This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial

CONTINUING ON with An Unsettling God:

Fissure at the Center of Reality

At the center of reality is a deep, radical, painful, costly fissure that will, soon or late, break every self-arranged pattern of well-being.  This claim is exposited in the texts of the Deuteronomic tradition, the prophetic lawsuits, the complaint psalms, and the theology of the book of Job.  In the Old Testament, no creatureley arrangement survives YHWH's governance unscathed - not mighty Babylon, not the temple of YHWH's presence in Jerusalem, not the beloved Davidic king to whom YHWH has made unconditional promises.   The chosen people are forced into exile, people suffer and die, nations and empires fall, and floods come to the earth.  It cannot be helped, and it cannot be avoided.

We have seen, moreover, that Israel's struggle to bear true witness about the reality is complicated and unresolved.  Much of the nullity besetting the partners of YHWH comes as a consequence of sin and defiance, as punishment of the sovereign, but there is more.  The partner who suffers is often perpetrator, but also sometimes victim.   Sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's negligence, whereby the hosts of the Nihil run rampant in the earth; sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's mean-spirited irascibility . . . sometimes.

In any case, as perpetrator or as victim of as both, the partner of YHWH must make claim against YHWH.  It is in this context that Israel voices its counter-testimony, Israel seizes the initiative against YWHW's protests YHWH's hiddenness, unreliability and negativity.  Sometimes - not always - these protests lead to restoration and rehabilitation of the resolve of YHWH.

This insistence on the reality of brokenness flies in the face of the Enlightenment practice of denial.  Enlightenment rationality, in its popular, uncritisized form, teaches that with enough reason and resources, brokenness can be avoided.  And so Enlightenment rationality, in its frenzied commercial advertising, hucksters the goods of denial and avoidance:  denial of headaches and perspiration and loneliness.  Impotence and poverty and shame, embarrassment and, finally, death.  In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people.  When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must,  it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt.  The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this.  When denial is transposed into guilt - into personal failure - the system of denial remains intact and uncriticized, in the way Job's friends defend the system.

The outcome for the isolated failure is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it.  In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics - it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing,  the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Agent who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility.

The denial precludes participation in the candor that assaults the system and makes newness possible.  Israel, of course knew about the practice of denial.  Israel knows how to imagine its own immunity from threat and risk: "As for me, I said in my prosperity, 'I shall never be moved'" (Psalm 30:6).  In its honest embrace of YHWH, however, Israel did not freeze in its denial, but moved on in a way that made newness a possibility:

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you
and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give
Thanks to you forever (Psalm 30:11-12)

"YHWH's hiddenness, unreliability and negativity," means, perhaps, God's ordering of reality as opposed to human preference or personal well-being - not counting those instances when such misfortune is a direct result of human choices made in opposition to God's commandments, certainly accounting for an enormous percentage of such human experience of those things.  It's one of the masterful points in the fable of Job that God's response to Job cites that ordering of the world and that that ordering is in place making, among other things, the existence of other animals possible.   It should also be noted that in the able, God doesn't step in to forbid The Accuser to cause all of Job's misfortunes, The Accuser, I'd guess, also being a part of God's ordering of reality.

"YHWH's negligence, whereby the hosts of the Nihil run rampant in the earth; sometimes the partner is victim of YHWH's mean-spirited irascibility . . . sometimes."  I'd say of the prophets' humanizing of God in the face of the pains and disasters of life.  How else could a human being understand that except as an all too human expression of meanness and irascibility?   Considering how we treat each other and other sentient beings.  

You need to remember that Scripture is a product of human imaginations based in human beings experience of the reality of God, it isn't a direct testimony from God about that reality.  It is an impressively complex and deep series of imaginings of that but it is certainly not "the word of God" in any literal sense.

The accusation of the Enlightenment as a serial denial of reality is certainly true, the very idea that human life is perfectible, that human cleverness will solve or could solve all difficulties even up to and including the insane ideas about tech millionaires and billionaires achieving immortality here in the physical realm by uploading themselves as a computer program,* is a pervasive delusion of both materialist-atheist-scientism and other schemes of utopian outcomes and Protestant fundamentalist misreadings of the book of Revelation.  As I've said, biblical fundamentalism and its reading of scripture is an expression of the same modern period simplification of reality, a serious misreading of Scripture.  Modernist habits of thought can't deal with this literature, though there are other ways to misread it, too.  

The passage that says:

When brokenness intrudes into such an assembly of denial, as surely it must,  it comes as failure, stupidity, incompetence, and guilt.  The church, so wrapped in the narrative of denial, tends to collude in this.  When denial is transposed into guilt - into personal failure - the system of denial remains intact and criticized, in the way Job's friends defend the system.

It describes the ordering into an underclass, the "undeserving poor," those who are "poor through no fault but their own," and a hundred other facile means of denying reality.   If that were not the truth, probably more than half of the commercials on TV wouldn't gain any traction and most of hate-talk media, radio, TV, internet and the vestiges of print on paper would lose their audience.  Manufactured outrage is largely dependent on it.  Both in choosing and focusing on targets and as the motive of those who become addicted to that.   That is what so much "First Amendment" advocacy promotes through its protection.  The United States political system is as indicted by this as ancient Israel was, so is every other human institution, to a huge to a small extent.

* In an earlier and more primitive form of the same thing, the idea was that you could have your corpse frozen and preserved until medical science could overcome whatever killed you.  That the true believers in science neglected to think of what I heard one person point out, that when meat is frozen most of the cell structures are destroyed as water crystalizes, shows how such a faith seems to regularly lead to the crudest of pseudo-science and sci-fi.  The sad saga of what happened to the flash-frozen head of Ted Williams, frozen by his sad, pathetic son should have ended that industry, though I doubt it did.  Such artifacts of the ideological-religious belief in science and its powers should be studied more because those are ubiquitous and dangerous.  The faith in the methods of sociology that leads to a stupid faith in opinion polling has a malignant effect on politics.