Whining About Walter - A Response

WHY WOULDN'T I want to make continual use of the things one of the finest Old Testament scholars in the English language wrote, someone who has earned world-wide respect for his scholarship and commentary on the Bible whose commentary and analysis includes a German language theologian's scope of external information, a writer who makes it relevant to the latest news.  And before going on I'll explain that he doesn't do so in the way that naive "evangelicals" or others do, by pretending he can turn Scripture into one big game of pop-Nostradamus predictions - would that what "journalism" has devolved into would cut that crap out, too.  His scholarship is pretty snark proof through not being done with any intention of being snark-proof

If I use Walter Brueggemann's writing and lectures and sermons a lot it is because I have found he often is the only one saying what he says or that he says it better than anyone else I'm aware of.   When I find a similar level of helpful speaking or writing from another person, I use that.   I have found a number of them.  And there is his own self-effacing humor in his lectures and, often his sermons.  He's either never found the praise he's given interesting or he got over himself well before I became aware of him.  I am also always impressed with his care to admit when what he's saying is his own or other scholars speculation and not based on "objective" evidence.  So much of what is contained in the Old Testament, especially, Scripture is the only evidence we have of what is claimed and, as is the way of all ancient writing, it was never intended to be taken as the same kind of "objective" information giving that the best of modern historical and biographical and some scientific writing is.  His acknowledgement that it is a literary text with the standards of artistic truth telling instead of mere expository writing is a given from the start.   

So I have no intention of not using Walter Brueggemann's writing when I find things in it that are seasonally or topically relevant or if I want to encourage the reading and study of one of his books by showing you some of what they've led me to think.   Merely on the basis of what's interesting, It beats the rote, repetitious reruns or rerun of pop-muzak or TV shows or movies or pulp rubbish or the typical college-credentialed received POV that comprises the typical replacement for thinking among the English language college-credentialed population.  It was going online and reading the unfiltered thinking of such people in such large numbers that led me to realize how truly futile and counter-productive all of that crap was.  

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I think the elevation of pop-kulcha as an easier and lazier and stupider replacement for serious thinking and reading and reflection is one of the most dangerous things encouraged by the American media and the surrender of the great American aspiration of public education to it.  I might sympathize with teachers faced with the idiocy that those produce and gave up but it wasn't helpful.  Like the conventions of TV and radio commercials, appealing to the laziness and weaknesses of People, that effort was to get audience, not because it was ever a real replacement for it. And I think it has been intentionally done as a means of controlling We the People as a means of making American liberal-democracy a tool of the billionaire and millionaire media owners and their allies in thwarting the aspirations of egalitarian democracy and the universal provision of as decent a life for all as is possible.  That was, it is no coincidence, the goal of the Mosaic tradition of the Old Testament, the Prophetic protest against the billionaire-millionaire equivalent class in ancient Israel and Judea and of the Gospel of Jesus and the writings of Paul and James, etc. in the New Testament.  I think overcoming the laziness and stupidity and greed that modernism has corrupted us with is necessary if saving the aspiration of achieving egalitarian democracy.  If that isn't done, trying to do that is futile.

There is no secular mechanism for appealing to People to overcome their worst weaknesses and vices, certainly none that will reliably overcome the worst of those, greed, envy, . . . the sins laid out as sins of malign consequence in Scripture.   And without that, we are doomed.  I doubt anything but a belief in God will do that.  

That religious tradition has been a victim of both the academic and pop-kulcha attacks on it and the rejection of it by conservative merely nominal Christianity and similar efforts in Judaism.  That is no absolutely no accident or coincidence.  It is an overt, in the former and a covert campaign in the latter to destroy the radical egalitarianism that is at the heart of both religious families.  I am certainly not as conversant with the similar corruption of their fellow Abrahamic religion, Islam, but I suspect the same thing is evident in that.  I suspect anywhere at any time that the religious inspiration towards egalitarian provision of a decent life has arisen, there will be such an effort to render that ineffective and to destroy it.  That it survived and became a major if not the major theme of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures certainly sets them apart from most of the scriptures of most traditions.  At least of what survives in a written form.  If you read the book I'm going through now, Brueggemann's An Unsettling God, you would find that is an early and major focus of his mightily informed reading of Scripture.  

I find that much of theology in the past and today is a rejection of that corruption of the egalitarian Biblical tradition and am certain that that is entirely more important to producing the continued possibility of human and other life, today than the entire secular philosophical profession.  I don't disdain all of secular philosophy though I don't find anything in it that produces a durable program to confront the guaranteed enemies of equality and morally responsible freedom in an effective way.  I certainly find nothing in the philosophy based- pseudo-scientific schools of secular political philosophy that can do that.  I used to chafe at the evocations of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" by those who want to erect a theocracy which would certainly be or turn into yet another neo-feudalistic anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic cesspool, but the worst thing about that hypocritical citation is that it led to the rejection of what has, in fact, been the basis of egalitarian democratic struggle.  I've pointed out that when the early BLACK abolitionists were writing against the enslavement of Black People in the United States they turned to the Scripture, especially the emancipation of the Children of Israel from Egypt and not the Constitution.  Sometimes they cited the defaulted promises of the Declaration of Independence or the hypocritical slogans from Jefferson or other idols of secular America, but that was done mostly to demonstrate the hypocrisy of that secular legal fakery.