ONE OF THE THINGS that I got from the influence of Walter Brueggemann was in loosening the blinders through which even, having been brought up as a Catholic with a quite non-literalist view of Scripture, I had managed to use in thinking about Scripture. Ironically, in the way that is generally taken, some of the most cumbersome of those blinders came from the historical-critical practices that dominate in modern educated practice instead of those of "evangelicalism" and fundamentalism.
"The problem is it (Scripture) is filled with contradiction. The contradictions simply resist finding a formulation that can account for everything. So it requires us to . . . in some ways hold it loosely. By which I do not mean not to take it seriously. But to take it seriously without imagining that it is going to deliver a package of certitudes for us. And that's what I want to resist, whether it is the rationalist certitudes of progressives or whether it is the fideistic certitude of more evangelical People."
That's what he said in an excellent discussion he got into a few years ago and that was one of the revelatory things I got, one which opened up Scripture to me in a way that all of the previous decades of my life didn't.
One of the lines in the interview noted that the "originalist" reading of the text of the Constitution by Antonin Scalia, oddly, never seemed to result in Scalia "finding" in the text of the Constitution something he didn't already think. I think that's more often true of not in the game of such critical gaming of texts, whether or not it's admitted. To tie this in with the series I'm engaged in.
It not only made what I believed was clearer to me more meaningful, it also shielded the value of that from those parts of the Bible which are far more problematic and are likely not at all prescriptions of how we are to live but are either a confession on the part of The Children of Israel for their shortcomings and evil acts (large stretches of the Bible is a confession of that sort as progress toward contrition and change, one of the most impressive acts of moral character in any literature I'm aware of) or self-questioning on the way. Even some of the most mistakenly permissive of claims, such as the command to slaughter the Canaanites, are a prelude to a description of the disasters they led to, in the legends of Joshua and the Book of Judges, leading to the mixed bag of them demanding a king, as in the disaster when such stuff was taken as an excuse for the invasion, genocide and conquest of the Americas. Atheists, mockers of revealed religion just can't deal with that, that you can have that kind of loose holding of Scripture which is full of contradictions, that you don't have to believe that God told Joshua to kill all of the Canaanites just because some (likely far later) scribes finally wrote down stories that were probably already heavily edited and amended and exaggerated through the oral tradition. As an example of that, I would bet you someone else would transcribe the recording of Walter Brueggemann attempted above differently than I did. I would bet he, if he wrote it out, would do it somewhat differently, perhaps changing some of it because he'd think of a better way of saying just what he meant. We are so enslaved by the printed or recorded word.*
His magnificently informed view of Scripture as, among other things, being a group-artistic work, in which there is no one auteur in even most parts of it in which the real meanings and values of it are frequently more a matter of implication and inconclusive questioning and urging instead of fixed "truths." And, in fact, there are many hands in producing what comes down to us as the texts, some commenting and extending the oldest poetic expressions and so mixed into the older text and there is no real way to find out which is which with complete or even good specificity. But which, in the end, we are to find contains instruction of how to conduct our lives. That some of those texts give some clear, universal, absolute commandments, treat others as you would be treated, tell the truth, don't kill, don't steal, don't deprive people of the product of their labor, the right to liberal provision for the poor, in other words, don't be stingy with what you have, etc.
And that insight has been extremely useful to me as I took up a book this week that I had read decades ago, Black Elk Speaks, reading the newer prefaces mentioning later "critical" editions of the book critical of the poet John G. Neihardt who edited the stenography of his daughter, the one who recorded the words of the translator, translating Black Elk and his friends and companions, comparing the original stenography with the published text in a manner not that much different from the historical-critical method of dealing with the Bible.
That there was no direct recording of the words of Black Elk, as he gave them in his own language is obvious, that there is not an absolute and direct recording of the words of the translator in the stenographic record in English is not questionable, that those facts were known to Black Elk and his friends and companions as they sat giving their prophesy and memory is obvious, as obvious as it must have been to those who copied, commented on, expanded on the words of the Prophets, those who took down the memories of the companions of Jesus, Paul, etc. as they did what they did. I don't expect to find something like a Cecil B. DeMille-Hollywood-etc. script view of even the most explicitly absolutist statements (Hollywood distortions) of Abraham faith from Black Elk Speaks, I expect to find translated poetry - for crying out loud, even the visions of the great mystic Saint Black Elk are told in symbolic images and experiences, not something that will satisfy the pretenses of a modern, academic scholar. Writing this, I think of the poetic visions of Julian of Norwich or other saints.
I doubt that I'd get so much out of my re-reading of something I'd not really appreciated when I was a lot younger and fully acculturated in historical-critical framing unless I'd read and heard so much of Walter Brueggemann on Scripture. Since what I find valuable in Hans Kung is so reliant on the text of, especially, the New Testament, I couldn't possibly find that as valuable as I have without the loosening of those blinders mentioned above. I think I'd have to place the Protestant Brueggemann ahead of even my favorite Catholic theologians in a listing, though, as I mentioned, the same was something I had aphoristically instead of expanded at great length from Abraham Joshua Heschel's observation about the written text of Scripture being a commentary on the real thing which was not a text, as such.
There is a movement among Catholics to canonize Black Elk which I think would be a good thing. I believe he was divinely inspired in his prophesy, I am impressed with what I'm learning about his life - he, as part of the widely misunderstood Ghost-Dance movement joined the Catholic Church and was a devoted and articulate lay-worker while remaining a great Holy Man of his tradition. I am astonished by what I've recently learned about that movement which I'd only known about distorted through white-academic claims about it made in the past and I have to say, I find it as convincing a series of prophecies as I do any other part of Scripture. I find him a far more credible saint than many of those recently canonized with far more dubious lives, some which I find more appalling than heroic. Some of those recently canonized, Popes and other members of the clergy and religious, though some of them I think were admirable, too. It's hard to be a convincing saint while holding worldly power of that kind.
Loosening that kind of thing in good will doesn't, in my experience, lead to dispersal or erasure of revealed religion, it expands it. But the good will has to be there to start with or it will dissolve any kind of morality. I have no faith in anything that doesn't hold with loving God and loving others as you love yourself. I doubt anything that doesn't hold those first can get anywhere good.
* I remember once Rupert Sheldrake said that when he was in the studio reading out the spoken recording of one of his books, he thought of a better way to say something than how it was published in the book and when he spoke that, the editor stopped the recording and said that wasn't the way he'd written it. He said that he thought the way he'd just said it was better but the editor forbade the author from making himself clearer because it had to be the way the text was published.
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