"except I think it's true ' - The Issue For Me Is The Reality of Justice And The Need To Make It Real In Reality

Way back, years ago, I mentioned that one of the crucial events that led me back to the Jewish-Christian - Islamic tradition from the agnostic-Buddhism that dominated my thinking for about 20 years was a discussion I had with some far more convinced Buddhists about the issue of justice.  When I use the term "justice" I don't mean what the police do and, perhaps even more so, what happens in prosecutors offices and in courtrooms.  I mean what the Jewish - Christian scriptures mean when they use the word, equality, liberal economic equality, provision for the least among you, fair treatment to the alien living among us, etc.  In the discussion the Buddhists asserted that justice, as I was saying I didn't find much of in the Buddhist scriptures, said that was because justice - like everything else - is an illusion.

I can still recall how it finally clicked with me, I remember where I was and what the room looked like, I think it was a warm afternoon in June,  as I realized that I really didn't believe that it was an illusion, that justice was more real than many of the things we experience or believe in and that if these affluent, contented Western White Buddhists had experienced a lack of justice in their lives, they would certainly not pretend that it was an illusion, a delusion, etc.  I'd read a Jewish criticism of Buddhism by a Masorti Rabbi a couple of years earlier in which he rejected the assertion of that kind of illusion,  his statement was "Reality is real,"  which I also say clicked with me.

I also didn't believe that such Buddhists as were telling me that this and that and that were "illusions" really believe it.   It was similar to when I heard someone point out that the intellectuals and university professors who asserted everything from  biological determinism of our minds to post-modernism (which has a lot in common with the popular Buddhism of those mentioned above) never led their lives as if they really believed what they were claiming, often asserting in ways that they recommended have a real effect in the real lives of people or, as in biological determinism, have real effects in society, in institutional and legal and political policy.  Though I didn't doubt that if it ended up disadvantaging them, they'd suddenly discover they really didn't think so, anymore.  It was a lot like the ardent Marxists and even Bolshevists who discovered that, far from a workers paradise, Marxism in reality as opposed to in books and pamphlets,  rivaled and far surpassed Czars and Emperors in hellish depravity and the generation of an oppressive oligarchy.  I certainly didn't believe, for a second that the most ardent post-modernist professors would let their ideology rule their financial remuneration or such things as people cribbing their copyrighted text for profit or their lecture and media appearance fees.  Post-modernist agents, what would they be like?  Imagine the discussion of the terms in contracts and ownership papers.

That's a long way round to getting to why I'm going over the Old Testament so much.  In his Fretheim lecture, named for his long-time friends and colleagues,  Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim and Faith, his wife , Walter Brueggemann summed up what I've come to conclude as to the indispensable value of the Old Testament and why it cannot be allowed to "go away".   The online recording of his giving the lecture, full of impromptu asides and humorous interjections, he said what I've concluded, the part I transcribed (in blue, below), after the text as given in the published version of the lecture.

In my view, it is the God who inhabits the text that generates all of these problems and possibilities. It is this inhabiting God who causes the Old Testament to be problematic. It is this inhabiting God who causes seminarians to vex over faith and criticism, because this God will accommodate none of our explanatory categories, even though we have done our JEDP best to dispel the vexation by explaining things away.

It is this inhabiting God who causes us embarrassment, who causes theologians to misread in order to make things come out right. This God creates such scandal that we cannot bear to read of such a God in church.

It is this inhabiting God who does not go away, because it is this God who asserts many times and in many ways, to Pharaoh and to us: “I am the first and the last; before you were here and after you are gone, I am and I will be.” It is this inhabiting God who must not go away, who is indispensable for the church and the life of the world, because this is the God who keeps the world—and our pretensions—open and penultimate, thus resisting lethal idolatries that come packaged as though they are precious.

The Old Testament is indispensable, will not go away, and must not go away, because it is a peculiar witness to the elusive, irascible, multilayered, multivoiced holiness that can affect agency in the world.

In my Theology book I carelessly wrote – so I've been told -  that the God of Old Testament theology, as such, lives inward and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text and nowhere else, in no other way – I'd have lived longer had I not added that last phrase - “nowhere else, in no other way” has turned out to be terribly problematic and careless and and indefensible, except I think it's true.  

I certainly haven't found the same content in other scriptures, certainly not as strongly asserted or insisted on as in the Jewish tradition.  And I absolutely think that it is only the extent to which we, as a country, as the English speaking People, as "Western Civilization" as the Human population really believe that justice and the moral obligation to enact equal justice because we really do believe that, that we have any prospect of real democracy or even survival.   Materialism, either that of the watered down Hollywood school of Buddhism or that of the Brit distortionist Stephen Batchelor or Sam Harris or the billionaire oligarchs and their retinue of rented thinkers and pundits or that of the professional atheists in the media and their online cult fans are probably the biggest obstacle to that.