Nothing Is Easy And Simple No Matter How Much We Want It To Be: Long Footnote to This Morning's Post

Just as reading the Congregationalist Marilynne Robinson in the last decade knocked me into a totally different place, in this decade the Congregationalist Walter Brueggemann is in this decade.   For anyone who thinks you can't change when you're officially in your elder years, I'm here to tell you, you can.  And for anyone who thinks that you're bound to get more conservative as you get older, no, that's not a given, either.

This lecture titled, "Imagining Life from God and Back to God," begins with the truth about The Bible that is as unwelcomed by fundamentalists as it is by atheists, that everything said about God in the Bible is filtered through the human imagination - just as every single thing about the physical universe said by every single scientist is - and that it is inevitable that the filter will inform what is said about God by any given person.  His comparison between God as imagined by Moses in his confrontation with Pharaoh and God as imagined in the poetry of the Prophets finds its expression in Hosea, the alternatively tough law giver of  Moses and the God who passionately wants to be for and with us at the same time.   Brueggemann says that we shouldn't bet on our preferred God as being complete and that any human imagination of God can risk becoming an idol if we aren't open to God always being more than we want or can imagine.

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How does this relate to the post this morning?   For a start, none of our candidates are seen by us unrelated to our own preferences and experience.   The disappointment with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (especially by those who began with an inflated, even messianic view of Obama) colors a lot of what people assume about Hillary Clinton.   And a lot of what is said about Bernie Sanders, this time, isn't different from what a lot of the same people were saying about Barack Obama seven years ago.  I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, I began by being a support of John Edwards, based on what he said and his record in office, and look at how reliable that view of things was.

The deification of the cheap, sleazy TV inaction figure, Donald Trump, the "evangelical" support of him and, as an alternative, Ted Cruz and the great hope of the establishment at this point, Marco Rubio all are a product of unconsidered human preferences.   An evangelical filter that could produce enthusiasm for the serial adulterer, Trump or Cruz or Rubio is obviously gone haywired - even a lot of evangelicals are openly troubled by what that means for the word and the movement.   I think a lot of them, as so many in so many other traditions bet their souls on Republican Mammonism and this year shows it is a bet that has lost everything.

And before we, on the left, get too cocky about the supposed implosion of the Republican Party, we'd better wait until we see what happens in November.  They could win it all, that's not outside of the realm of possibility, especially if the Democrats are split by the supporters of one or the other candidate staying home or voting for a third party pipe dream candidate.  Lots of Bernie supporters I've heard are delusional enough to talk about voting Green.  As if 2000 never happened.