social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions

 Continuing with The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann

It is the marvel of prophetic faith that both imperial religion and imperial politics could be broken.  Religiously,  the gods were declared no-gods.  Politically, the oppressiveness of the brickyard was shown to be ineffective and not necessary to human community.   Moses introduced not just the new free God and not just a message of social liberation.  Rather, his work came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice.  Derivative finally from Marx, we can learn from these traditions that finally we will not have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God's freedom.  We are indeed made in the mage of some God.  And perhaps we have no more important theological investigation than to discern in whose image we have been made.  Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology.  And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the "haves," oppression cannot be far behind.  Conversely,  if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries,  free from all proper godness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion. 

Before going on, I'll point out that this passage pretty well answers the idiotic popular atheist lines about "only believing in one less god than the theists" "theists are atheists when it comes to every other god" and the demands that we recognize the legitimacy of the atheists superhero comic, sword and sandals movie conception of "Zeus" or whoever.   The God identified in, especially Exodus is entirely unlike the pagan, classical pantheons of material gods, subject to fate or other forces that untimately even determine the future and, in some stories, the actions of the gods of the classical period or others.   

I think to classify the One God of monotheism who is not definable or identifiable as Moses, in his first encounter in which he got his charge from him knew the Children of Israel knew they wold require.  Not to mention the Pharaohnic establishment.  When Moses asked what he was to tell them when he asked,  God said,  "I AM THAT I AM'; and he said: Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: I AM hath sent me unto you."  (JPS) 

When we talk about God, about "gods" we are talking about the human conception of them, in the case of the GOD of Moses, Jesus, Paul, among the only things we know is that that human conception is never adequate. It is the human conception of God that is a product of human creation but in that explicitly mysterious passage from Exodus 3, that is a defining aspect of God,  the definition is that that God is always beyond adequate, certainly comprehensive definition or even conception. Brueggemann is absolutely right in noting that the God of Moses is not like the other gods.   Though I would say that I think many world religions who have an ultimate God are certainly talking and thinking about the same God understood differently.  Even the Books of Moses notes that that God has interactions and is concerned with people who conceive of God differently, even making covenants with them, not to mention with animals who certainly don't conceive of God in human terms, not to mention the terms of a very small beleaguered nation in slavery and on the way to freedom.  

My impression is that we have split those two items much to easily but not without reason.  The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God.  Indeed, it has been hard for liberals to imagine that theology mattered, for all of that seemed irrelevant.  And it has thought that the question of God could be safely left to others who still worried about such matters.  As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions.  Conversely,  it has been the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression.  Indeed, a case can be made that unprophetic conservatives did not take God seriously enough to see that our discernment of God has remarkable sociological implications. And between liberals who imagine God to be irrelevant to sociology and conservatives who unwittingly use the notion of God for social reasons because they do not see how the two belong together, there is little to choose.  Here it is enough to insist that Moses,  paradigm for prophet, carried the alternative in both directions: a religion of God's freedom as alternative to the static imperial religion of order and triumph and the politics of justice and compassion as alternative to the imperial politics of oppression.  The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without the religion of the freedom of God.  

If I had not concluded before reading this that without the radical economic and social justice given as a moral obligation WITH CONSEQUENCES believed in by an effective majority of the population that egalitarian democracy was doomed, I'd believe it as a consequence of reading that passage.  It is certain as the experience of American history that people needed more than just a nice habit of niceness to empower their best though hardly strongest tendencies in order to keep doing that consistently and that is found nowhere else but in this religious framing. I early in my investigation of the failure of the American left came to the conclusion that atheist, scientistic materialism matched with the liberalish preferences and preferences of the largely college-credentialed "left" were no substitute that anyone should put their childlike faith in.  They should certainly not count on that being effective. It as the overtly religious, overtly  presented in the Jewish-Christian prophetic tradition, religious nature of the last successful mass movement for justice, the Civil Rights movement, that gave me the most persuasive evidence in drawing that conclusion, as seeing how that progress ended as the harder, more cynical at times explicitly anti-religious "radicals" were put at the forefront confirmed thsoe conclusions.