The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.

The ancient city was in a moral default that could not be sustained.  It is no wonder that the poets, given how late it was wondered if it was too late or only very late.

So here in eight phrasings - I'm going to say the same thing eight different ways - is my thought about these two triads of:

- might, wisdom, and wealth

and

-steadfast love, justice, and righteousness.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, "they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy" [Jeremiah 5:28]. And the same poet says, "if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . ." (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation). [Jeremiah 7:5- ]

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently.

The increasingly forgotten, once most popularly known of American economists, John Kenneth Galbraith once pointed out that in his field of economics, the most abstracting of economists, the mathematical economists,  were at the top in repute in the profession and as the sub-specialties in that field increasingly dealt with real things, real lives, the economics of bodily needs of real People, the academic repute of the people doing that decreased, to the point where agronomists, those who dealt with the production of food and clothing and building materials, were held in the least esteem.  

The same can be said in one field after another.   I have recently pointed out the absurdity of that in the most reputable of all academic fields, theoretical physics and its bastard twin, cosmology, in which the things dealt with are held to no longer even need to actually be things but merely abstract arguments, science fiction written in equations, things which have no knowable reality and which may be no more than the imaginings of atheist physicists who want to make God go away and, so, they give their equations the powers of God as described in the first verses of Genesis, the much more evidenced theory of the Big Bang angrily rejected* because it is too close to doing the same thing they want the privilege of doing on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all. 

The repute which "theory" has in modern academics and, so among those it trains is undeniable, as well as the demotion of the material necessities of People without the necessities of life.  That has not ever been untrue of those who old power and those they sponsor have always had a strong tendency to play along because if there's one thing that even the most abstracting, wooly-headed academic can be counted on to know it's which side his bread is buttered on and where to get fun from.  The scientific, political and other elites who were Jeffrey Epstein's fan boys and passengers on his pedophile express is just another of the exhibits in support of what Walter Brueggemann says here.  

In that last list of the collaborators in the triad of control, I would have included the civil law, lawyers, judges, . . . and, more so, journalism and the scribbling professions.  While those may contain some of those who are, in fact, fighting against the controllers on behalf of fidelity for those who are poor and oppressed, the large majority of them are entirely in with the servants of power and wealth through the wisdom they were said to have had by those in the universities and colleges with the power to grant them their credentials and their fellow elite grad who run the news outlets.   The servants of the servants of Mammon are as in on it as their bosses who they would certainly like to join at the top. 

I should mention, since, no doubt, you noticed how close the word "materiality" is to the ideology of materialism which you can count on me to deplore at least three times a day, that the materiality of the Prophets, the Law, the Gospels and Epistles is nothing like the ideological materialism that is at the heart of so much of our moral and intellectual decadence, now.  One sees material needs and the material that could meet those needs OF THOSE WHO NEED THEM as being the point of material existence, the other sees the ideology of materialism as the ultimate wisdom with which they will dispose of God and the moral obligations to provide the needs of the poor even at a cost to themselves, a cost which they resent if paid out of the top of their mountain of personal surplus at no felt cost to themselves or their descendants, should their line feed off of it for a hundred generations.  

You can contrast that to the story of the widow who puts her last two cents into the poor box Luke 21:1–4 Mark 12:41-44.   The materiality of the prophets is, in fact, the opposite of the ideology of materialism.  It is the sanctification of material existence whereas the ideology of materialism is the debasement of human minds and lives so snobs can convince themselves there is no God.

* I think that's a fair characterization of those who held out for the steady-state model even after even more confirmation of the Big Bang was found in the 1960s, especially the 1990s rantings of the editor of the most esteemed of all science magazines, Nature, John Maddox.  Him especially.