We Face Greater Dangers From Vulgar Materialism Than We Do About Religious Disagreements - Last Advent Post From The Unsettling God

 Classical Christianity's Tilt toward Closure

A second vision of reality against which the Old Testament may play is the articulation of classical Christianity.  Here I will deal more briefly with the interface and the tension between construals, for on the whole, classical Christianity shares claims with Israel's testimony against Enlightenment liberalism.  That is, classical Christianity, like ancient Israel, affirms generosity over scarcity, brokenness in the face of denial, and hope instead of despair.  I want to assert only one point that is sharply at issue between these narrative offers.  I have repeatedly stressed that Israel deals with ain incommensurate God who is endlessly at risk in mutuality.  That is, YHWH is seen by Israel to be genuinely dialectical, always on one end of a disputatious transaction that may effect change in YHWH as well as in UHWH's partners. We have seen this profound unresolved already in Exodus 34:6-7.  We have seen it regularly in the noun-metaphors used for YHWH.  Most largely, we have seen this dialectical quality in the juxtaposition of what I have called core testimony and countertestimony.  Israel's transactions with YHWH are indeed characteristically open and unsettled.

It appears to me, granting the enormous difference made by a christological center in Christian faith, that the real issue that concerns us in Old Testament theology is this;  Classical Christianity is tilted in a transcendental direction which gives closure to YHWH and to YHWH's relationships with the partners.  There may be many reasons for such a closure;  perhaps not least is the need of a derivative tradition (Christianity) to substantiate its claim against the precursive tradition (Judaism).  For whatever reason, this tendency to transcendental closure compromises the genuinely dialectical quality of Jewish testimony.  That compromise, however is of crucial importance for what is possible and what is precluded in our discernment of God, world and self.

I do not imagine that Christianity in its classical forms will yield much, soon, on this score.  But there are hints that as Christianity in the West is increasingly disestablished, and so may distance itself from its Hellenistic-Constantinian propensity, it may move in the direction of its Jewish dimension of genuine unsettlement between YHWH and YHWH's partners.  There is no doubt that this drama of brokenness and restoration is shared by Judaism and Christianity.  In Judaism it is a drama of:

exile and homecoming,
death and resurrection,
Pit and rescue, and
Chaos and creation.

To the set categories of discernment, Christianity adds (decisively for its identity) crucifixion and resurrection.  That of course is a specific move the Old Testament (and Judaism) do not make.  The differential on this point is very great.

What strikes me more however, is that these traditions are, in the main, agreed.  That agreement is the basis for a genuine alternative to the nihilism of the modern world, a nihilism contained in the elimination of this incommensurate, mutual One in the interest of autonomy and self-sufficiency.  This testimony of Israel, echoed by Christianity, not only gives different answers - it insists on different questions, wherein the answers offered are perforce thin and tenuous, but not for that reason unuttered.  The intramural quarrels in the church, and the ancient alienations between Christians and Jews are unconscionable, in my judgement, when this lean, resilient tradition stands as a fragile alternative to the embrace of the Nihil.

If Christianity could avoid a view of things that results in closure, given that at the center of Christianity is the figure of Jesus, his life and his Gospel, his death and Resurrection, might be asked.   I don't think that's the same as figuring that human interaction with God and our evolving relationship is once and for all settled.  I do think that the clearly wrong idea that the return of Jesus Christ was about to happen during Paul's time and the continuation of history may have played an over-large part in any declaration or notion that that relationship had been settled could account for that rupture in the Hebrew tradition.   Though I would point out that the earliest history of Christianity, especially, the very one in which that thinking came about was, almost exclusively at the start and even in a majority for at least the first few generations very much a part of the Hebrew Scriptural informed world.  As everyone always seems to have to be reminded Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, James was, likely the author of Mark was, perhaps the writer of Matthew, maybe even John, as well.  But the entire New Testament is steeped in the same tradition that the Hebrew Bible is based in - if in the Jewish scholarly translations into Greek starting some centuries earlier.*   I don't know how you can find a bright line that definitively separates Christianity as decisively "un-Jewish" if by that you mean what was around at the times and in the places relevant to this discussion in the First Century.  The history of the world, certainly of Europe and the Middle East would have been entirely different if the kind of comity Brueggemann hopes for was practiced.   I think there is a great opportunity for unsettlement for Christians if we are always, constantly reminded of the perceived tensions between Christianity and the Old Testament Scriptures which we must take as authoritative if not, necessarily, normative in mandating our actions.

I don't think Christianity, in its best sense, needs to apologize for being Christian but in its best sense it would never have done the things that so much of Christian history records.  I do think that the person of Jesus, the teachings he taught, the faith in his Resurrection and his ministry is decisively different from what is recorded in the Old Testament but I don't think Jesus would have ever wanted anyone following him to forget that he was a Jew, he is recorded as quoting the Torah, the Prophets, the Psalms, etc. extensively, of making recourse to Abraham and, reportedly, was advised by Moses and Elijah in the Transfiguration.   If there is a problem with Christianity, it's that it forgot all of that, certainly in the West, certainly even in much of Protestantism, even such branches of that as Lutheranism and Calvinism and, most remarkably, in much of the Anabaptist divergence from that Protestantism.   Especially by American Baptists. 

But I don't think Christianity needs to feel so secure in its relationship with God as if Jesus made all of the enormous trial of being a human being in the physical universe disappear, as if the whatever reason we are created as we are where we are hasn't continued on even with his death and Resurrection.  Paul's extremely subtle and complex theology dealing with that made things that were going to be hard, anyway, just as hard even as they articulated so much.  And Paul, himself, declared himself to not only be a Jew but a Pharisee, even as he was preaching his own experience of the Risen Christ.  

I do think that Walter Brueggemann is right, in the face of a far more destructive rupture in the Hebrew experience and knowledge of God, that of modernism, of "enlightenment" liberalism - which certainly includes what Americans and Brits, etc. call "conservatism" and which certainly includes much that is nominally Christian - and the materialist seduction of the world, both the tradition faithful to only the Old Testament and that which includes the New Testament have to struggle in common against that.  It is probably, if anything, worse at this most vulgarly materialistic time of year than it often is.  The institutional enemies of the God who commands justice, who commands equality, who commands charity to widows, orphans, illegal aliens, and even the just treatment of slaves and animals are rampant.  They have never been anything but strong but they are stronger now than ever since the classical period.  I don't think Christians giving up Christianity would help - it is no small issue that the largest, by far, population who take the Hebrew Scriptures seriously are Christians with Muslims in second place.   What is needed is a different focus that takes the Old Testament much more seriously than it has been taken.  One step in that direction was made at the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s when, especially in reaction to the crimes of the Nazis and WWII in general, it was mandated that texts from the Hebrew Bible would take a far greater role in the Catholic lectionary and far more of a role in Catholic teaching and scholarship.  I think that Walter Brueggemann has become the great scholar of the Old Testament that he is, as an ordained Christian minister, is certainly a part of the same trend in Christianity.  That is one that has to continue or Christianity will become just another part of the materialist-atheist-scientistic blob that is enveloping the human species and destroying the world.  

* I have come to really question the idea that the Septuagint Old Testament is knowably less valid than the Hebrew Masoretic text is.  The present day text is, itself, unknown to have existed until well into the Common Era.  The evidence is that there were many variant texts of the Old Testament around in the first century of the Common Era.  The text we have today is as much a matter of long periods of editing and the influence of external events - the destruction of Jerusalem is thought to have greatly reduced the diversity of texts.   I think the present Hebrew text is no less a matter of shaping than the Septuagint was.  And there are still variants current in Israel, itself, the Samaritans keeping a different version of it as authoritative.