Wednesday Lecture - Walter Brueggemann - Truth-Filled Futures

So much said in less than 16 minutes.  

I have decided to get back to posting lectures, sermons, interviews on a more regular basis.  This is one given by Walter Brueggemann which I listened to recently while doing some otherwise boring chore.   I've listened to it several more times.  While listening  the first couple of times, I was impressed with the expansive interpretation that Brueggemann gave to what is implied in those troublesome, often exclusively interpreted texts where Jesus said no one came to God except through him, and which have been abused so often to say that no one but a small circle of believers were eternally damned.  His association of Jesus as conceived of as The Logos in John with Wisdom in Proverbs Chapter 8 and the association of Jesus with the justice and mercy and compassion that Wisdom created as fundamental attributes of the universe and that THAT is what we have to conform ourselves and our lives to or there will be disaster is the first time I've ever felt entirely comfortable with the idea.  NOT that Brueggemann's interpretation is more comfortable or easy or untroubling than the tradition that interprets that as being baptized and claiming that you're a Christian.   It's not easier, it's to throw yourself against the machine of the powerful, the rich, governments, societies that oppose those, "the world of power" which Brueggemann says, so well, "is dedicated to phoniness".   By the time he gets to the part about Jesus saying "it's all mine" and that he will give it all to us, Brueggemann associates that distribution with conformity to justice, compassion, generosity.

Particularly worth noticing is what he says about the folly of that American, modernist virtue "self sufficiency" and how destructive and stupid that ultimately is.

Here's the talk, I'll probably transcribe parts of it to discuss some ideas in it later, when I'm not feeling so exhausted.

P.S. 

It happened that just the other day I listened to another lecture session that was much longer, William Lane Craig on "God and the Platonic Host" which got into the concept of The Logos and much more, in which Craig talked at length about his years long philosophical study of the nature of abstract objects and the aseity of God, which is extremely interesting and pretty convincing on an intellectual level but, much as I appreciated what Craig was saying I didn't find nearly as useful.  

Both of these did leave me more convinced than ever that materialism, scientism and atheism are symptoms of intellectual vacuity and the dumbing down of intellectualism.  I have some profound disagreements with William Lane Craig about specific things but he is intellectually heads and shoulders above the atheist competition in the realm of ideas.  To a large extent that could be the result of most of his debate opponents being trained in some narrow aspect of the sciences and so-called sciences, relieved of any in depth knowledge of even the areas of philosophy that deal with logical argument.  As I pointed out not long ago, when he has an argument with another philosopher I've found the atheist was far less prone to arrogantly make an ass of himself, maybe unknown to his own audience but obvious to anyone who has read much philosophy or dealt in rigorous self-criticism of thier own thinking.  I specifically wouldn't include someone like Daniel Dennett or John Shook in that category, I think that Shook in particular is someone who should never have been given an undergraduate degree in philosophy, nevermind a PhD.   I have to confess that I've come to be skeptical of anyone who has a philosophy degree from the University of  Buffalo. 

Why I Am A Christian

The Fretheim lecture given by Walter Brueggemann at the Luther Seminary which I linked to the other day was one of the most radical and practical political visions I've heard presented in this past year of my undisciplined but constant reading of what Brueggemann wrote, consulting the texts he sites and listening to the enormous number of his lectures, discussions interviews and sermons available online.  As I said at the beginning of last year I had intended to do something like that with what Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, and I might get around to doing that but I am far from done with Brueggemann's view of the Hebrew scriptures, revealing how entirely relevant they are to our present world, how they raise the same questions and the same issues and present variable ways of addressing the horrific and wonderful world and give advice and warning about the various ways people propose of addressing our world, today as much as their worlds when the many texts were written.

The often mentioned anger of alleged many Christians whenever other people point out the political issues and consequences that flow from taking the radical egalitarian content and the consequent moral obligations is, pretty shockingly, often found in those who pretend to take the Bible most seriously.   If they hold that politics is to be kept out of it, they couldn't more obviously demonstrate that either they don't know it or they choose to not see what it is all about.

The text of the Bible is saturated with the clash between human politics and the consequences of managing our lives and socieities as if economic and social justice don't matter. Every single book in it, including Genesis, is saturated with the political critique of the societies the poets and prophets lived in.   Even while the authors are held back by the social conventions that provide them their stock of references and images and metaphors there is always the radicalism that forces people who read those texts to face that truth even while they can do what the authors so often can't, transcend of disregard or stay in ignorance of those references, images and metaphors.  More often than not, that transcendence of those requires understanding what those are, why they came about and why the truth being pressed requires that those be left behind.  Walter Brueggemann points out, though, that to turn everything into a metaphor carries the danger of dissolving the thing that made that truth the reality behind the text.  These aren't easy books to read, outside of the general requirement of radical equal justice and other tests of truth, they can lead to misunderstanding and abuse to promote the opposite of that truth.

In the lecture and in the answer to questions after, this stands out as both a summary of what Brueggemann is saying and an idea that is as striking disturbing and productive as anything I've heard in the past year. NOTE:  The transcription is by me, including any errors or elisions.  The first questioner asked:

Q - Can you talk about the nexus between so many Old Testament texts that are about purifying, dividing you know no two kinds of of fabrics no two kinds cheese and meat have to be apart  everything has to be separate… purity including don't take any hostages don't intermarry the dialogue of all of that kind of holiness talk … with what you've just been explaining about dialogue, meaning, coming together, loving the other.     How do those things, how do those two channels work in interpretation.

Brueggemann – Which is why I said that I think a contestation  about neighborliness runs through the Bible.  It's not an unequivocal testimony to neighborliness,   it is an argument about neighborliness it ...its an argument in which we as the Christian congregation have to participate.   So there are many texts that want to fence out would be neighbors by labeling them as threats.   

There is a book by a scholar named Beck, I think it's called Unclean.  He lists all the things that disgust conservatives and then he has a shorter list of things that disgust liberals.  But he wants to argue that all these purity laws and so on grow out of what disgusts people who imagine that what disgusts me must surely disgust God.  

There is a book by Martha Nussbaum it's called The Clash Within.  I recommend it to you, it's an analysis of Hindus and Muslims in India and Nussbaum concluded that the clash in India is not between Muslims and Hindus,  it's between people who can allow the other and people who must eliminate the other.  And the title of the book is to indicate she believes that all of us carry this clash in ourselves of openness and exclusion and what counts is how we manage that clash. 

Now I think that one of the implications of your question is that we have to help church people see that the Bible is essentially an ongoing interpretive dispute.  We have allowed people to think that the Bible is all a seamless theological package to which everyone has agreed but the only people who could think that are people who have never opened it. 

And when I am a public persona as I am tonight I want you to think that I practice purity of heart which is one thing.  But I am like you, I am a conundrum of contradictions and what I wanted to argue is that the Bible says that God's struggles with these realities in God's own life that we are in the Image of that God.  Does that make sense?

So what I think the church has to do is to surface the contest that is going on everywhere in our society but we want to pretend that it's not going on.  I don't know if you have it in Minnesota but you see these church signs all welcome what they mean is all who are like me.   And you know that's the reality of our life.  But the Bible is a script for processing that reality.   That's my thesis.

That could lead to a month's worth of posts.

First, it is the opposite to what atheists and other anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic people present religion as being, a monolithic and rigid set of dogmas and doctrines whose blind allegiance is forced by violence.  And that view isn't unknown among those who claim to believe.  A lot of them like that violent dictatorship, and I think they have to be opposed.

But as Brueggemann said, it's an idea that can only be held by people who haven't ever read the Bible which contains within it a more exigent and brutal self-criticism than almost any other large collection of texts I'm aware of.  As has been pointed out, every sin of the ancient Hebrews which we know about, we know due to their telling on themselves, in many cases presenting the claims of divine approval and the rejection of those claims.  The questioner mentioning the exclusions against the other as a means of maintaining a distinct identity is the heart of the Trump campaign, the most exigent opponents of which include even some conservative churches.

The thing that I found the most striking in it was when he said,

But I am like you, I am a conundrum of contradictions and what I wanted to argue is that the Bible says that God's struggles with these realities in God's own life that we are in the image of that God.  Does that make sense?

Which presented me with a way of thinking about God which I'd never had before.  God as a person who struggles with these issues in God's own life.  A God who contains what we experience as contradictions and uncertainties and that God cares about those.   And that our own struggles are a real part of being made in the image of that God.  To answer his question, yes, that does FINALLY make sense.  That God is one I can really love, or, more honestly, that understanding of God is open to my heart and more immediate than the Great and Powerful Oz in the sky.  I think I can finally get that picture of God touching Adam on the famous ceiling at the Vatican.  Like the people who wrote the Bible, it was one of my folks who painted that.

I haven't transcribed it but at one point Brueggemann points out to the necessity of and the enormous opportunity that having so many different, often clashing ideas about God in the Bible, how even given the necessity of those views of God clashing makes that God superior to other, narrower, statements about divinity.  I agree with that, too.

Reading The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann - A proposal for a Fall Project

A wintry season:  such is [Karl] Rahner's metaphor for the situation of faith in the modern world.  Keeping his eye on middle-class, educated European persons who are trying to live a Christian life,  he sees that this is a world that no longer easily communicates the faith.  First off, a person can no longer be a Christian out of social convention or inherited customs.  To be a Christian now requires a personal decision, the kind of decision that brings about a change of heart and sustains long-term commitment.  Not cultural Christianity but a diaspora church, scattered among unbelievers and believers of various stripes, becomes the setting for this free act of faith.  Furthermore , when a person does come to engage belief in a personal way, society makes this difficult to do.  For modern society is marked not only by atheism and agnosticism but also by positivism, which restricts what we can know to data accessible from the natural sciences;  secularism, which gets on with the business at hand, impatient of ultimate questions, with a wealth of humanistic values that allow a life of ethical integrity without faith;  and religious pluralism, which demonstrates that there is more than one path to holy and ethical living.  All of these call into question the very validity of Christian belief.  

Elizabeth A. Johnson:  Quest For The Living God

A few years back in response to my disgust over what I was reading about the then just opened Museum of the Bible I proposed instead of paying the rather substantial entry fee to look at what, if I recall correctly, included some rather dubiously authentic as well as looted artifacts in its collection, you'd do a lot better by spending a fraction of that to buy a copy of Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense and going through it, reading the texts, looking at the scholarly reference materials and works he suggests (I'm sure his recommendations would be updated, today) and doing his exercises.   I still would recommend that as an excellent alternative to looking at even authentic, even honestly acquired artifacts and antiquities.   There's more than a bit of the "graven images" flavor to going to a "Bible museum, "libary" or theme park.  That project began during Advent and it extended well into the following winter.   I learned a lot from doing those posts and hope other people here did as well.  As an aside, during it I typed out the entire text and copied and pasted the texts that Brueggeman gave citations for which I have gone back to and read.   Typing out or copying a text is a good way to study it, just saying. 

Anyway I'm hoping to do a number of posts going through some from all of the chapters of The Prophetic Imagination to encourage the study  and consideration and discussion of that very fine, often very troubling as well as enlightening study by one of the finest of Old Testament scholars.  Having done a post on the introduction to the book, I'll start with Chapter 1

The Alternative Community of Moses

A study of the prophets of Israel must try to take into account both the evidence of the Old Testament and the contemporary situation of the church.  What we understand about the Old Testament must be somehow connected with the realities of the church today.   So I shall begin with a statement of how I see our present situation and the task facing us in ministry.  I will not elaborate but only provide a clue to the perspective from which I am presenting the subject.

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act.  This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life,  both liberal and conservative.  It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time.  That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons.  Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric.

The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition.  Our consumer culture is organized against history.  There is a deprecation of memory and a ridicule of hope,  which means everything must be held in the how, either an urgent now or an eternal now.  Either way, a community rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical hopes is a curiosity and a threat in such a culture.

When we suffer from amnesia every form of serious authority for faith is  in question,and we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice unauthorized ministries.

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.  This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgement that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.  And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid a faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and  Enlightenment. 

It must seem kind of ironic to those of us brought up in a pretty uninformed and superficial notion of the history of Western intellectual life that Brueggemann notes that conservatives in Christianity in 1978 had buried religion under "hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightnement"  but, as I keep pointing out,  theologians and religious scholars of his level are not uninformed and superficial in their understanding.   The very right-wing Christiantiy "fundamentalism"  that is identified with the rejection of science is, itself, a product of "Enlightenment" scientistic culture mistaking itself for what Brueggemann knows is the quite different "full power and authenticity" of the Hebrew-Christian religions.  What he talks about throughout this work will continually come up against the common habits of categorizations of college credentialed  English speakers.   I thought I should point that out first.  In order to understand his book, you have to get past the common received nonsense about such things that comprise the "knowledge" commonly mistaken as such. 

As surprising and, I'm sure some would feel insulting, is the criticism of liberal Christianity as too "chic" to allow itself to "remember" or, I'd say, to really believe. That Brueggemann links the two in terms of the ubiquitous acculturation into what he called in The Bible Makes Sense "The Modern Industrial-Scientific Model" of reality which is the golden calf of most affluent and aspiring to be affluent Christians* is spot on.   And Brueggemann points out then and now that it is also the reason that the Israeli prophets rose up and spoke their poetic verse in protest against that vision of life.   For me, Brueggemann's analysis of that kind of thing is one of the most important I've ever come across in my lifetime.   He often points out, in Biblical order in Genesis,  Joseph's management of Pharaoh's horded food, using it to reduce the People to slavery - but I'd argue it has a prelude in the Tower of Babel if not the conflict between Able the herdsman and Cain the sower of crops. 

As he has pointed out, the hinge on which everything in the Bible, Old and New Testaments moves is the Law of Moses coming out of the Exodus stories.  His alternative, his most radical of all political ecnomics is an alternative to Pharaoh's centralized, hierarchical system of life and reality in one which strives to guarantee economic and social equality and NOT DISTRIBUTION but sharing of the common wealth.   I say "not distribution" because if there is a distribution, there is a distributor, there is one who decides to do that and with that will come, inevitably, a decision of who is deserving of receiving that distribution and who isn't, who is "worthy" and who is "unworthy".  And not only of material goods but of what we live by other than bread, alone.  I think that is as true in that widest sense among liberals, even those who believe themselves to be "levelers" as those who don't follow that form of radicalism.

Two days ago a member of my family told me that his dentist had given him a discount on the two crowns he had had to have replaced, he was only charging him $1800 instead of $2400 for the job.  We had a discussion of how in America** 

having good teeth is a luxury item, even in places where they fluoridate the water.  Which led to me pointing out how that very day I'd seen on a liberal website a picture put up mocking Trump supporters as missing teeth and wearing overalls.  As I have been typing out this post that and similar memories of reading and hearing talk about "trailer trash" and the like on "liberal blogs" on those that consider themselves as leftist comes to mind.  I haven't gotten far into that in terms of this self-study course in Brueggemann's book but I expect it's something I'll think about and revisit. 

I am proposing this as a sort of self-teaching course though unlike The Bible Makes Sense,  The Prophetic Imagination isn't set up to be one.  Brueggemann notes that one of the most significant features of the Israeli Prophets is that they were "uncredentialed" he often these days notes what they have in common with the singer-songwriters of protest songs today who seldom have credentials to do what they do.  I'm not surprised that the late too little remembered Harry Chapin comes to mind right now, another undeveloped association.  I think we are all going to be a lot more on our own from now on in learning and acting.  No better time to start that than on August 1.  

 * And Jews and casual non-believers, professed believers in the monotheistic religions and others and outright and hostile atheist-scientistic-conceited atheists with some pretense to intellectual status,  that is the real faith that has hegemony over the world and world culture today.   

Brueggemann's Incredible Insight Into LGBT Equality

I have been gorging on what Walter Brueggemann has said for the past week and find that he not only had come to many of the same conclusions about things that I had, much, much earlier, he has gone a lot farther than I had.  I got there through political thinking, he got there through rigorous and serious consideration of the Bible.

One of the things I'm always getting is the demand of how I can take Christianity seriously when I also am an LGBT equality absolutist.   In this interview with Julie A. Wortman, he shows that fourteen years ago he had a more fully developed concept of the issue than I had at the time. Considering that Walter Brueggemann is a white, straight man, his developed, nuanced appreciation for what that equality means and his lack of unrealistic romanticism about that is rather stunning.


Julie Wortman: Do you think lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) folks are sinners?

Walter Brueggemann: Yes, like we all are. So I think that our sexual interpersonal relationships are enormously hazardous and they are the place where we work out our fears and our anxieties and we do that in many exploitative ways. So I don’t think that gays and lesbians and so on are exempt from the kind of temptations that all of us live with.

Julie Wortman: Is their struggle for full inclusion in the life of the church a justice struggle?

Walter Brueggemann: Yes. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that the arc of history is bent toward justice. And the parallel statement that I want to make is that the arc of the Gospel is bent toward inclusiveness. And I think that’s a kind of elemental conviction through which I then read the text. I suspect a lot of people who share this approach simply sort out the parts of the text that are in the service of inclusion and kind of put aside the parts of the text that move in the other direction.

Julie Wortman: And what do you do with those other parts?

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think you have to take them seriously. I think that it is clear that much or all of the Bible is time-bound and much of the Bible is filtered through a rather heavy-duty patriarchal ideology. What all of us have to try to do is to sort out what in that has an evangelical future and what in that really is organized against the Gospel. For me, the conviction from Martin Luther that you have to make a distinction between the Gospel and the Bible is a terribly important one. Of course, what Luther meant by the Gospel is whatever Luther meant. And that’s what we all do, so there’s a highly subjective dimension to that. But it’s very scary now in the church that the Gospel is equated with the Bible, so you get a kind of a biblicism that is not noticeably informed by the Gospel. And that means that the relationship between the Bible and the Gospel is always going to be contested and I suppose that’s what all our churches are doing – they’re contesting.

Julie Wortman: You’ve done a lot of work on the Hebrew prophets. What do you think we can learn from the prophets about justice in this particular issue of lgbt people and their quest for justice?

Walter Brueggemann: As you know the prophets are largely focused on economic questions, but I suppose that the way I would transpose that is to say that the prophets are concerned with the way in which the powerful take advantage of the vulnerable. When you transpose that into these questions, then obviously gays and lesbians are the vulnerable and the very loud heterosexual community is as exploitative as any of the people that the prophets critiqued. Plus, on sexuality questions you have this tremendous claim of virtue and morality on the heterosexual side, which of course makes heterosexual ideology much more heavy-handed.

I have never, in the period of reading peoples' declarations on such issues online or before, come across such a fully developed appreciation for the meaning of LGBT equality, its promise and its problems, in such realistic terms.

I think that our sexual interpersonal relationships are enormously hazardous and they are the place where we work out our fears and our anxieties and we do that in many exploitative ways. So I don’t think that gays and lesbians and so on are exempt from the kind of temptations that all of us live with.

That passage alone, Breuggemann's equalization of gay and straight people as sinners whose sexual activities are equally fraught with the possibility of the corruption into inequality and exploitation, doing harm and worse, makes him more credible than most of the theoreticians and sex columnists I'm aware of.   It is a radical realism which refuses to ignore that sex is fraught with dangers when it isn't kept in check by the full application of love and a commitment to the well being of both of those involved.   That is only going to happen in a majority of instances when sex is within a committed, faithful relationship, marriage being the mere legal expression of that in contractual terms.

The alternative to that, the promotion of adultery - even that entered into by agreement - and all of the carny of free and kinky sex promoted by the champions of "freedom" turns out to have similar consequences in abuse and destruction of people.  Whenever I've pointed out such things as that the most prevalent expressions of hatred of gay men is found in gay porn, that the model of promiscuous abandon practiced in gay oases such as New York City and San Francisco and in local anonymous sex venues across the country was a proven way of death,  the reaction - especially from straight "leftists" has been uniformly hostile.

I long ago concluded that the pathological emphasis put on following rigid sexual rules by the "Christian" establishment was a means of deflecting attention from the radical economic questions and demand for equality which are found in far more verses of the Bible than those dealing with men having sex with men and the such.  It was in the economic interest, the power of the establishments, political and religious, to keep peoples' minds off of the demands throughout the Bible for economic justice and equality, nothing served that purpose better than promoting an obsession with sex - the allure of thinking about sex is another of the perils associated with it.  The legal treatment of such things was certainly not in line with what Jesus did when he had someone accused of sexual misconduct brought to him.   It's entirely more in line with pagan "honor" customs than anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus.  And I think it serves that purpose today.

 I have only just begun to consider that the ends of the rigid sexual moralists and the libertines comes out in about the same place, inequality, exploitation, injustice, prescriptive sex roles as dominator and dominated, etc.   Whatever could be said about that, they come out the same place.  "Sex positive" "feminism" is remarkable for reinforcing exactly the things which the reviled second-wave feminism struggled against, the same thing can be said of the promotion of promiscuity among gay men.

On The Necessity Of Being Socially Unacceptable, Uncomfortable And Icky

HAVING GONE OVER the transcriptions I made of Walter Brueggemann's lecture "Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality" I mentioned the other day, almost every sentence in it could generate an entire post about some aspect of current politics and current life.  I'm going to give into that temptation to go back over some of it.

Day 7 of my previous posts contained this passage which I'll comment on inside of the text:

The force of Torah aims to resist autonomy wherein one imagines unfettered freedom without responsibility.  Freedom to seize what belongs to another because of more power or freedom to exploit the vulnerable neighbor.

In abbreviated form,  this lays out in total what is wrong with the ersatz virtues of liberal democracy, especially as those in my generation, educated far more in movie theaters and by TV entertainment than the university, learned things.  The theme of most of the movies I've ever seen imagine their male leading characters as autonomous, standing outside of or against a community or tradition, insistent on having their own way, pursuing their own unfettered freedom without responsibility to much of anyone except, perhaps, a few people who they have some interest in, as even the minimal limits of the production code gave way to the heady libertarianism of the 1950s, 60s and onward, even the cinematically presented consequences of even the most depraved of those movie heroes, the gangsters, were made to not impinge on them, they gave us Trumpian figures as heroes and we wonder why so many entertainment addled Americans still fall for him even now.  

In many cases, the hero was presented as standing against some obvious wrong of the greater society but what may have been presented as a bold, brave, sexy, manly stand against some moral wrong didn't require that societal wrong as a plot outline, as in the answer to what are you rebelling against, "what'd'ya got?"  And when writers, directors and producers found out that nothing more than the emotional outline of that plot worked, it worked for gangsters and outlaws just as much as it worked for Atticus Finch.  A related outline of boldness, autonomy, etc. worked for the most degenerate of figures of the establishment worked perfectly for Donald Trump in Celebrity Apprentice.   Apparently it even managed to sell the fat, short-fingered degenerate as a sex symbol on TV in his fat, phony haired, orange tinged obvious phony.   The thing he rode into the presidency.

The extent to which this is true of what the "news division" presents as Christianity, the TV hallelujah peddlers, billionaire-millionaire astro-turf "traditional Catholics" are no less a product of Hollywood-TV style entertainment production values than Trump is, than the Republican-fascist biggest mouths like Gaetz and Green, Cruz or Hawley or the particularly odious form of Republican-fascist politician who got their start in hate-talk radio and TV. Suckers for the phony history of the Revolutionary period or "the way-est" or "the South".  All of that started in what generally college-credentialed TV and radio and movie bosses and script scribblers figured would turn them the greatest profits and enhance their wealth.  

And the American People, no less trained in their thinking by TV and the movies than my generation of Boomers were, are largely suckers for it, especially when it was sold in the language of secular civic virtue, "bold," "independent " "liberty," "freedom," and, yes, "rights." The Easy-Rider style of counter-culture was just the same with long hair.  The use by Trumpian and related American fascists in 2020 of the same language as the "counter-culture" of the 1960s should lead at least some people to wonder if those basic concepts removed from the kind of moral responsibility Brueggemann is talking about might not be problematic. The language of liberal-democracy in the mouths of CPAC fascism, the miscalculation of George Soros who was one of Viktor Orban's early supporters, all of that is evidence that there are foundational and fatal problems with liberal democracy.  

Of course, while there was the media-presented "counter-culture" of secular indulgence, there was a real counter-culture which tended to be religious which was, in many cases, genuinely counter-cultural in the way that Brueggemann points out that Jeremiah was.  I often think of Jeremiah and Bob Dylan at the same time, after reading Brueggemann.  Or The Staple Singers.

In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction.

That is true IF and only if the liberal arts start out with that orientation and that intention.  Under secularism, with its inevitable rejection of the language of the actual truth of that kind of morality, its reality, its consequential truth when made consequential in actions, under the sciency amorality of secularism, that itself is not only rejected but made to feel uncomfortable and socially unacceptable and icky.

The main stream of imaginative literature since the so-called "enlightenment" has been in the diminution of the validity and reality and consequential nature of the morality of the Torah.  Not a little of the commentary on Scripture has the same flavor if not intention as the secular culture of the "enlightenment" and the ideological depravities that flow from it, including those which grew up upon finding the 18th century enlightenment was not an adequate or satisfying framing of life and reality.  

Romanticism, especially as it declined into late 19th and 20th century decadence, wasn't much better. Some really great writing was produced during that entire time but there isn't really much to find that will produce the kinds of results that Brueggemann is talking about in it.  It's more of a distraction to those who find themselves depressed and distraught about the life that is produced by the kinds of "freedom" that has become the reality of most people.  The voyeurism of so much of the legitimately artistic literature of the period is only different in quality and range of imagination and not in kind from Hallmark made for TV movies.  I would propose that the oppressiveness of secularism and its byproducts are even worse than the imagined oppressiveness of 17th century established churches aligned to the political powers and the law, which were seldom any more governed by the kind of things Brueggemann finds in Jeremiah and the Prophetic tradition.  Our science-tech conducted wars are certainly more destructive and far more indiscriminate in who gets killed than the often anti-religiously cited 30-years-war was.  The modern genocides of the scientific regimes kill far more people, whether the most efficient of those genocides as conducted by the Nazis or the non-industrial, free-press driven one in Rwanda.

If you think I'm calling for any part of our history to be reproduced as our future, you are entirely wrong.  It is stunning how our free-press, entertainment glutted minds can't imagine more than the most inaccurate and base either-this-or-that alternatives.  I can't imagine what that better future will be with any great detail but I know if you try to reproduce the past you will a. fail because the past cannot be reproduced now, time doesn't work like that, b. likely reproduce some of the worst aspects of the past (look at the racist 1776 romantic bull shit of the Trumpians if you want a good example of where that would lead us), c. you will only turn that into the kinds of oppressive ideologies that the Jewish prophetic tradition is full to the top with warnings against.

I do know that with the power of human numbers, human technology, the pollution of the planet and atmosphere, nuclear and other powers, if we don't drastically turn around the world in the direction that Jeremiah and Brueggemann points to - which is not about any humanly made past epoch -  there will very likely not be a future, barring some more dramatic divine intervention of a kind which enlightenment ideology and social strictures forbid polite people from expecting and which the Republican-fascist use of The Book of Revelation most certainly is not anything like.

The triad of fidelity excuses the seduction of the reasoning of autonomy, it fends off the counter temptation of absolutism.

Autonomy, "every man thinks for himself," as opposed to the "counter temptation" of absolutism, no one thinks for themselves but are given what they are to think.  

The cheap limits of cinematic and dramatic and, ironically, "enlightenment" imagination doesn't allow for the imagination of other alternatives to those "opposites."  It is amazing, when you think of it, how many false dichotomies are the only habit of thought permitted or achieved in the modern world.

It refuses absolutism through the ongoing disputatious practice of interpretation. So that the old Torah cannot just be read.  

This reminds me of the advice of the atheist-materialist who didn't think like one, Richard Lewontin, to the conventional hero of popular atheist-materialism, Carl Sagan that if he wanted to hear lively disputation about the nature of the universe he should leave the elite university he taught science at and to to an Orthodox study hall in Brooklyn.  

And there can be no recourse to the original intention or what we call originalism, which is to misconstrue the tradition.

I believe that what Brueggeman means by "the old Torah cannot just be read" is that it has to be made real in the real lives of real People who live in history and the history of now can never be a mere reproduction of what was in even the period of the Prophets.  It will always be as new as good jazz is always new and never a reproduction of the past.  But you can go through the motions through habit and the results won't be good.  Creation, time, goes from the past to the future through the present.  That is the reason for it. Deny that as we might, it is how time which we all live in works. The prophetic tradition accounts for that.

Because it is the great work of the university to nurture competent hermeneutists who refuse the easy relativism of popular culture and who refuse the temptation to absolutism whether of God or sect or country. The tradition requires interpretive agility that knows that the memory is the beginning point but never the conclusion. The tradition is always being reformulated in radical contemporaneity with deep rootage that is not deleted by interpretation.

This passage is, of course, tied to the friction between the would be "originalists" the "fundamentalists" of religion but, especially useful to us right now, the Constitutional fundamentalists of the Supreme Court,  and those who by "interpretation" delete the moral center or meaning of Scripture, most certainly by the discrediting-debunking of the historical-critical methods that have gotten us a bit in the way of loosening some of the priestly purity codes in sexual behavior and gender roles but which, in the process, have diminished so much of what is true and of vital importance in every area of moral urgency in the material and mental well-being of the least among us and the vulnerable.  

I am very tempted to go into that and might this week if I have the time in terms of what it gave and what the results, good and catastrophic,  were for gay men, something I know and have witnessed first-hand as a gay man in the time I've lived.  Believe me, I've got some experience in the reformulations of radical contemporaneity and deep rootage in tradition, between the heady language of and life of libertarian freedom, the reaction of traditional LGBTQ hatred as "Christianity" and discrimination, the practice of unfettered freedom and the radical consequences of ignoring the most basic of moral considerations for the well-being of others in the context of sexual freedom on that basis.  Much of it personal experience, even more in intimate observation of the lives and consequences for other gay men and LGBTQ people. I have a feeling the experience was like a long, slow, rabbinical disputation, lived out over years, while looking backwards.  I think I'll give into temptation to talk about that later this week.  Though this piece from years back did some of it.

"This is a deliberate program of inadequate productivity that leaves everybody unsatisfied and eventually ruthless."

Instead of just letting that lecture I posted yesterday go eventually under the top page of my blog, as happens, I'm going to go over some of the points Walter Brueggemann made in it.  

The idea I find most stunning in the lecture is his contrast between the prophetic writings of the Hebrew scriptures and the official, temple institution which is just an arm of what Brueggemann calls the contemporary "national security state" under Solomon.  He explicitly related that ancient imperial-intellectual complex to our own, contemporary one.  If you haven't listened to it, the place he does that most plainly is when he mentions Dick Cheney, who was the de facto head of the Bush II regime at the time the talk was given in 2007.  It comes early in the talk.   I will say that it is the most convincing analysis of both the scriptures describing the Solomonic security state and the prophetic reaction to it, including the variance of that with what Brueggemann notes was the original social safety net, especially in the book of Deuteronomy which I know of.  It makes me think I should rethink converting to the United Church of Christ, except I think it's probably better to have an Irish Catholic who is being influenced by such protestant thinking than to have just another protestant.

I will be taking some time with this, which will involve a lot of transcription but, for now, I'll consider what he pointed out about the rules of two those parts of our imperial religion which have the most influence, today, business and sports.  After talking about how both his own son and a football coach point out that even if you do what you're supposed to do, meeting or exceeding the stated goals of those jobs, you are expected to exceed even more or you are a failure.  The ethic of competition, what is presented by the media, by business, the turning of winning over others into one of the major ethical holdings of American society is guaranteed to lead to evil.  Here is what he said.

You're never good enough [under the rules of capitalism or sports].  This is not an accident in our society.  This is a deliberate program of inadequate productivity that leaves everybody unsatisfied and eventually ruthless. 

Brueggemann's linking of that to the ancient and contemporary imperial trinity of might, wealth and wisdom is something I am certain will leave me with a lot to think about, it is certainly relevant to my thinking about politics and why the left has failed.  I am sure some of the fashionable folks who might read this will scoff at the inclusion of "wisdom" which is certainly an idol on the nominal left, with a position far greater than any real and serious pursuit of effective equality and real social leveling.   The academics who have had such an influence, much of it obviously unwise and counterproductive, so often have an attitude of managing the great unwashed masses instead of real equality.  They and so many of those who they have allegedly educated might love the idea of equality but not at a cost to their own status and asserted superiority.  Their ruthlessness in protecting that status isn't far from that of the football coach whose income and influence they might very well resent - as do I for different reasons - and the vulgarity of the businessmen who they may also disdain as they silently envy.  If that were not the case then the use to which they have allowed themselves to be made by the professional liars in the media would have been far less successful.  Even uneducated people know when people are looking down on them, it's not as if the real feelings of the alleged intelligentsia aren't casually expressed by so many of them.  Especially the students of those wise men who work in the media.  The entire careers of some of them are one big inside joke about how stupid the masses of humanity are as compared to themselves.

Though I am certain that there are many who work in academia and elsewhere who will know what I'm talking about.  You're less likely to hear them in the media than you will at synods and from pulpits.  What Brueggemann said about Abiathar, the priest exiled to the back woods by Solomon, is also important.  There have always been those who saw behind the false front that is put up to cover the corrupt imperial state, even that which is erected by its PR operation, its wisdom establishment.  But a priesthood that is in cahoots with the imperial system and, in leftist terms, academics who lobby for that imperial establishment or another one will just continue the same thing.  The way out of the wilderness for the left is not through supporting an alternative holder of the imperial throne, it's through something entirely different.  The secular-atheist left is not that alternative, it is, if anything, a force for continuing the spiral of the past half-century after the murder of The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

Hate Mail - You've Led Me To Decide That February Will Concentrate On This Topic

Show me anything from any atheist organization like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, even those allegedly of the left, as that fraud started out claiming to be, that matches just this passage from Walter Brueggemann, based completely and forcefully on both the First and Second Testament of the Bible you mock.

And we have to recognize that the totalism in which we live is a system of incredible militarization, so that on the one hand what we are seeing is the militarization of the police, and on the other hand we are seeing the militarization of sports.

It turns out that the NFL is really the great military liturgy. And now at NFL football games, the announcer says, “Please stand, and place your hand on your heart.” It's kind of coerced patriotism. And we are able to see, if you just look at anything on television, that the totalism is committed to consumerism. It believes that more stuff will somehow make us safe, and will somehow make us happy. So, this combination of acquisitiveness, militarization, and consumerism adds up to a doctrine of exceptionalism, which then gets translated into "Make America Great Again." And it is all blessed by an anemic God who has no function except to bless white nationalism.

If you just take the case of Colin Kaepernick, you can see that this system is ready to ruthlessly silence anyone who speaks or acts to the contrary. So what prophetic judgment amounts to is making the case that acquisitiveness leads to violence, that militarization leads to bankruptcy, that consumerism leads to the evaporation of citizenship, that ecological exploitation leads to chaotic weather, that silencing leads to brutality, and that exceptionalism leads to white tribalism. It is a package that needs to be exposed at the teaching level of the religious community.

So the first task is to identify the totalism. The second task is to identify the contradictions that put us on the route to death, because one can see that we now live in a society that is engaged in its self-destruction.

Organized atheism is no alternative to that totalism, it shares in the exact same foundation in materialist scientistic worship of technology and the cargo-cult of ever multiplying products to make at an enormous environmental cost and cost in slave labor, to sell, to use briefly (using environmentally damaging energy production), then to send to the landfill or to be broken up for the poisonous components of it in third-world hell holes, some of those in the Marxist paradises such as China.   All of which is based on the profit-making and wealth concentrating system of slave labor and wage slavery.   In all too many instances "work" is slavery with a pittance being paid to those kept in bare subsistence if that. 

Nothing in organized atheism, not even the remnants of the Marxist atheists, is as radical as what Brueggemann lays out in that article, some of what he said in the talk I posted yesterday strikes me as being even more radical.  If the ecnonomic laws of Deuteronomy were the law of the land, billionaires would disappear, destitution would disappear, the leveling effect would be profound, debt slavery would end.  Debt slavery is, as Brueggemann has pointed out, one of the issues that is constantly addressed in The Bible from Exodus to the last mention of it in the epistles.  His argument about how the story of Joseph and Pharaoh's dreams about famine and the system that was set up to turn The People into slaves and how the central narrative of the Bible, the Exodus story is not only a complaint about that but a practical means of ending and avoiding such things should be at the center of a real egalitarian democratic left.   Not some lame-asssed Ronald Reagan jr. fame fucking promotion of the scientistic materialism that is one of the central pillars of the totalism that oppresses us and which any real left has to fight.   Atheism is inherently totalistic, its central ideology, materialism is a totalistic ideological holding. It will always end up oppressing people.

The Superbowl is the central religious holiday of the American Mammonist part of that totalism.  It is the most anti-Christian day of the year.  As Brueggemann has pointed out, the football industry has claimed "We own Sunday" a day which used to be devoted, at least in theory, to God.  The extent to which any christian institution or sect or denomination tolerates that is the extent to which it has joined the totalism.  As can be seen in much of Brueggemann's work, religion is self critical, atheism never is as the Mammonism that it is a part of never is, either.

the difficulty is that all of us, liberals and conservatives, are basically contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism

I don't know if it's that summer has finally come and it's hot as hell - I don't do well once it gets over 75F and it's way over that right now - or if it's anxiety over the election, or the Covid pandemic or that my own financial situation is looking ever grimmer as I really get old or what but I am feeling stuck in writing.  That's not something that has happened to me much, knowing I'm not a writer I haven't had much in the way of anxiety to lead to writers' cramp.  Having low expectations for oneself can be very liberating.  

It's definitely not that there isn't a lot to write about, there's too much.   To deal with that I'm going to give Hans Kung a break after concentrating on him so much for the past several months and I'm going to go back to Walter Brueggemann, specifically his most famous book,  The Prophetic Imagination.   The Jewish Prophets are the most impressive grouping of human beings composing texts on the most serious topics who I'm aware of.  I found the Buddhists and some of the other Asian traditions also very impressive and very useful - I'm not convinced that they were not writing about the human encounter, witness and understanding of the same God, even the Taoists whose writings I had occasion to look over again.   I think that they were writing about the same God but with radically different, though overlapping, human understandings of God.  

To get ready for that I think the discussion that Krista Tippet had with Brueggemann about the prophetic imagination is a good introduction to his scholarship and thinking.   And I think it's time for me to re-read it more deeply than I did and there's nothing like having to type out passages and comment on them for that.  This has become one of my favorite ways to study something, I wish I'd done it when I was a kid.

One of the things I like about Brueggemann is that though we definitely share the same stream of ideological orientation, he is one of the best internal critics of Christian political liberalism - and theological liberalism who I've encountered.  He knows how dangerous it is to get smugly complacent in a belief in your own moral superiority, or, rather, for me to.  

Ms. Tippett: You’re naming something when you call the prophets poets. You’re naming qualities of this text, this Bible that people think they know so well, but in fact and partly because of the way these things were translated and transmitted, I don’t think I grew up realizing how much of the Bible is poetry. The reason that also matters — and that’s true of the Hebrew Bible in particular — and also this realization, which is very simple but not brought home very often, is that this was the text of Jesus. This was his scripture.

Mr. Brueggemann:  That’s right. He obviously knew it so well. But even in the more liberal theological tradition that I was raised, we only talked about the prophets as moral teachers, and there was no attention to the artistic, aesthetic quality of how they did that. But it is the only way in which you can think outside of the box. Otherwise, even liberal passion for justice just becomes another ideology, and it does not have transformative power. That’s what’s extraordinary about the poetry, that it’s so elusive that it refuses to be reduced to a formula. I think that’s a great temptation among liberals who care about justice — is to reduce it to a formula.

I'm reminded of how in some of the latter passages of Hans Kung I posted he said, 

These last examples especially show ore clearly that even that Jesus' requirements must not be understood as laws.  

We are so insecure, certainly in the liklihood that other people are going to do wrong - really, to hurt us and those we love or care about - that we try to make everything legalisms, laws, absolute requirements instead of relying on the power of love to make people want to do unto others as they would want done unto them.  Probably a lot of that skepticism is well founded in our experience of each other and of ourselves - who are we in a better position to know the true motives behind righteous self-interest than ourselves?   And the seductions of the system against which the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition either stands or it sags into compliance with it is as binding on "liberals" as it is those who liberals are convinced have been led into temptation even as they love to believe we have been delivered from evil. 

Mr. Brueggemann:  It’s very difficult, and I think the difficulty is that all of us, liberals and conservatives, are basically contained in the ideology of consumer capitalism. We want that to be our universe of meaning. And when you get a poetic articulation that moves outside of that, it’s just too anxiety-producing for most of us, so we try to stop that kind of talk. In a local church, obviously, people have a lot of leverage for being able to stop that kind of talk.

When I first read Isaiah and read his condemnation of the central authority of the religio-political establishment at the Temple which we are supposed to believe was established on divine authority, I was rather stunned at how radically impious it was to that priestly religion.  I think all of us could do with that right now.  

Now, I've got to find out where I put my copy of it.  

Speaking Up As A Commandment And As A Necessity In Many Other Ways

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found, outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

Thorstein Veblen 

I have only read as much of Interrupting Silence: God's Command to Speak Out, Walter Brueggemann's latest (*) book as can be read free online, I'm considering doing something I seldom do, buy the book new at full price so I can read it now.  From what I can see it is Brueggemann's prophetic attempt to rattle awake the kind of Christians who have fallen into a sort of middle-class comfortable quietism so as not to make anyone feel uncomfortable with what they are supposed to take as the truth.  That truth being the basis of American liberalism, the polite quiescence of such as should be liberal activists is a social and economic and political catastrophe, a vacuum which fascism has eagerly occupied.  Quiescence inescapably leads to acquiescence.  That's certainly the substance of much of Brueggemann's series of prophetic lectures as can be heard for free on Youtubes and other places, if I posted one a day it would take months to exhaust them.  

In other works Brueggemann has pointed out that the entire Bible revolves around the Exodus narrative, in which the Pharaoh's enslaving economy of extraction grows to the point where the Children of Israel, enslaved and oppressed ever more severely, cry out against their oppression.  He points out that that crying out is the actual initiation of the story, that God comes into the story in Exodus several pages into it when God hears the cries of the slaves and - using the agency of Moses - God frees them from their slavery.  As I pointed out over a course of months a year ago, in his early book The Bible Makes Sense, Brueggemann makes a very good case that literally everything in the Bible revolves around and refers to and comments on that narrative of slaves crying out and become free in speaking out against and struggling against slavery.   

A large part of the Bible, such as the tales of the kings and kingdoms that the Mosaic alternative decayed into, is a story of what happens when people forget that they too were slaves in Egypt and in the Prophetic books, the cry of the slaves who started it all, is taken up in protest to the now domestic Pharoah style oppression of the Kings of Israel and Judah.   In many of his lectures Walter Brueggemann notes how the Prophets were "non-credentialed poets who have no pedigree", some of them country bumpkins, hillbillies.  He notes that they open up space in the imagination so that people, entrenched in a well-established habit of life, as part of a well-established social order, so that they can imagine that life might be better than that, that life can be just, that it can be based in neighborliness and generosity instead of commercial transaction.  That is something which you're still far more likley to get from non-credentialed poets, hillbillies, bumpkins, than you're going to get from the college-credentialed, those who have been either staff or feature writers, the kind of writers and scribblers who seem to spend most of their time on talk-shows and giving awards to each other.   I think a lot of, especially the First Testament, can be read as a juxtaposition of the official, approved, credentialed, educated classes of people and the unofficial, unapproved, non-credentialed, un-educated classes of people.  I will note that when the First Testament is most useful to the enemies of God and morality, it's generally the credentialed, educated writings that are useful to them, not the country-bumpkin and déclassé poet-Prophets. 

-------------------------

You might wonder why I started this with that quote by Thorstein Veblen, one of my favorite quotes from him.  I suppose it's a self-indulgence but I wondered how many times various people have complained that I'm not a writer yet I still persist in writing.  As if the written form of the language, by right, was the property of some kind of self-defined guild of writers, those who have some kind of proprietary right to write words, or type words, as is the case.   

My usual response is that I've never claimed to be "a writer" that is someone who tries to produce piss elegant phrases and clauses and sentences and paragraphs and compositions in official proper style so as to be printed (for so many cents a word) and that might be read through and forgotten by the ever diminishing number of people who read in the electronics polluted world to be talked about by them and have no impact on the wider world.  Or that would risk writing the kind of thing that would upset things and risk having an impact on the wider world.  

That first one was never my purpose in writing the pieces I post online or in any other part of life, I don't want the respect of people who would be impressed with those kinds of impotent repetitions of the common received POV so as to claim team-fandom (right-left, conservative-lefty, etc.) and find a tiny little but comfortable niche, in reality probably no bigger than their imagination.  

Thinking about that last night, I decided I've been giving the wrong answer.  A writer is anyone who writes something.  Someone who speaks a language has as much right to write it as to say it.   So I'm owning up to it, I'm a writer and am proclaiming the right of any other speaker of English to the right of being an English writer if they choose to write something.   I mean, they've got as much of a right to do that to their abilities as some bull-shit pop guitar-strummer and intoner has to be a musician. 

One of the things I wrote a long time ago, which pissed off a lot of the kinds of nice people who read the blog where I posted it, used Veblen's quote to answer someone who complained that I used a variant spelling for a word, I don't remember which one it was, but which I was able to point out is given in Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.   It was a slightly less 1st grade level brawl than the one I instigated when I used the spelling "cooky" here a few months back.   I noted that some of the best writers in the English language never much had any use for standardized spelling, some such as Jefferson disdained the novel introduction of standardized spelling, others, like Emily Dickinson, didn't much publish but seem to be either unaware of it or unconcerned in what they did write.   I didn't know that ol' Em was one of us till I read some idiot English prof who criticized her spelling in a paper which I wouldn't be surprised if I was one of tens who read it indifferently as opposed to the millions who read and love Dickinson's poetry and letters. 

What is the motive of the tireless little meter-maids of the kind who police other peoples' writing?  Those who set themselves up as judges of writing and who are always giving out their unasked for and non-authoritative judgments on it?  

Is it a demand of silence?  Of course it is.  It is a demand that people not credentialed (by, them, or someone they choose to acknowledge has that power) not speak, not present their ideas, not express them.   To which anyone has a perfect right to ask, who died and made them God?  

One of the huge problems with Americans, probably with way too many people in the English speaking people and, no doubt, others, is that they are inhibited from writing their own language by such tin-pot, bullshitting speech police.   

I am in favor of people writing every day, for themselves or for posting or publication because writing is such a useful way of taking a good hard look at your own thinking.   

One of the best things that could be done with the superfluity of computers that are in the hands of American students would be to set aside twenty minutes or so, every school day to require them to type whatever they thought on whatever topic with whatever spelling and punctuation and requiring them to read it, to themselves or have the teacher read it (maybe they could read one of them a day at random to make sure the brats were doing it).   If students did that every day for 180 days a year, I think most of them would come out of the experience more articulate, more critical of their own thinking, more open to changing their thinking, than they'll ever get from writing the kind of dreary compositions in approved form, with approved sentence structure and approved spelling.   The written form of language is too important for too many things, learning how to think, inspiring conscience, on whether or not you're being an asshole to let the assholes who want to stop that have their way.   

One of the greatest lessons I've found from making my writing public is to find that other people have other lives and even things that I care deeply about, they might not.  The world isn't necessarily holding their breath waiting for what opinion I hold.   That's clearly something the writing police have yet to learn.  Maybe they should write more and read in their own words what assholes they're being.   There's the world of difference between speaking up against injustice and just being an asshole.  The American left, especially those with college-credentials, has too many of the latter. 

*  I wouldn't be surprised if Brueggemann, who writes as much as he writes with excellence and, most importantly, relevance , has another one about to come out. 

The Profitable Practice Of Shifting The Blame For Environmental Destruction Is Widely Practiced

Like much of North America and some other places, my area of New England is in what could become a catastrophic drought, it has had a major impact on agriculture here, I've lost a couple of my most important crops.  Bela Bartok once said he was puzzled over an old Hungarian peasant curse, "May you buy your bread."  until he realized that a Hungarian peasant who had to buy their bread had had a catastrophic grain crop failure, well, I'm going to be buying beans and with the price of beans these days, it will have a real impact on me.  For some reason the bean beetles have had a very good year, up till the time they wiped out my stressed bean crops.  What is a financial setback for me, in other places must mean starvation, destruction of wildlife, endangered species, etc.

It became fashionable in the early 1970s, with the publication of the article by Lynn White mentioned below, to attribute the massive destruction of nature under the domination of Europeans to Christianity.  I think that to ignore that those involved in the destruction were aided, at every step, by the science and technology that arose in the late 16th and onward, blaming the very religion that is both accused of impeding that, through setting aside the actual historical record in favor of an explicitly anti-Christian mythological presentation as history, and which is presented as being destroyed and superseded by it is absurd.  In our world, since at least the 19th century, the most serious damage to the environment has happened with the participation of scientists, with the use of their technology and, often, with the false assurances of scientists that what will make them, their employees, their universities and their countries money, will have no serious effect worth delaying a product line, a technological innovation, a massive construction project or the deployment of policies and military resources while it is studied more.

Compared to the power of those secular, "Enlightenment" institutions, things such as science, technology, capitalism, modern systems of investment and return.... there are few weaker forces at work in the socieities and the world which is destroying our planet than religion, especially those religions which are the least to blame for it but which it is fashionable to indict in such a dishonest way.

Scholars, even some of them Christians, knew and know there would be no price to be paid and lots to be gained by blaming the activities of scientists, engineers, those who hired them, and a host of others on the authors of the Bible, long dead theologians or even living ones whose refutations would be ignored in the secularized academic and popular cultures.  

Here is the passage in the video I posted yesterday that started me thinking about this.  Note, I don't know and can't find a reference to the author of the book which Walter Brueggemann makes reference to, if anyone can tell me who and what book he's talking about,  I'll be grateful.  The passage begins at about 21:45 on the video.  I think I got it pretty close to what's said in my transcription.

Arni Zacharissen: A lot or a big part of the praise that is directed towards God in the Psalms concerns nature and creation.  And you could tie it back to the counter-world thing the picture of creation presented in the Psalms is very different from the scientific picture that we talk about in, you know, the modern west, you now dead matter and also scarcity. That has all sorts of implications.  Can you maybe talk about the contrast between those two.

Walter Brueggemann:   Well I think there's no doubt that the Bible is articulated in poetic and pre-scientific categories and I don't think we ought to use any of our energy pretending otherwise.  But what that pre-scientific stuff does is remind us that the creation is not simply a technical problem to be solved,  it is a mystery to be honored and that no matter how much scientific control you think we can manage in the end the world does not belong to us and we are not free to do with it what we want to do with it.  So I think that  Biblical faith has a strong ally in responsible science but I think it is also a great caution to Promethean science that thinks we can do anything we want to do.  I think the whole environmental crisis and global warming and all that is a reminder that the world does not belong to us and that there are non-transgressible limits to what we are able to do.  So, there is a good argument going back to Bacon and Descartes, at the beginning of the Enlightenment period that's the kind of destructive science that thought the world was autonomous and I think creation faith will of of its doxologies is a great protest against that kind of autonomy.  

Arni Zacharissen:  Sometimes Christian theology gets blamed for a lot of the problems that we are in, environmental problems would you you know ….

Walter Brueggemann:   Well I think that's right.  I can't think of the  the author who wrote that famous article that blamed everything….

Arni Zacharissen: Lynn White

Walter Brueggemann:  Yeah, that's correct.  I think that's clearly wrong.  There is a book written by a guy named Librow (?) that's not received much attention but he traces out Bacon and Descartes and the shifts that came in the 16th   and 17th  centuries that unleashed this kind of autonomous science and I think Lynn White has it exactly wrong about where the destructive permissions came from.  I think they did not come from the Bible,  Descartes and people like that may have found the Bible useful but that's not where they came from, they came form Enlightenment rationality and I think … I personally think that's beyond argument.

Q  Yeah,  It's the creation isn't….   is clearly not mechanistic when you read the Psalms

Walter Brueggemann:   That's exactly it, that's exactly right.

"The best verse for reading the Book of Jeremiah"

THE REASON I HAD to delay going on with Walter Brueggemann's first lesson on Jeremiah was because I had intended to transcribe a lot of what he said about the section that is often labeled as the "calling" or "commissioning" of Jeremiah as a prophet which states what his assignment was.  Brueggemann names it as the key text to understanding the whole book.   That begins at about 57:40 of the video.  Much as I'd like to put that down in text, I haven't gotten around to it yet.  That is found in Jeremiah 1:4-10, I'll link to the Revised Standard Version because somewhere someone says that is what the group he was giving the lesson to was using and it uses the language he addresses.

He points out that the text gives the prophet four negative things to do and two positive ones.

 9 Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,

“Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.
10  See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”

Brueggemann sets out his intention to deal with the plucking up and tearing down, the destruction and the overthrowing in the next lesson and the building and planting in the third one.   As a preliminary this is the part of the lesson in which he compares what the prophet, Jeremiah said about plucking up and breaking down with the sermon of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright in which he prophetically said "Goddamn America" pointing out that what he said offended a lot of people, it was used politically in a short and, so, distorted clip as seen on cabloid "news" and elsewhere to attack Barack Obama.   He points out that the book that has resided in the Bible, indeed prophesy about the destruction of Jerusalem as a result of the evil and immorality and, I'd argue the far worse amorality of the Jerusalem political-economic-religious establishment, is far more offensive in its own terms than anything Reverend Wright said but which, since he says it about the injustice and so evil of our American establishment, we have no problem being offended by it.

Brueggemann, in this first lecture talks about the psychological consequences of all of this in denial and rejection and anger then - and of course just as we don't like what our prophets have to say and the prophecy of our experience that results from our injustice and evil, the same reaction that those got in Jermiah's day is here now among us.

I will point, again, to what Marilynne Robinson said about the fact that every report of their own culpability in their own misfortune, all of the confessions of injustice and other evil that comes down to us IS THERE BECAUSE IT IS REPORTED IN THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS SCRIPTURE, BY THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY'S JEWS.   

Scholarly books on the Scriptures typically claim objectivity, and may sometimes aspire to it, though their definitions of objectivity inevitably vary with the intentions of their writers. But to assume a posture of seeming objectivity relative to any controverted subject is a very old polemical maneuver. David Hume, in an endnote to his Natural History of Religion (written in 1751 , published in 1779), quotes Chevalier Ramsay, who quotes an imagined Chinese or Indian philosopher’s reaction to Christianity: ‘“The God of the Jews is a most cruel, unjust, partial, and fantastical being … This chosen nation was … the most stupid, ungrateful, rebellious and perfidious of all nations … [God’s son dies to appease his vindictive wrath, but the vast majority of the world are excluded from any benefit. This makes God] … a cruel, vindictive tyrant, an impotent or a wrathful daemon.’” And so on.

Even pious critics seem never to remember that, in the Old Testament, the Jews were talking among themselves, interpreting their own experience to themselves. Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment. Who but the ancient Jews would have thought to blame themselves for, in effect, lying along the invasion route of the Babylonians? They preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory, in ways no other people would have thought of being. This incomparable literature would surely have been lost if they had imagined the use it would be put to, and had written to justify themselves and to defend their descendants in the eyes of the nations rather than to ponder their life in openness toward God. By what standard but their own could Israel have been considered ungrateful or rebellious or corrupt? Granting crimes and errors, which they recorded, and preserved and pondered the records of for centuries, and which were otherwise so historically minor that no one would ever have heard of them — how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries or ours? When Hume wrote, the English gibbets More describes were still as full as ever. The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance is attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardnesss. It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous. To misappropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and “the Jewish God” is vulgar beyond belief. And not at all uncommon, therefore. It is useful to consider how the New Testament would read, if it had gone on to chronicle the crusades and the inquisition.

If there is one thing they knew, it was that actions had consequences, even if those consequences seemed remote and only subtly related to the actions that led to those consequences.

In her discussion of both the distortions and lies that are the bread and butter of popular and academic claims about the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish and Christian religions that come from that tradition and the unparalleled self-criticism that is both the glory of that monotheistic tradition and the raw material of those who attack it, she gives a milder version of what the Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, pointing out that it isn't only in the documents Walter Brueggemann is dealing with here that carries prophetic warnings to those who are identified as chosen from among the nations that that doesn't mean they can get away with injustice, internally or externally.  In discussing the description of the conquest and subduing of the Canaanites as fund in Joshua, she said.

As ancient narrative, and as history, this story of conquest is certainly the least remarkable part of the Bible, and a very modest event as conquests go, the gradual claiming of an enclave in a territory that would be utterly negligible by the lights of real conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar or even Ashurbanipal. The suggestion that God was behind it may make it worse than the campaigns of self-aggrandizement that destroyed many larger and greater cities, though it is not clear to me that it should. A consequence which follows from God’s role in the conquest of Canaan, asserted with terrible emphasis in Leviticus and elsewhere, is that God will deal with the Israelites exactly as he has dealt with the Canaanites, casting them out of the land in their turn if  they cease to deserve it. Abraham is told in a dream that possession of the promised land will be delayed an astonishing four hundred years until, in effect, the Amorites (that is, Canaanites) have lost their right to it. We Anglo-European invaders do not know yet if we will have four hundred years in this land.

Imagine if our founding documents the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence had dared to give that kind of warning to those intent on founding a new nation, a new order for the ages.  Imagine how we would bury that as we did at least as bad and, I'd argue, worse than the Children of Israel did - the form of slavery laid out in The Law of Moses was far, far less horrible than that practiced in the United States PERMITTED TO DO SO BY THE CONSTITUTION.  I would argue that the real, though unofficial slavery under Jim Crow was far worse in reality in many respects, not to mention the genocide against the native population of North and South America and elsewhere.  

I do believe that one of the things that makes these Scriptures of such enduring interest and importance is just this, their unique example of this level of internal criticism, this self-exposure as constantly failing to come up to the level of their own chosen standard of moral and ethical behavior even as they are the ones who warn themselves of the results of that failure.  That is something the United States does to an extent and, perhaps, sometimes, is better for it until the demons of our more typical behavior gain the upper hand as they certainly have done in the period when Republicans, as they have fallen into vulgar and, to a lesser extent ideological materialism, much of that materialism consisting of a debasement of so-called Christianity of the Trumpist white evangelicals and, to some extent, Judaism of the kind exemplified by the Jared Kuschner family and the pimp of Macau, Sheldon Adelson and as allied to the former leader of the state of Israel.

To be continued.