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.
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