"It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closeure and buoyantly offers newness.

MORE OF WALTER BREUGGEMANN'S An Unsettled God as an Advent thought.

Regulation via Imagination

What we have in the biblical text is a human document, a product of daring, evocative human imagination.  But serious readers of this text of human imagination regularly are recruited, in the process of being addressed, to the conviction that what is surely daring artistic human imagination is, at the same time, an act of divine revelation.  There is something different here that insists always on being "strange and new."  What is revealed here is a Holy One who is undomesticatedly available for dialogic transaction; and because of dialogical transaction, what is revealed here, as well, is mature personhood that is commensurate with the undomesticated fidelity of the Holy One: "until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13); "It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ (Collosians 1:28).  I cite these texts (with their use of the word "mature" [Greek telos] not to tilt the discussion in a christological direction, but to notice that the fully formed human person, in this relationship, is one who is engaged in the dialogical transaction of faith and obedience.  Well before this particular epistolary formulation, Israel had understood that "maturity" as a creature concerns life congruent with the creator God.  I judge, moreover, that Israel would further claim that the same "maturity" (completeness, Hebrew tam) may well pertain to every partner of YHWH, every creature - human, nonhuman, Isreal, nations - for the creator God summons all creatures to maturity.

The reason I stress that the biblical testimony is revelation-as-human-imagination is that the text tradition fully delivers on adequate partners for YHWH, partners who are capable of sustained dialogic transactions of fidelity.  Israel, in its formation and transmission of the text, found itself drawn out beyond itself into this always lively, redefining transaction.  And while the framers and transmitters of the textual tradition lived a quite concrete human life - of family, of sexuality, of money and property - they also understood that life in faithful intentionality was a performance of an ongoing transaction that caused it to be different in the world.  Beyond its own performance, moreover, it also imagined (was led by the spirit to imagine) that all other creatures are also partners in the same God and so recuited into the same dialogic transaction.  Thus Israel could construe the life of sea monsters and birds and creeping things as YHWH's creaturely partners (see Psalm 148:7-10).  And it could in like manner discern Nebuchadnezzar as "servant of YHWH" (Jeremiah 25:9; 27:6) and the unwitting Cyrus as "YHWH's messiah" (Isaiah 45:1).  It could imagine in the sweep of its performance that all of life is drawn into this dialogic transaction.

The commensurability between dialogic God and dialogic partner is well articulated by Jurgen Moltmann.  In his thoughtful discussion, Moltmann has contrasted the apathetic God and the God capable of pathos.  Then he extrapolates:

"In the sphere of the apathetic God man becomes a homo apatheticus.  In the situation of the pathos of God he becomes homo sympatheticus.   The divine pathos is reflected in man's participation, his hopes and his prayers.  Sympathy is the openness of a person to the present of another.  It has the structure of dialogue.  In the pathos of God, man is filled with the spirit of God.  He becomes the friend of God, feels sympathy with God and for God.  He does not enter into a mystical union but into a sympathetic union with God.  He is angry with God's wrath.  He suffers with God's suffering.  He loves with God's love.  He hopes with God's hope."

The human person stands alongside YHWH in engagement with the tribulation and wonder of the world.  In the exposition that follows in this volume, we dare to imagine as well that YHWH's other partners are also drawn into the same dialogic structure of friendship, wrath and hope.  There is of course a great deal at stake in this dialogic interaction of God with God's partners.  The religious temptation to dissolve the dialogue into an authoritarian monologue is matched by the temptation to self-authorizing autonomy.  Both authoritarianism and autonomy are temptations that are everywhere around us.  The offer of technological solutions to relational problems is an encompassing temptation among us.  Continuing attentiveness to this textual tradition is an affirmative reminder that our God-given, God-engaged creatureliness is of another ilk.  It is not too much to conclude that the future of the world depends upon the continued performance of this dialogue that resolvedly refuses closure and buoyantly offers newness.

The first paragraph of this made me think of how many proud and arrogant atheists have declared that they rejected belief in God at the age of 6 or 9 or 14 based on their thoughts or experiences reacted to at that age or, in one case I read in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences, the expressed disdain of his older brother at one of those ages, not even on his own thinking.  In a seasonal vein, the sometimes heard disdain of belief in God as being the equivalent of a belief in Santa Clause, I remember someone asking how many adults the mocker knew who came to a belief in Santa Clause as a mature adult.  

What Walter Brueggemann and Jurgen Moltmann are talking about is an entirely higher level of mature engagement than that puerile polemical pubescents issue.  As can be seen in the specifics of what they're talking about, it's a serious and adult level call to the kind of maturity that is the topic in this passage.  

But modernism is nothing if not a call to immaturity, certainly as it has devolved in the 20th and 21st centuries that's the case, certainly that has accelerated since the advent of television and the largest part of the internet.  In writing my political thinking online I've several times referred to the passage in Brave New World in which the director of the institute dresses down one of his subordinates for acting too mature and serious.  It's one of the reasons I think Aldous Huxley got a good part of the popular culture of the modern world righter than Orwell did, though the Orwell vision seems to be coming as a result of what Huxley saw coming about.  I don't think either of them had any real way out of that, but I think the kind of thinking presented here does.  But being harder than that of modernist imagination, it will be harder to persuade those damaged by the ambient culture to adopt it.

Anyone who has read the Scriptures and thought about them as deeply as Brueggeman and Moltmann have will come to an understanding of them arriving at a wholly more important and serious ground than those who never actually read them can.  Though, as seen in the Republican-fascist caucus of the house and so much "white evangelical" and "traditional Catholic" discourse, just reading it can get you, if anything, wronger than the mockers.  What the mockers mock, after all, is generally exactly that "literal, fundamentalists" reading of Scripture.  Though, really, it's generally some later church based doctrinal or dogmatic assertion that they find so much use for in their mockery.

The radicality of this view of God is seen in how universal God's scope of concern and activity in making covenants is.  As I've also pointed out, the Scripture says explicitly that God makes covenants with "all flesh" that God has had covenantal relations with many nations, some of them enemies of Israel, even with those who conquer and drive Israel into exile and who rule over Israel as despotic colonial exploiters.  God specifically told them that they would have to wait hundreds of years before they could inhabit the land that was promised to Abraham because the People who were living there had a covenant with God which would not lapse to the point of default for that time.  God also warned Israel that the covenant with them was only good for as long as they honored their obligations under it.  That should be a warning to anyone who is tempted to practice "self-authorizing autonomy," a product of "an authoritarian monologue."  In the section between where I left off and where I started on the comments on An Unsettling God, Walter Brueggeman quotes George Steiner as saying, "It is the Hebraic intuition that God is capable of all speech-acts except that of monologue which has generated our arts of reply, of questioning and counter-creation."  Which leads me to wonder if idolatry is a peculiarly human act based on such "authoritarian monologue" in which we imagine our imaginations are capable of containing God but only is able to come up with a metaphor for God that we, then, mistake as the reality of God.  I don't recall ever getting into a brawl over religion in which such an imagined complete God wasn't the focus of the disagreement.  It's possible to have an open-ended imagination of God, such a God will never be swept aside like a pubescent atheist will, though such a God will never be fully grasped and anyone who tries to is foolish.  I think that's the God that these two theologians are talking about.

I also think it's the God that Luke quotes Mary as presenting in the Magnificat.  Of course, the God she conceived of was the same God, that conception being based in the Hebrew Scriptures.    

I'm finding that practically every page of Walter Brueggemann's book is good Advent reading.