IT WAS IN HIS DISCUSSION of the Book of Jeremiah as we have it as a combination of inspired poetry and commentary on the poetry, mixed in with other observations and applications of the poetry of Jeremiah to events that happened during the assemblage of the book, during his presentation of the fact that it is a work of literature that the talk about the various versions of Jeremiah came up. In the question period after that section, a member of the audience asked about the version of it among the Dead Sea Scrolls and which led to Brueggemann talking about the other versions of it, all having their own point of view, all having content not found in the "original" Hebrew version of the book which is in our Bibles. That was the origin of my reading that led to yesterday's post.
The section before that, after he talks about the historical context of the book when he talks about it as literature brings up all kinds of issues for us who consider "literature" as works of unified intention created by a single author who wants their name attached to what they've produced. But that's not what you get with a lot of old literature, you get a combination of texts, perhaps one of them the original text that gets commented on or otherwise modified over the period of its production and, sometimes, with further additions by those who copied them to publish them and to preserve them. Sometimes that commentary is separated carefully and with full respect to the original that is commented on, as in the Talmud, but sometimes its a production of what appears as a unified work to any but the most rigorous of readers. Though, I would suspect, at times, the rigorous methods of those readers introduce their own biases and extraneous content, even if it's just the content of claiming to discern different hands and different interests.
If you don't like that, if it seems too messy and unlikely to produce a final "definitive" reading of it, well, you shouldn't think you know what you think you know about it if you take the bother to understand where it's coming from.
That fact about, not only the books of the Old Testament or First Testament (depending on who I want to annoy with the usage) that the three Mosaic montheistic traditions share but also the Second Testament of Christianity forces questions about the status of the Bible as having sole authority as The Word of The Lord and the status of the commentary on it. I agree with something Brueggemann said about that phrase that it is a conventionally understood means of saying "this is important" and I would agree that all of it is important to anchoring the discussion. It is one of the objections to the Catholic tradition that has, in fact, introduced lots of later, Medieval theological stuff as primary int the discussions that is a basis of Protestantism. It is a critique within the Catholic tradition, too, especially in the 20th century, much of the work of the recently late Hans Kung was based in recovering the centrality of the New Testament in a rejection of much, though not all, of the later material.
I have pointed out that Marilynne Robinson, in an essay defending the Mosaic tradition against the calumnies heaped on it by later, Christian and, even more so, secular condemnation of it on the basis of nationalism and exclusion, the kind of which is clearly the basis of the antisemtic science of MacDonald defended by the antisemtic fellow traveler Dutton as science. She pointed out that all of the sins of the Children of Israel are known to us THROUGH THEIR SELF CONFESSION OF IT, something that is rarely included in the official documentation of other traditions except in the most grudging of manners. It is that self-criticism that is what I called one of the glories of the Jewish tradition, yesterday. She wondered what the Christian scriptures would have been like if they had covered as long a period as the Jewish Scriptures did, including things like the Crusades, the various ones within Europe and in the Middle East, what it would look like if it covered the entire period of European expansion and colonization and genocide on every continent - including the prophetic condemnation of that which is too little known even as it was too little heeded at the time. Brueggemann touches on that as one of the responses to the prophetic warning that they were on the road to evil and death within Judea and Israel in general.
And what can be said about the reticence of the Christian tradition to own up to the full range of its history - in which, as well there was full and furious condemnation of evil for the entire time - is one of the more disastrous consequences of the modern secular world which, in its scientism has diminished the only methods for making that critique in anti-materialistic morality. It has in its science no means of making that critique nor, in its amorality, got any motivation to notice that something isn't right - perhaps that's the method that allows such a roster of luminaries within science and the modern universities to publish a Dutton or a MacDonald as science, seemingly most concerned for their standing in the profession as opposed to what they're claiming has a scientific guarantee as being objective reality.
That problem with modernism, the scientistic materialistic atheistic view of life which governs our intellectual life, that it is incapable of taking any claims of morality seriously enough for them to make a difference is not going away, not anymore than the pre-Nazi uses of natural selection did in the post-war period, despite the all too temporary eclipse of the overt claims made from Darwinism.
The fact is that religion has, throughout its history, been its most exigent of critics, not only externally, between different denominations, sects and traditions but also internally. Science, supposedly the most rigorous of all intellectual pursuits, including applied mathematics (see the post about probability from last week) has not practiced anything like the same level of critical reflection.
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As a further footnote to the piece below, I will give you this little bit from a short "essay" published on the PBS website about the relationship of Darwin to eugenics.
The specter of eugenics hovers over virtually all contemporary developments in human genetics. Eugenics was rooted in the social Darwinism of the late 19th century, a period in which notions of fitness, competition, and biological rationalizations of inequality were popular. At the time, a growing number of theorists introduced Darwinian analogies of "survival of the fittest" into social argument. Many social Darwinists insisted that biology was destiny, at least for the unfit, and that a broad spectrum of socially deleterious traits, ranging from "pauperism" to mental illness, resulted from heredity.
A caption under a picture of Darwin next to that says:
Charles Darwin's theories were adapted by others and applied to social issues.
Those adaptations and that connection to eugenics were no less true of the scientific writings of Charles Darwin than they were to the "others" which this piece of cover-up wants its readers to believe. No one who had read Charles Darwin could make such a claim because he, himself named his inspiration in political-economic theories that involved the most brutal of social-political-economics of policies. Nor could they have failed to notice that he fully supported even more brutal applications of his theory, especially in the science of Ernst Haeckel and others.
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