happening. I've had a few recurring fevers this past two months so some of that might have had something to do with it, too. I'm not told that it's long-Covid but whatever it is, it gets weird.
Rejecting both the vulgar materialism of Republican-fascism and the would-be elite materialism of the often academic, secular alleged opposition to that, a lot of what I've said about egalitarian democratic politics and why I think that everywhere we have made any kind of an approximate approach to that is intimately bound up with the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures as those are an actual force in Peoples' thinking and political positions has both enraged and confused People.
Well, a lot of this starts out confusing and some of it People have been trying to figure out for thousands of years. And a lot of it isn't going to be to our liking. What we like most is usually a big part of the problem to start with. That's just how these problems are.
A lot of it is because even most English language college-credentialed people seem to know an ideologically distorted view of the evils of history in which churches are blamed for a lot that they certainly weren't the major forces in producing, some of them are complete fictions but as the movie said, "print the legend." A college education ain't what it should be in easily 9 out of 10 cases. More like 10 out of 10 when it's a media figure.
A Rule For Having A More Edifying Life: Listen To Lectures, Not Sit-Com Reruns
One of the great benefits of being online and, especially, having access to many recorded speeches, lectures, interviews, discussions and, don't think I've forgotten, radio-dramas, is that when I'm depressed I can listen to someone like Walter Brueggemann who, thank God, has been much recorded and much posted. With him, with others such as Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Johnson, the late James Cone, those who participate in Catholic Women Preach, Rupert Sheldrake (I listen to lots of youtubed lectures) I can always find something to listen to that addresses my condition. And almost inevitably I find something I've listened to is directly, though not always explicitly, relevant to the political issues I've dealt with. That's not a surprise because from Exodus to Revelations, the Bible is intimately tied up with economics and politics in a far more exigent and demanding and direct manner than secular politics. My recent detour into the political thought of Hannah Arendt and those associated with and sometimes disagreeing with her reminded me of how, for all of their many virtues, there is always something that falls flat in a the secular-academic approach to those same issues. I love those thinkers, I've spent so many of the hours of my life with them but as they determinedly cut out God from their academic discourse - like good modernist scholars - they can never quite seal the deal in the end, at least for me. I have come to the conclusion that to get to the promised land, you have to make choices that can't be made within that secular, scientistic, materialistic, atheistic framing.
That came to a head during the question period from a 2011 interview discussion on the nature of evil that Walter Brueggemann participated in at Elmhurst College. I'd downloaded it and listened to it before, maybe I've transcribed a bit of it before, though I don't remember if I posted it or not. But listening to it to pick myself up - it's a discussion of evil - these two questions and responses jumped out at me. So, with my not exactly verbatim transcription.
Questioner 1: In was interested in your rejection of the Greek philosophers' definition of God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. And what I want to ask then is from that I gathered that God is not all powerful. There's some limit on His power. And I just wonder if you could say more that's verified in both the Old and the New Testament.
Walter Brueggemann: Well, it says of Jesus in, I think it's Luke 4, "He came to Nazareth" . . . I'm not sure it's in Luke 4, somewhere in the synoptics . . . " He came to Nazareth and he could do no mighty works there because of their disbelief." And I think there's ample evidence in both Testaments, that God, in some texts, has to deal with the world the way it is, and cannot wish it away. I think that the power of God was assumed everywhere in the Near East. But that's not the Biblical question, the Biblical question is is God faithful. And they struggle a lot with the faithfulness of God. So, I think that's a more interesting question than the power of God. I think you can point to texts that claim God's power and you can point to texts that doubt God's power but I don't think Israel is preoccupied with that question, I think it's the question of fidelity. So you get, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Which is an accusation to God about God's infidelity. And I think that's everywhere.
I'll jump in to note it's nice for me, who has such a hard time remembering chapter and verse to see that someone as good at this as WB does too. But more so because the answer I gave a while back about the barroom atheist chestnut, the challenge to a believer about the paradox of God being all-powerful enough to make a rock that's too big for God to pick up seems to me to go farther (the next questioner kind of gets there too) because the atheist challenge seems to miss several things:
A. We live in the cosmos that God created, in which God set the conditions of possibility and the limits of what is possible. Everything about us, all of our thinking comes from our experience of that universe with its pre-set conditions, that that imagined scenario is a paradox is a product of our experience of God's choices in making things as they are. What would seem to be a challenge to God's ultimate powerfulness works even better as a demonstration of God's ultimate power.
That we can imagine that paradox, imagining something that could not be internally true because it pits one imagined ultimate display of ultimate power against an inconsistent imagined ultimate display of ultimate power would, within the idea that God is all powerful and that, as the Bible puts it, we are created in Gods image would certainly mean that God is able to imagine things being different from how they are but for God's own reasons which God doesn't completely share with us, God didn't choose the cosmos to be like that.
I think what's missing from this is human beings imagining that we're equipped to get that, to understand why God doesn't set things up the way we like them. You can choose not to like that and choose to decide there is no God because you don't like it and the fact that all of us are creatures within a cosmos in which we are not the ultimate point of everything, that our material bodies are as much a part of that as a sparrow's or the grasses that dry up in the wind, but the secularists don't even get as far as the hapless Job in understanding why bad things happen to good people. Which gets us to the thing that really got me excited in my egalitarian predisposition.
Questioner 2: You were talking about . . . this follows up to what you were just saying. This idea of making a choice between the goodness of God verses the power of God as a way of bringing some understanding to when we don't understand why bad things happen to good people. I know I've heard it in the Christian circle that I'm a part of. That when I cannot understand or trace the Hand of God I must trust the Heart of God. Which I think gets back to His goodness. But you raised as an example of that the Book of Job. When Job is crying out, trying to understand why it seemed the Hand of God had turned against him, God had abandoned him and then God responds to him. And almost dares him, "Where were you [when I laid the foundation of the Earth . . . ]" How does the Sovereignty of God fit into this paradigm that you've set up, the Goodness of God verses the Power of God as a way of understanding. And also the free will of man. I think that plays into this idea of when Jesus could do no good work there because that element of faith that is needed on our part for God to be able to function and do what He does. So I'd like your thoughts on the idea of sovereignty and also the free will of man.
Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think that the whirlwind speeches at the end of The Book of Job are deliberately enigmatic. What I know is that God is a terrible pastoral councilor because Job comes with all of these aches and pains and doubts and angers and, you know, God is supposed to say, "How are things going?" And God says, "Let me tell you about the hippopotamus I just made." So I think it is probably a tilt at God's Sovereignty but it isn't quite spelled out that way, it says, "I'm not gonna discuss this with you! I am not interested in your aches and pains so quit talking to me about that!" So, I think God is portrayed there as fairly abrasive . . . is not terribly amenable. . .
It should be remembered that Job is a story that is supposed to represent and teach us something about unearned suffering - I think elsewhere Brueggemann says it is a reaction against the idea that suffereing is earned in parts of The Law. This is a human explanation of things, inspired, I think, because in so many ways it is honest that God is not going to tell us, at least in this life, about why everything is as it is. It's a confession of the limits of even revealed religion that religion doesn't have all the answers anymore than physics or chemistry or pure or applied math is ever going to have them. It's really rather funny how the "theory of everything" atheist ideological cosmologists are just the flip side of the joker card of pretetious religious fundamentalism, in the end. Both of them have a tendency towards a rigid determinism as a response to the mysteries and exigencies of human experience. I don't think it's any accident that Republican-fascism is so tied to the antiChrist of vulgar materialism as expressed by the American antichrist of "Christian nationalism," and that the would be secular left is so impotent to oppose them.
Getting to the heart of things:
Now I don't know about free will. I'll tell you a joke from Columbia Seminary where I taught which is very Calvinist. Long time ago Dr. Geer was lecturing on double-predestination - this is Calvin voodoo - and he saw a student sleeping in class so he went up to him and said, "Define double-predestination!" And the student said, Oh, Dr. Geer, I did know but I've forgotten. Dr. Geer said, "Holy Jesus, the only person in Western Christendom who understood and he has forgotten!"
I just saw . . . what's it called? "Adjustment Bureau?" with Matt Damon which is about free will. And the movie sort of says if you love enough you'll have freedom against God's will. Well, I don't find that a very helpful way to talk about it.
I think when you talk about God's Sovereignty and human free will you have to talk about a covenant. You have to talk about a dialogical relationship in which both parties are free and both parties are bound. And it's like any serious relationship, it's a matter of working that out which never ends in complete sovereignty or in complete freedom but it is the enigma of fidelity. And I think that's the primary set of Biblical faith. And, you see, if we had understood that dialogical fidelity is the defining set I dare to think we wouldn't have gotten into all of the patriarchal abuse of Women, we wouldn't have gotten into the silencing of Gays, we wouldn't have needed to get into enslavement of Blacks because dialogical freedom means that both parties are always at risk and I think in the Bible that's true of our relationship with God in which both parties are free and both parties are bound and it has to do with working it out. Does that make sense? . . . Then I'm lucky.
This has so much in it for further understanding of both the problems of having a truly egalitarian society, legal and political system and, most problematic of all, economics - as Brueggemann gets in his list of those who are in great need of equality - that I am going to present it as tying the past two months here together. And Brueggeman, with all of his experience and intellect and honesty, admits that he doesn't have more of a framing to understand it than the author of Job seems to have for the aspects of it that she or he was dealing with.
I do think he's farther along than anything I've read in the best secular political thinkers I've read. They are often extremely good on narrowly defined issues, Arent on lying, on the Eichmann trial, but I don't find anyting, not a single thing, that will advance us on equality and justice and on farther than that to mutual fidelity and care which is what will give the reluctant, the skeptical and the scared the motive to enter into that kind of dialogical freedom in which you have to give up some of what you want to live in justice with others. Which is why so many on the secular left have been diverted into some horrific positions such as supporting some of the most evil governments in the history of the world, giving Nazis a chance of making their history repeat itself perpetually (on the idiotic idea that Marxism would, thus, have a chance here), even more so our indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy, the evils of the "first amendment rights" of the addiction industries to lie us into things like the opioid addiction epidemic, the porn industry, etc. Secularism has had such bad results that I am ready to say they match the evils of established religion if they don't already out-match that other evil we should never try again.
I tried European, 18th century style secular liberalism and it doesn't do the job. It's worse than ineffective, it has helped get us to the discrediting of the traditional form of American liberalism which arose to struggle against the evils that Brueggemann listed.
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