Not Wishing To Engage In Reductionism

THESE LAST FEW DAYS of Advent, in my too few postings from An Unsettling God by Walter Brueggemann, I'm going to skip to the very end of the book.  Maybe in the coming Christmas season I'll go over some of what I left out.  I may not even get to give you all of the ending but only fragments of it.  The book, for me at least, is one of the most important ones I've read in the past thirty years and is really worth the reading on its own.

In the section "Materials for a Metanarrative, which Walter Bruggemann admits is an imposition he says:

 "I am profoundly ill at ease with the use of the term "metanarrative," by which I mean simply a more or less coherent perspective on reality.  I am ill at ease, first, because I am impressed with the plurality, diversity, and fragmented quality of the Old Testament text, and have no wish to engage in reductionism. . .

This is such a succinct summary of what makes Scripture so unsuited for a modern reading, a reading as if it were a systematic philosophical text, a scientific text, or even a coherent reporting of history.  Having praised the best sort of most recent modern historical writing so recently and reading this passage this week makes me realize that that level of historical writing faces the diversity and fragmented quality of the historical record in a way that either a fundamentalist reading of it as reliable on its face or a less honestly presented reductionist use of it in service to an a priori theme, something which is bound to tell us at least as much about the motives of the historian as it does about the actual past.  If you want a good example, look at the reaction to history that includes the experience of People of Color, Women, religious and ethnic minorities by American white supremacists, a white, elite metanarrative being what most Americans' view of our history consists of.  Considering the use of scripture by the part of our culture governed by our traditional form of fascism, nominally Christian white supremacists, I don't think the political analogy is irrelevant.  What can I say?  People tend to think in the same patterns out of habit, no matter what the subject matter.  That's why so many of the scientistic atheists insist that everyone reads Scripture and does religion like a fundamentalist, fundamentalism shares the same habits with their chosen framing of reality.*  In my case, perhaps, I am open that I am a political blogger and so a political analogy will be the first that comes to me.  I could come up with some others from science, too, though I won't just now.  

. . . Second, I am ill at ease with the term because I take seriously, along with my deconstructionist friends and colleagues, Jean- Francois Lyotard's suspicion of metanarrative, with its hegemonic potential.  For all that, however, I am impressed with the odd-Yawistically odd and Jewishly odd - offer of a perspective in these texts that clearly is in profound tension with the regnant metanarratives of our society.  I will settle for the judgment that the Old Testament is not a metanarrative, but offers materials out of which a metanarrative is to be constructed.  I will settle for that, so long as it is recognized that any metanarrative constructed out of these materials must include certain claims and awarenesses that cannot be compromised.  

I will exposit those nonnegotiable awarenesses in relation to Enlightenment liberalism and in relation to the standard claims of classical Christianity. Vis-a-vis the claims of Enlightenment liberalism, Israel's Yahwistic account of brokenness and restoration may yield several enormously important instances.  

Limitless Generosity at the Root of Reality

At the root of reality is a limitless generosity that intends an extravagant abundance.  This claim is exposited in Israel's creation texts, sapiential traditions, and hymnic exubranances.  This insistence flies in the face of the theory of scarcity on which the modern world is built.  An ideology of scarcity produces a competitiveness that issues in brutality, justifies policies of wars and aggression, authorizes an acute individualism, and provides endless anxiety about money, sexuality, physical fitness, beauty, work achievements, and finally morality.  It seems to me that, in the end, all of these anxieties are rooted in an ideology that resists a notion of limitless generosity and extravagant abundance.  

I can't resist pointing out that the truth of that statement in regard to Scripture in general and the Old Testament in particular would make that metaphysical totem of scientism and formal logic, Occam's razor, not only moot but counter productive.   That razor, used to trim down reality into a neat package, might work in some cases but using it on wider reality only produces illusions of completeness.   The extent to which that might negate modern approaches to Scripture should be considered more.

That statement, that notion of "limitless generosity and extravagant abundance" flies in the face of not only our own notions of common sense, it is in direct opposition to the ruling hegemonic framing of reality in the sciences, natural selection.**  I will mention, again, that my critique of Darwinism was, originally motivated by my having read the literature and knowing that the common received metanarrative of it, failure to accept which will result in your being expelled from the fellowship of "right thinking people, is based exactly in this modernist view of the world as a violent struggle for material sustenance and more.  That choice of science was made when Darwin chose Malthus as his framing of biological reality.  It is inevitably going to result in that list of woes and neurotic obsessions that Brueggemann lists above.  


It is a hard question how literally and how seriously to take Israel's lyrical claims, which Israel itself often did not take seriously.  Do these claims mean simply that all mankind should be nice and share, and we will all get along? [That's not a bad place to start, actually.] Do they mean that as we trust abundance, we will learn a kind of joy that does not need so much?  Or might they mean, in a venturesome antimodern stance , that the genuine practice of trust causes the earth to produce more, so that justice evokes the blessings of the earth?  That is the claim of the blessing theology of Leviticus 26:3-13 and Deuteronomy 28:1-14.  From the perspective of our several Enlightenment metanarratives, such a claim is outrageous and absurd.  But the outrage may at bottom signify nothing more than the totalizing power of the ideology of scarcity.  One must depart from the narrative of scarcity in order to host this lyrical affirmation of generosity and abundance, a departure to which Israel is summoned each time it engaged in worship and reflection.  

There are so many examples in Scripture and in the lives of the saints that could be mentioned here.  I remember once when my dear old materialist-atheist Latin teacher who in showing off his etymological erudition on the word "beatus" commented that the saints weren't very happy, I mentioned St. Francis in refutation.  He rather condescendingly remarked that he thought Francis was rather simple minded.  I learned a lot about the framing of materialist-atheist-scientism from my arguments with him, though I was still, officially an agnostic back then.  Agnosticism is a stance of cowardly laziness and the superstition that we don't choose to believe what we believe.  It awaits an revelation that is based on notional emotion instead of reasoning choice.   But I digress.  

That human beings are fallible, that the best of human beings is radically limited in our capacity to live faithfully to this tradition is to be expected - as I've mentioned over and over again, one of the most convincing things I find about the Hebrew Scriptures is that it is confessional about the consequences of its own sinfulness and weakness and folly.  I find the enduring moral protest of the Prophetic tradition to entirely outweigh the vainglorious claims and slanders against God in the "historical" books and some of the "wisdom" literature out of which so much conventional  religiosity favored by those with worldly power (including many a corrupt minister, priest, bishop, etc.).  The corruption of centers of religious power are as much confessed as the corruption of secular power and as often taken wrongly by those who create many theological metanarratives in service of that.  The pettiness of the power in many cases and cults doesn't matter anymore than it does in the most corrupt eras of the Western Papacy or the present Patriarchy of Moscow or the Islamic Republic in Iran or the High Priesthood in Israel.  As you can see, I can find myriads of political analogues to fill out a discussion of this passage, it's no wonder I took to this book so much.  

Since this exercise started in me deciding to read Brueggemann's book during Advent, I will ask you to consider the outrageous claims of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary which talks of God filling those with the least, with "good things" and the rich, those with the most, being deposed from their seats of power and being sent away empty.  It's something of a miracle that such a song could have withstood the millennia of even those who recited it daily not really believing that's the way reality was constructed.   If the Catholic hierarchy, all of whom, after some point in history, would have heard that and sung it or recited it hundreds of times a year had believed it, the obscene opulence of the Vatican would never have been built and the Reformation may never have happened, certainly not happened as it did.  The scandalous history of Christian churches, for the most part, would not have been what they were.  But I think even in the case of many of the most modest, often some of the less worldly churches would have been far different.  The competitive assertions of their particular lines of dogma and doctrine, their own peculiar theological certainties may not have arisen if they didn't buy into the narrative of scarcity.  One of the things that many Christian religions seem to think is in shortest supply it is God's love and God's mercy and God's forgiveness, especially God's patience with our own limited abilities and susceptibility to being wrong and weak.  If God didn't have those in mind he'd certainly not provide a special place for the least among us, the weak, many times weak on their being unable to navigate reality.  


* I have been thinking more and more as I read not only about the crisis in science from the failures replicability and peer review but in the most hegemonic of all scientific framings, physics, that what may be happening is that physicists are finding that the physical universe is far, far more complex than their ideological framing of their science has ever held it to be.  The arrogant, cocksure assurance that we are on the verge of them achieving a theory of everything when they know they have no such a theory of even one subatomic particle - and I really mean one single electron in the entire universe of them - is a good indication that the pride that idea is based in is sheer folly.  That's one of the reasons I think the idea that basing any belief in God on the current and almost certainly temporary claims of cosmology or biology is as much folly as basing a claim of disbelief of God on those.   That Sean Carroll, with whom I share that one brief interaction with, seems to base his science on the hope that cosmology will put the last nail in God's coffin is so sure of the ever impending theory of everything is, I think due to him buying into the common received narratives of "enlightenment" modernism and it being such a strong part of his emotional life and intellectual habits.  In doing so he must reject that there is the crisis in his kind of physics, as discussed by Peter Woit in that video I posted here.  Woit, as well, buys into that framing but he's honest enough to know a crisis when he sees one.  

I think it's interesting that the rigorous scientist who is regularly branded a heretic by conventional scientists, the eminent biologist Rupert Sheldrake, just gets on with things.  He noted in one of his more recent lectures that the most interesting scientific publications in Nature, in recent years, have been in the far less ideological and less systematically ambitious area of material physics.   Maybe since Sheldrake is a Christian and probably believes it really is a sin to lie about reality, he can roll with the ups and downs of science while so many others seen to be rather more febrile about it.  That isn't to say I agree with everything Sheldrake says, he still believes in natural selection, after all.  I think it's a habitually conditioned illusion based in Malthusian expressions of the ideology of scarcity, not much more sophisticated than the dreams of Pharaoh in the end of Genesis.  Brueggemann on the betrayal of the Hebrew tradition by Joseph as Pharaoh's food Czar is also interesting to think about.  I think biology is entirely more complex than can be dealt with in one theory and I think that particular theory is an especially bad one since it's impossible to observe or measure and consists entirely in imaginary impositions on what can be seen.  Even as much of that cannot be proven to be relevant to the evolution of life on the ancient Earth.

** See also: Marilynne Robinson's fine essay on "Austerity" reprinted in When I Was A Child I Read Books.  Come to think of it, her essay "Darwinism" from The Death of Adam is certainly relevant.