IT IS ONE OF MY DEEPEST REGRETS that it was not until I was old that I first read and heard Walter Brueggemann, the great scholar of the Old Testament and not too bad a one of the New one, either. Starting with a book I have probably recommended as much as I have any other, the self-study guide The Bible Makes Sense and continuing with a few other of his huge number of books, following up on a few of his generously and rigorously cited sources from many sources, religious and some atheists, he, a Protestant, has probably had a more profound effect on my habitual Irish Catholic concept of things than almost anyone else, now.
It's why when someone asks me if I'm a Catholic the answer is I'm sort of Catholic-plus. And what is as true of his writing is at least as true of his sermons and lectures, a wonderful number of which are available to be listened to online.
In no other thing has that impact been stronger than the understanding that the stories of the Bible, the human interpretation of the divine presence in human lives which become human history are as fresh as the news of the day. His repeated point that in the earliest encounters in the first two books of the Bible between religious figures and governments, the stories of Joseph and Moses in Egypt, that, especially in the Exodus story, we don't know what the name of Pharaoh is while the names of people like the two Egyptian midwives are known, Shifra and Puah. He says that's because "if you've seen one Pharaoh you've seen them all." And that is true.
It is true throughout the entire history of humanity on every continent and in every age, right up to today. The same motives, the same evils, the same injustices, the same need for opposition is true in each and every age and, since it is people who are doing both the oppressing and the opposing, all of it will be far from a clean and easy thing. That's another thing I have come to appreciate through reading the scholarship of Brueggemann, the Bible is a humanly made document inspired by human experience of God in human lives and human history. It is as mixed a bag, a collection of writings, pieced together, edited, miscopied, sometimes slanted, sometimes like a knife cutting directly to the truth, sometimes clearly more inspired by a harder experience of God than at other times.
And some of it of inspiration that I don't find at all convincing of much other than an expression of the elites among the Children of Israel, the gawdy instructions for fitting out the priests and temple, the claims surrounding the House of David, extending into the treatment of Jesus in some of the Gospels. Some of the Laws an expression of the likes and dislikes of those who set them down, perhaps of the scribes who copied them. Though none of that is easily discerned by study and the people who do spend their time doing the heavy lifting of trying to discern the meaning of the text are not at all uniform in their conclusions. I will say that one of my guiding lights in that has been the teaching of Jesus about how to figure out things, "By their fruits you will know them" especially when matched by the commandment from Leviticus as expanded by him, "Do to others what you would have them do to you." Those two things are truths that I have always found reliable in trying to discern whose interpretation of scripture is right, always keeping an eye on the principle of equal treatment in results and, now, what we can learn from such human studies as modern history and science.
-------------------------
This is all a long way round to pointing out that anyone who claims religion has no place in human politics on the basis of it being a violation of the purity of religion that is to be above such stuff ignore the fact that from those earliest encounters with Pharaoh, all though the stories and narratives of the Children of Israel, especially when, against the advice of God, they established their own kingdoms, EVERYTHING ABOUT THE BOOKS ARE ABOUT THE UNWILLINGNESS OF EARTHLY GOVERNMENTS TO DO JUSTICE TO THE POOR, THE WIDOW, THE ORPHAN, THE ILLEGAL ALIEN AMONG US. It is a protest against governments not only doing injustice BUT THEM NOT DOING JUSTICE. That passage from Jeremiah that I gave a couple of weeks ago is part of a political tract that condemned the king fo
22 1 The Lord told me to go to the palace of the king of Judah, the descendant of David, and there tell the king, his officials, and the people of Jerusalem to listen to what the Lord had said: 3 “I, the Lord, command you to do what is just and right. Protect the person who is being cheated from the one who is cheating him. Do not mistreat or oppress aliens, orphans, or widows; and do not kill innocent people in this holy place. 4 If you really do as I have commanded, then David's descendants will continue to be kings. And they, together with their officials and their people, will continue to pass through the gates of this palace in chariots and on horses. 5 But if you do not obey my commands, then I swear to you that this palace will fall into ruins. I, the Lord, have spoken.
6 “To me, Judah's royal palace is as beautiful as the land of Gilead and as the Lebanon Mountains; but I will make it a desolate place where no one lives. 7 I am sending men to destroy it. They will all bring their axes, cut down its beautiful cedar pillars, and throw them into the fire.
8 “Afterward many foreigners will pass by and ask one another why I, the Lord, have done such a thing to this great city. 9 Then they will answer that it is because you have abandoned your covenant with me, your God, and have worshiped and served other gods.”
The "other gods" that were served were well described by Paul in Romans 23
18 God's anger is revealed from heaven against all the sin and evil of the people whose evil ways prevent the truth from being known. 19 God punishes them, because what can be known about God is plain to them, for God himself made it plain. 20 Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. So those people have no excuse at all! 21 They know God, but they do not give him the honor that belongs to him, nor do they thank him. Instead, their thoughts have become complete nonsense, and their empty minds are filled with darkness. 22 They say they are wise, but they are fools; 23 instead of worshiping the immortal God, they worship images made to look like mortals or birds or animals or reptiles.
24 And so God has given those people over to do the filthy things their hearts desire, and they do shameful things with each other. 25 They exchange the truth about God for a lie; they worship and serve what God has created instead of the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever! Amen.*
Good News Translation
Certainly the gods Paul referred to included the gods of the political-religious cult of Egypt, he was an expert in the law, by his own identification one of those Pharisees that Jesus was always warning about their presumptions. And of the other religions around him and where he traveled to. It would certainly include the worship of gold and silver and other minerals and other sources of wealth, which are always the preeminent gods that human beings make up and do evil around. You don't have to believe in god to worship those kinds of idols, nor is that cult unknown among those who may also believe in something like God, or at least have heard some of this. I could name you dozens of Popes and Protestant and Orthodox hierarchs who are fully devoted to such idols off the top of my head. Such have been presented as almost exclusively representing "Christianity" in the media since the 1970s.
Brueggemann points out in his lectures and sermons that you can contrast the two figures of Moses and Joseph as two different approaches for dealing with political power. Moses, one of the most radical egalitarians in human history, opposed Pharaoh on the basis of his understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (or Israel) as being someone totally different from the gods of Egypt who supported the rulers and their inequality. And he freed the Children of Israel and began their subsequent history as a people. Joseph, on the other hand, became one of Pharaoh's ministers, his "food czar" who, as Brueggemann pointed out began by taking their money the first year, ending up with taking their cattle and land and, finally, reducing them to the slavery where future Pharaohs would try to manage them as a herd of slave animals to be culled so as not to be a problem to their rule, where the story of Moses starts out.
So the Bible, from the end of the first and the entire rest of the collection is a deep and through commentary on governments, their injustices, their rarer acts of justice, even some who tried to do justice, economic justice being understood by anyone who bothers to think about it AND AS EXPLICITLY LAID OUT IN THE ACTUAL TEXTS. And it lays out the humanly observed and, I would say. divinely inspired insight that economic injustice, injustice due to ethnic or gender or family status will eventually engulf not only the minorities or powerless lower class peons but also the contented majority and even the peons who are quite happy with that unjust regime or who are under the control of a corrupt political and, or religious establishment.
It was one of the things that I was impressed by even before reading Brueggemann, that the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New one are extremely hard on the religious authorities of the tradition they are a part of, especially those in the priestly class and those who succeeded them in the religious elite among the Children of Israel. THAT ACT OF SELF-CRITICISM STRIKES ME AS BEING SOME OF THE MOST CONVINCING THINGS ABOUT THE ENTIRE TRADITION, JEWISH AS WELL AS CHRISTIAN. It is something that even Jeremiah warned his fellow protest singers (another insight from Brueggemann) about themselves in the next chapter of that book. To which I can only say, wow! Talk about a deep, deep and humble experience of the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and Jesus, and Paul and Mary Magdalene, Lydia, Junia . . . and what incredible courage it takes to put that kind of intense self-criticism directly into the Scripture.
You're never going to find anything like that in the scribblings of legal scholars and jurists and Supreme Court "justices" Or Constitutional scholars or the civil liberties industry. The more perfumed servants of Mammon are nothing if not gentlemen, to each other, at least. One of the reasons I have become entirely skeptical of the idea that secularism can save us from the kind of injustice we see and experience around us. It is an even greater folly for secularists to demand the separation of religion and state because religion will, somehow, sully the secular (most of them mean or hope for anti-religious) purity of secular government. They might hope for that if they want to see a continuation of injustice, as do so many of those who want to make a pantomime of "Christianity" the de facto state religion, but, as the great civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s proved, they are rejecting the driving force that propelled that movement to change things, even as progress sputtered out as anti-religious figures pushed their way forward and grabbed the mic. That is another of my pole stars in this, the role that religion played in making that possible, just as I hope that Joe Biden's religious conviction restarts that where it left off in the mid-1960s.
* Experienced readers will note that that passage comes right before one that has been used to do a lot of injustice to my kind, LGBTQ People. For which Christianity has taken a lot of flack. I'll write about that later.
Update: Rereading this to see what corrections are needed - I haven't gotten to those yet - it strikes me as ironic that a Catholic would need a Protestant minister to inform him that the Bible is a fallible, human document, Protestantism tending to be far more bibliolatrous as opposed to Catholics' fixation on the Magisterium. Goes to show, you shouldn't get so fixated on being one thing or another, you miss a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment