Saturday Night Radio Drama - Timothy X Atack - The Morpeth Carol

 The Morpeth Carol

Nine-year-old Harry lives on the edge of a housing estate in an un-named Northern town, a serious and intelligent lad with a troubled mum and dad. Late on Christmas Eve he escapes his rowing parents and ventures out into the night. and on a snow-covered precinct in between high-rises he finds what looks like a crashed sled, burning presents scattered in its wake, and mortally wounded reindeer all around. There's also a very scary looking man, gaunt, unshaven and hooded, who skulks around the crash site, finishing off the dying animals with a shotgun..

Harry - Paul Copley
Young Harry - Ellis Hollins
The Man - Alun Raglan
Yvonne - Rachel Davies
Mum - Philippa Stanton
Dad - Paul Stonehouse
Policeman 1 - Matthew Watson
Policeman 2 - David Seddon

Directed by Marc Beeby

I posted this last year but I think it deserves a second hearing.   

we'll miss the evangelical message of Christmas if we allow ourselves to sleep in heavenly peace, satiated by Hallmark

I started copying parts of this piece by Mary McGlone and apart from the first short paragraph, I couldn't not include any of it.  I hope you go to the original but here is most of it.  It's one of the best pieces on Christmas I've read in a long time.

Isaiah aptly portrayed his own and Jesus' times by describing people walking in darkness and dwelling in a land of gloom, people who suffered under the rod of an overseer: treated like yoked oxen, valued for their labor and taxes, people whose personhood had ceased to matter. There was little of prosperity or joy stirring while Mary and Joseph trudged along for the 90 miles that separated Nazareth from Bethlehem.

The census that put them on the road, whether historically verifiable or not, symbolized the people's subjugation to a pagan empire. (Israel had been taught that a census of her own was sacrilegious because it demonstrated that the king would rely on his brute power — armies and taxes — rather than God's providence.)

In Luke's infancy narrative, which includes the Annunciation and Visitation, the journey to Bethlehem and lack of room at the inn are the story version of the poetic prologue of John's Gospel, which speaks of the eternal Word becoming flesh and being rejected by his own.

It seems that every epoch, every century of human history, must lament its share of what Isaiah described as boots that trample in battle and cloaks soaked with blood. But those are not nice to think about.

At this time of year, we would prefer that TV show us less of the wars and more of Macy's Parade. Nevertheless, we'll miss the evangelical message of Christmas if we allow ourselves to sleep in heavenly peace, satiated by Hallmark.

Jesus was born in desperate circumstances. His parents, like the 100 million people forced to be on the move today, had no insurance policies, no AAA roadside help and no credit cards to buy their way in somewhere. With no insulation from ever-present difficulties and danger, they were dependent, hopeful for the kindness of strangers.

In this, Mary and Joseph were icons of God and the child they were about to receive into the world. The Creator did not exercise power and might, but set the universe on a course of evolution in which divine love would one day take on flesh and need to rely on the goodwill of people with generous, open hearts.

We must remember that God did not do this to shame the comfortable, but to bring joy to the needy. In Luke's version of the story, neither religious leaders nor the wealthy represented by the Magi noticed the signs of their times.

Who did notice? The shepherds, people of shady reputation, unwashed and unable to observe religious laws — they took the angels' message to heart. These were the ones who, in spite of their fear, left their 99 (more or less) and hastened to Bethlehem to see "what the Lord has made known to us." Then the shepherds became the first evangelists, "glorifying God and making known the message."

For Christians, the Incarnation is the high point of creation. All of the universe exists from God; God is present somehow in everything as a result of divine love. Now we can understand the Incarnation as the essence, the most concrete expression of the revelation of divine love and our clearest image of what God is like. And with this, the story gets more challenging.

When angels appeared to shepherds, they said, "You will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes."

This very ordinary scene turns out to be a scandalous theophany; God's greatest self-revelation is of divinity in diapers. Traditional Byzantine icons of the Nativity depict this by showing the swaddled infant in a manger that could also represent a coffin, his wrapping cloths like those used in burial.

In theologian St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson's words, the Incarnation "enacts the kind of divine love that ... enters empathetically into [human] experience, self-identifying with the glory and agony of human life from within, befriending even the godless and the godforsaken."

The evangelical message of Christmas is just that. God longs to be with us, God loves us profoundly and respectfully enough to share our mortal life. From such love, God has become vulnerable to us, never imposing but inviting us into a union possible only when God enters into human life.

The babe wrapped in swaddling clothes is a sign that God exercises power as faithful, loving committed accompaniment in vulnerability. And all of this, to invite us to become like the God who dwells among us, seeking to find a home in us.

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.

Callie Crossley's Annual Show With Mike Wilkins' Merry Christmas Mix

LOOK FORWARD to this every year.   I prefer listening to the host and guest talking about most of them to listening to the whole thing, though he regularly finds some gems that you'd almost certainly never find.

Mr. Mike's Merry Mix

The Next To Last Advent Post From An Unsettled God

Israelite Hope versus Enlightenment Despair

At the culmination of Israel's portrayal of reality is a certitude and a vision of newness, a full restoration to well-being that runs beyond any old well-being.  
This culmination in well-being, assured by the resolve of YHWH, is articulated in the conclusion of most psalms of complaint and in prophetic promises that eventuate in messianic and apocalyptic expectations.  Israel's speech witnesses to profound hope, based in the promise-maker and promise-keeper for whom all things are possible.

Israel refuses to accept that any context of nullity - exile, death, chaos - is a permanent conclusion to reality.  Israel, in such circumstance, articulated hope rooted not in any discernible signs in the circumstance, but in the character of YHWH (based on old experience),  who was not a prisoner of circumstance but was able to override circumstance in order to implement promises.  This hope is not incidental in Israel's life;  it is a bedrock, identity-giving conviction, nurtured in nullity, that YHWH's good intentions have not and will not be defeated. As a consequence, complainers anticipate well-being and praise. Israel awaits home-coming, the dead look to new life, creation expects reordering.

All of this requires confidence in an agent outside of the system of defeat.  Enlightenment liberalism, which sets the liberated, self-sufficient human agent at the center of reality, can entertain or credit no such agent outside the system.  Without such an agent who exists in and through Israel's core testimony, there are no new gifts to be given and no new possibilities to be received.  Thus, put simply, the alternative to Israelite hope is Enlightenment despair.  In such a metanarrative, when human capacity is exhausted, all is exhausted.  Ultimate trust is placed in human capacity, human ingenuity, and human technology.  It is self-evident that such a trust cannot deliver, and so ends in despair, for self-sufficiency is only a whisker away from despair.  Such a reading of reality engenders fear and hate, self-hate, and brutality, But Israel, inside its peculiar testimony, refuses such a reading. 

This reminds me of how addicted we are to declarations that nothing is to be done on the basis of nothing but an ambiguously or imperiously issued fiat.  In the most common context for someone living in the United States, we await the ambiguous and imperiously issued fiat of a five-four or larger declaration of the Supreme Court, whether or not American democracy has a future.  They issue such fiats regularly to the effect that nothing is to be done about the epidemic of mass gun murder in American schools, destroying the lives of children, even very young ones.  That fiat is based on the often make-believe secular law of the Constitution, and because of that unholy scripture, noting is to be done even though anyone with a working mind knows what can be done.  That previous courts held otherwise, as well doesn't matter.  That such overturning of Supreme Court precedent negates the authority of that court to do anything and be taken as authoritative is not to matter, by fiat of the Supreme Court.

Similar fiats are regularly issued in many modern academic and intellectual categories, in science, no less than anything other.  I especially like the arbitrary and authoritative fiat that phenomena which are very well established, established by rigorous experimental science which its critics cannot find any flaw with or any flaw in the quantitative analysis of the data resulting from those experiments cannot be right "BECAUSE" that because never as well defined or demonstrated as the experimental results that are rejected.  I'm speaking of what is probably the most rigorously conducted of all science, these days, the scientific investigation of parapsychology.   Of course, mentioning that is forbidden by arbitrary, authoritative fiat enforced by coercive disapproval and shunning.   

Such nullification is rampant under the "enlightenment" materialist-atheist-scientistic culture which the Hebrew religious tradition is in conflict with.

I state the contrast as boldly and sweepingly as I know how.  The drama of brokenness and restoration, which has YHWH as its key agent, features generosity, candor in brokenness and resilient hope, the markings of a viable life.  The primary alternative now available to us features scarcity, denial and despair, surely the ingredients of nihilism. 

I have continually found that the general culture of the "enlightened" enemies of faith is a rather sad and pathetic thing.   The despair and denial and nihilism is generally never far from the surface of merriment and soporific distraction, which is certainly part of the popular, common received culture of the United States, much of Europe and elsewhere.  That the circuses of electronic entertainment is the primary formation of most peoples active minds instead of learning seems relevant to this, to me.  The amount of drinking, taking drugs (especially, perhaps those prescribed by doctors) and wallowing in hate, given how long the West has been wallowing in "enlightenment" might give us reason to doubt the claims of that hegemony that rules us and our institutions.   It is remarkable that the association of active religious belief with better health and more happiness and less addiction, etc. and its opposite, the uninvolvement with and rejection of religion are associated with more negative results, on the basis of many studies more rigorous than most sociology is doesn't gain any traction.

To be sure, for all its venturesome witness, Israel did not always choose cleanly.  Israel accommodated and compromised,  In practiced scarcity as much as it trusted generosity.  It engaged occasionally in denial, for all its embrace of brokenness.  It lived close to despair, for all its resources of hope.  The amazing thing, in my judgement, is not that Israel compromised;  it is that Israel kept its testimony as sustained as it did amid the pressures and demands of its circumstance.  It kept its testimony enough of a coherent assertion that it was able to say, in the voice of YHWH, to itself, to its own children, and to any others who would listen:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.  If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.  But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish;  you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess..  I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him;  for that means life to you and strength of days so that you may live in the land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:15-20)

This Deuteronomic assertion, derivative from the vision of Moses, proved durable enough for Israel that in its season of rehabilitation, Ezra could still affirm: "Nevertheless, in our great mercies you did not make an end of them or forsake them, for you are a gracious and merciful God" (Nehemiah 9:31).  The choosing between construals of reality is something Israel always had to do again.  And the choosing is not yet finished.  

I can believe that. 

Schütz: Deutsches Magnificat

 

Collegium vocale Gent
Concerto Palatino
Philippe Herreweghe

More About The First Manger Scene - So Far Away From American Xmas

From an article posted at NRC today, St. Francis, Kurt Vonnegut and the radical absurdity of the Incarnation:

Was this not a semblance of what St. Francis of Assisi was also doing when he set up a live Nativity 800 years ago in the little town of Greccio? (I doubt anyone has ever bridged Vonnegut to Francis before, but there is a first time for everything.)

At a time when Jesus was often depicted as a conquering, victorious king on a throne, a God-view used to justify crusades and other conversion-focused missions, Francis helped people refocus on the humanity and humility of Christ. In the mystery of the Incarnation, Francis saw the heart of God.

I was recently given the opportunity to visit Italy on a Franciscan pilgrimage. At Greccio, our guides helped my imagination expand as they explained the shocking qualities of Francis' live Nativity. Francis sought to make the Nativity reenactment as human and real as possible: in the middle of the night, in the freezing cold, with not only real people but also real animals who likely smelled and perhaps even used the bathroom there in that tiny cave.

The people of Greccio, who adored Francis and his brothers, would have found this immersive experience to be unique, maybe beautiful, but it was far from comfortable or pleasant. Maybe this was Francis' point. Sometimes in our romanticization of the Christmas story, we forget its absurdity.

Francis, of course, was no stranger to the realm of the absurd. This was a man who denounced his father by stripping naked before the bishop; who would voyage barefoot to far-off places like Rome and Greccio and La Verna; who once journeyed "behind enemy lines" in the middle of the Fifth Crusade with hopes of meeting the sultan, commander of the Muslim army (they did meet, spent several days together and became friends).

Legend has it that one Christmas Eve, as banquets took place around Assisi and his brothers became conscious of their own hunger and poverty, Francis took a large piece of meat from the table where his brothers sat and rubbed it against the wall saying, "Even the walls must eat meat in celebration!"

I have to admit that reading about St. Francis eating meat is a disappointment.

This Is What Happens in the Eighth Decade When They Listened to Uncle Milty Instead Of Doing Their Homework In The 4th Grade

Simps Says:

 "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."

Wow, that's a seriously obnoxious example of academese/jargon.

Oh, and I should add that "Yahwistic" is perhaps the most hilariously awful coinage of this century so far.

Starting with the last bit of idiocy:

Yahwistic
adjective
Yah·​wis·​tic yä-ˈwi-stik -ˈvi-
1: characterized by the use of Yahweh as the name of God
2: of or relating to Yahwism

First Known Use

1874, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Merriam Websters online

Walter Breuggemann has published more than a hundred books, both scholarly and for a general audience, I'd guess he's probably one of the most seriously read authors in the English language today and in many languages his books have been translated into.  He's still publishing at about the age of 90 and still being widely read.  So I think the opinion of his writing from a washed up scribbler for a recording industry ad-flyer who is reduced to attention getting at a gradually fading out blog which had a little bit of buzz around 2004 counts for very little.  

You might try to learn to read something more challenging than the level that Readers Digest catered to but I'd think it's probably too little, too late.  Much, much too late.   Readers of serious theology get used to keeping things in mind for the length of a long sentence, paragraph and page, those whose formation was mostly sitting in front of a TV or movie screen don't get that.  It does make a difference. 

Update:  Simps goes on to say:

you got me on the currency of the word Yahwistic, although I must say it still gives me much pleasure to imagine you using it in casual conversation.

If I had a dollar for every time I got you on your lexicographic incompetence I'd be able to by the OED in hardback.   I've never used the word thought like so many others I know what it means.   You get that from reading and, you know, looking up words you don't know.   You just don't get that from TV and movies.

I Love That Republican Fascists Are Upset Over Eisenhower's Cultural Ambassador's Refreshing of That Over Cracked Chestnut

THE REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS are whipping up their patented pretend horror over Duke Ellington's arrangements of The Nutcracker being danced to by Black People at the White House.   They know their audience is based entirely in hatred of Black People and People of Color, so of course that's what they've been doing.  I heard one FOX Lies a-hole saying it was "Marxist" which is pretty hilarious considering the use of American Jazz in the cultural struggle against the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany.  And Duke Ellington?  I had to get over him going to the Nixon White House, you know the quintessential Red-baiter, the guy who had the kitchen debate with Khrushchev?  

Is there any better reason than to post some of what they hate?

They've got the whole thing at Youtube.   It's worth listening to.  I wish the Bidens would have that dance troop in to do the whole thing and really piss them off.  Maybe next year after Biden wins reelection by a landslide. 

Darkest Night - Patrick Cornelius - Music For The Night of Solstice

 

Patrick Cornelius - alto saxophone
Kristjan Randalu - piano
Michael Janisch - double bass
Paul Wiltgen - drums

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. 

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.  

The Earliest Account Of A Manger Scene

Now three years before his death it befell that he was minded, at the town of Greccio, to celebrate the memory of the Birth of the Child Jesus, with all the added solemnity that he might, for the kindling of devotion. That this might not seem an innovation, he sought and obtained license from the Supreme Pontiff, and then made ready a manger, and bade hay, together with an ox and an ass, be brought unto the spot. The Brethren were called together, the folk assembled, the wood echoed with their voices, and that august night was made radiant and solemn with many bright lights, and with tuneful and sonorous praises. The man of God, filled with tender love, stood before the manger, bathed m tears, and overflowing with joy. Solemn Masses were celebrated over the manger, Francis, the Levite of Christ, chanting the Holy Gospel. Then he preached unto the folk standing round of the Birth of the King in poverty, calling Him, when he wished to name Him, the Child of Bethlehem, by reason of his tender love for Him. A certain knight, valorous and true, Messer John of Greccio, who for the love of Christ had left the secular army, and was bound by closest friendship unto the man of God, declared that he beheld a little Child right fair to see sleeping in that manger. Who seemed to be awakened from sleep when the blessed Father Francis embraced Him in both arms. This vision of the devout knight is rendered worthy of belief, not alone through the holiness of him that beheld it, but is also confirmed by the truth that it set forth, and withal proven by the miracles that followed it. For the ensample of Francis, if meditated upon by the world, must needs stir up sluggish hearts unto the faith of Christ, and the hay that was kept back from the manger by the folk proved a marvellous remedy for sick beasts, and a prophylactic against divers other plagues, God magnifying by all means His servant, and making manifest by clear and miraculous portents the efficacy of his holy prayers. 

from The Life of St. Francis of Assisi by St. Bonaventure

Talk About Synchronicity

I DECIDED TO GO back online this afternoon after trying to deal with the Windows 8 on a rather nice and hardly used laptop my brother-in-law gave me - reminding me of why I gave up windows after one of its more disastrous mandated, involuntary updates that made all of our computers around here crash.   I decided to see if I could find a tutorial about my problem at Youtube University - I couldn't.  But I saw that an hour ago Mark Vernon posted a video exactly in line with my rather cranky post immediately below.  

On The Incarnation or The Real Meaning of Christmas 

I Wish You A Serious Christmas

A RELATIVE OF MINE told me about encountering a Republican-fascist, FOX Lies viewer who was ranting and raving irrelevantly about "not being allowed to say Merry Christmas!".     She challenged the dolt to say when someone told her she couldn't say Merry Christmas and the dim bulb couldn't even invent someone telling her that.   If you decorated a tree with Trumpzis I doubt it would add up to a watt in power draw. 

I don't say "Merry Christmas" because I don't like how people make merry at Christmas,  the commercialization, mostly.   I would bet you that if you asked a truly representative sample of Americans what their conception of the Incarnation was, a very large majority would think it had something to do with cars.  

I have never enjoyed Christmas as much as I have since I pulled out of American Christmas, no presents accepted or given, no merry making, no tree (though I like RMJ's dowel tree picture) minimal fuss with baking and cooking.  I go to my family party to see the people there, that's as much as I want of that. 

I've been thinking of how St. Francis, the person who did so much to a religious celebration of Christmas, would have celebrated Christmas.  One thing he did was more or less invent the manger scene, I prefer one with shepherds and animals and not so much the anachronistic three kings stuff.  I'm sure his manger scene was small and rudimentary.   Another thing that I make sure I do is follow his instruction to feed the birds and animals during Christmas season - something that the price of birdseed has made a more considerable expense than it used to be.  Considering the Rule of the earliest Franciscans, anything they did would have thought about the Incarnation, God made flesh, choosing to become one with us and all flesh through Jesus.   That's more than enough to deal with at Christmas.  

Have a thoughtful Christmas, a really thoughtful one. That's something FOX Lies would never be in favor of because they don't like thinking.    Give to those who won't ever gift you back.  Who you don't know, who you can't see.  Put some bird food down and don't get pissed off when the squirrels eat it.  They need to eat, too.   I think I'll order some tree seeds.  I've been thinking of trying to grow some of those mostly-American chestnut trees that might survive the ravages of liberal democracy in the stupidest form of free trade.  

Maginficat in c minor - George Dyson

 

 

Sung by the Choristers of Lichfield Cathedral.

"man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world

AT THE START of the third chapter of his book, Walter Brueggemann says:

The Old Testament yields a peculiar and important notion of humanness.  Scholarship, moreover, has used great energy in articulating what used to be called "an Old Testament understanding of man."  Furthermore, in contrast to the several ideologies of modernity, much that the Old Testament has to say about human personhood is strikingly odd.  There is a reason for the oddness of Israel's testimony about humanness, a reason that has not been noticed and appreciated often enough.   The oddity, I suggest, stems from the fact that the Old Testament has no interest in articulating an autonomous or universal notion of humanness.  Indeed, such a notion is, for the most part not even on the horizon of Old Testament witnesses."

I'll break in here to say that the modern superstition that we are capable of coming up with universally applicable policies or even notions of the enormously diverse human population, whether through the pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology or anthropology or the semi-pseud-sciences that use the prefixes "neuro" or "cognitive" is just that, superstition.  If the alternative of  seeing human beings through the lens of a relationship with God seems to be absurd, it is no more absurd than the idea that science can provide something to focus on using the tools of science which, in any case, don't work on what it can't observe with any reliability.  That the Old Testament practice doesn't try that is, it seems to me, a step up in doing so with some honesty.  If you reject its method of using history and human experience and prophetic insight on the basis of those not being scientific, well, neither is the science that claims to substitute scientific method for that.  

But it goes farther than that and is more basic.  What right thinking person in the United States in 2023 could object to universal human autonomy?  That is the central argument for Women's ownership of their own bodies, of LGBTQ+ equality, of the dignity and rights of People of Color and other subjugated People.  But all of those political issues are dealing with People subjugated by other People, the unequal, all too human and so always at risk of injustice which is always present when that is arises from human choice. The need to assert autonomy is against human injustice and subjugation, whether by political powers or institutional powers or church hierarchies, etc.  The Jewish Scriptural conception of God is different.  The God who I find ever more credible as I look farther into Scripture and the kind of commentary I quote.  That God, not the all-too-human gods of classical paganism or modern "New Age" romantic recreation of those, can be trusted to be just and so considering personal rights and justice in even our flawed human perception of this God that is a huge step up in what we can depend on.  Issues of human autonomy at the very least will fall into the background when considering our life with such a God as Walter Brueggemann lays out in this book.  That may be why:

The Old Testament has no interest in such a notion , because its articulation of what it means to be human is characteristically situated in its own Yahwistic, covenantal, interactionist mode of reality, so that humanness is always Yahwistic humanness or, we may say, Jewish humanness.  The Old Testament, for the most part, is unable and unwilling - as well as uninterested - to think outside the categories and boundaries of its own sense of YHWH and YHWH's partner.  As a consequence, the primary categories of Israel's faith - sovereignty, fidelity, covenant, and obedience - pertain for this topic as well, Israel makes tis  claim for all human persons, including those well beyond its own community.  Thus Emmanuel Levinas is correct when he writes in his own mystical, lyrical way of the human person:

"But his soul, which Genesis 2:7 calls divine breath, remains near the Throne of God, around which are gathered all the souls of Israel, i.e., Iwe must accept this terminology!) all the souls of the authentically humna humanity, which is conceived in Hiam of Volozhen as being subsumed beneath the category of Israel. . . . Hence, there is a privileged relationship between the human soul, the soul of Israel, and God.  There is a connaturnalitly between man and the manifold entirety of the creature on the one hand, and a special intimacy between man and Elohim on the other."

Levinas goes on to speak of "man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world.

Such an odd linkage between the human and Israel does not mean  that the Old Testament yields nothing beyond Jewishness.  Nor does it mean that Jewish persons are superior human beings.  It means, rather, that in the Old Testament all human persons are understood as situated in the same transactional processes with the holiness of YHWH as is Israel,  so that in a general way the character and destiny of human persons replicates and reiterates the character and destiny of Israel.  This transactional process causes a biblical understanding of human persons to stand at a critical distance and as a critical protest against all modern notions of humanness that move in the direction of autonomy.  This means that when the Old Testament speaks of the human person, its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated.  

How far does that go beyond any secular notion of human autonomy which can never find an explanation of its origin?  It's the ultimate justification of and legitimate articulation of it WITHIN THAT HUMAN AND GOD RELATIONSHIP.  I would go so far as to say any notion of it outside of that acknowledgement of our origin in God is a flimsy substitute for the real thing bound to prove more damaging than merely useless, in the end.   The presumptuous concept of humanism, the idea that "man is the measure of all things" especially in its modern secular (not to say antireligious) form is absurdly inadequate as compared to this Scriptural conception of what it is to be human in relationship with God. 

. . . its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated, is something which so many who misread the conception of the "chosenness" of the Children of Israel in the Bible as it would be read outside of that context, the way that "American exceptionalism,"  French Chauvinism, and any other myriad expressions of vainglory and ranking of human beings on the basis of nationality would have it.  The idea from the first time that Scripture presents God as setting Abraham and his descendants apart gives them the responsibility of being an example of holiness to the world from whom "all nations" will learn the way.   There is all the difference between that and the "White man's burden," slogan of British imperialism, "making the world safe for democracy," under America's military hegemony, and many other such national myths which don't go through the pretenses of a pantomime of moral responsibility.

You can compare that to the foremost model of modernism which I have devoted so much time to exposing and attacking, the Darwinian-Malthusian separation of human beings on the basis of their "biological fitness," really their economic utility and the ranking of humans on an individual scale up to and including the ranking of entire "races" and other crude, unscientific and often entirely imaginary human groupings.  That would be on the basis of their autonomous existence as opposed to their relationship to God.  That notion of human beings is inevitably anti-egalitarian, inevitably hierarchical in ways that the Old Testament is generally not.  As I've mentioned in these posts, one of the things that brought me back to believing the Hebrew Scriptural monotheistic tradition was its acknowledgement that not only all humans. even nationalities who oppose, invade and colonize The Children of Israel and who hold them in captive exile but "all flesh" shares in that relationship to God which exceeds materialistic, atheistic notions of such autonomy and which has possibilities undreamed of by modernism with its idolization of science above other ideas.  

I have pointed out any number of times how when that supremely clever man, the young Thomas Jefferson was tasked with explaining the right of Americans to be free of the British monarchy, a man of current fashion who must have hated to have to make resort to our endowment of a right to such autonomy by God had no alternative but to make that argument that God was the source of human rights, the one who endowed human beings with rights.  Rights which he, one of the idols of our American secular piety, immediately denied to those he held in slavery, his devotion to slavery growing even as his United States became a reality.  The idols of secularism all have feet of clay.  

It is one of the ironies of late-stage, decadent modernism that the very thing which demands equal justice by People for all People and living beings, this very religious assertion of all life being related to God is presented as the foremost oppressor of People.  That use of Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheism as an attack on the most vigorous asserted origin of the right to equal justice and environmental justice is complicated by the denial of that by various churches, right now the Southern Baptist cult which holds so much of the country under its political influence, insisting on the subjugation of Women, born in the rejection of racial equality and maintaining a wealthy, corrupt clergy is one such force.  Mike Johnson is merely emblematic of the complete hypocrisy and corruption of it.  You can say the same about other denominations especially those with political and social influence, the current make up of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and, especially, the media star bishops among them, who, ironically, are as opposed to the most Catholic president in our history, Joe Biden as Southern Baptists were to the previous one, JFK.  

A lot of the public vulnerability to the atheist and anti-Christian attack on Christianity is a direct result of the corrupt uses of the name of Jesus and the idea of "The Bible," that thing that Donald Trump was so unused to holding that he held it upside down, a man who, when visiting the church he was brought to as a child as a campaign stunt had to ask if Presbyterians were Christians.   The man who Mike Johnson and his fascist House caucus take instruction for on whose behalf no lie is beyond telling.  Such "Christianity" and, or more rarely,"Judaism" is a false-front fraud of religion.  Why would anyone be surprised that now when almost all Americans' minds are filled up with the smoke and mirror illusions of TV and movies and the internet would be unable to distinguish the fake from the real?  Such is another illusion of modern notions of freedom.  

The fact is that there is no alternative to this view of human beings in the world that will elevate them to the point where they believe that they can know the truth and the truth can make them free.  That that very status comes only with the assertion that God endowed human beings with an ability to be free and who has endowed us all with human rights, there is no scientific, mathematical or social-scientific articulation of it which is convincing and durable enough to overcome our weakness, our laziness, our feeling of being beleaguered and overwhelmed.  Our fear of violence if we assert our rights and our autonomy within the realm of our relationships with other human beings, especially those who hold superior power.   I've looked at the academically respectable alternatives, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, the double-speak of Marxism, etc. and none of those work.  I have not, once, found one of those which is not guaranteed to produce the same horrors of human history because of the human tendency to want a strong-man to make us feel safe and secure.  If liberal democracy really worked, here, in the United States, where we like to believe we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the most pathetic and ridiculous As Seen On TV strong man phony would never have gotten the traction he did, the power that the damned U.S. Constitution handed him as he lost an election.   The same can be seen in liberal democracies around the world, just now.  The "more speech" of an unregulated media free to tell any lie for the most profit, the thing that so many idiotic American liberals of my generation believed would be the great savior is just another empty idol.  That those things have failed is certainly evidence of what I've come to conclude that only that view of human beings in relationship with God has the strength to SOMETIMES, MORE OFTEN THAN ANY OTHER SYSTEM, result on something better.   I think America's and Europe's endangerment by media driven fascism as it wallows in freedom-fetishistic autonomy granted by "free speech-press" absolutism is certainly an indictment of those 18th century "enlightenment" idols.  I think the tragedy of modern Israel and Palestine is a part of that.  

I don't think that it is impossible for other religions to find the same substance in their own tradition but I have not found it in several of those I've looked at as an outsider.  Those forms of Hinduism that contain crushing inequality as a religious holding are guaranteed not to have it, though I've read there are streams of Hinduism that reject caste, especially in some regions of Southern India.  I have talked about how arguing for the reality of justice with some Western Buddists led me away from that path, though the Engaged Buddhism emerging in Asia and elsewhere seems to find something like it.  Scripture says God makes covenants with other Peoples, I don't think God leaves other People without the possibility to find what the Prophets of Israel, Moses being the first of those, found.  I think it's not impossible that other religious traditions might develop such ideas out of their own experiences of God in their lives, no tradition is static and uninfluenced by continuing human experience.  I think the more widespread that is among the religions, the better.  It can't be found without really living out moral obligations that are, in our wrongheaded human calculations, a negation of "autonomy."   Doing what's good for others which you feel is bad for yourself is the very basis of egalitarian human governance, democracy and the possibility of a decent life.  Materialism, atheism and scientism all eventually attack that.  Many other ideologies of the past, some of those religious ideologies, have been poison to those but modernism is probably the most poisonous of all and deceptively packaged for easy consumption by the gullible and weak.  

Going through this book during Advent I've come to the conclusion that it deserves a lot longer than forty days.  So I intend to go over it at length for myself during the coming year, going through as many of the cited materials as I can get access to.   I can honestly say that it has had an unusually deep impact on both my intellectual idea of God and far more deeply my life as a believer in the God of Moses, the Prophets and Jesus.