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.