AT THE START of the third chapter of his book, Walter Brueggemann says:
The Old Testament yields a peculiar and important notion of humanness. Scholarship, moreover, has used great energy in articulating what used to be called "an Old Testament understanding of man." Furthermore, in contrast to the several ideologies of modernity, much that the Old Testament has to say about human personhood is strikingly odd. There is a reason for the oddness of Israel's testimony about humanness, a reason that has not been noticed and appreciated often enough. The oddity, I suggest, stems from the fact that the Old Testament has no interest in articulating an autonomous or universal notion of humanness. Indeed, such a notion is, for the most part not even on the horizon of Old Testament witnesses."
I'll break in here to say that the modern superstition that we are capable of coming up with universally applicable policies or even notions of the enormously diverse human population, whether through the pseudo-sciences of psychology, sociology or anthropology or the semi-pseud-sciences that use the prefixes "neuro" or "cognitive" is just that, superstition. If the alternative of seeing human beings through the lens of a relationship with God seems to be absurd, it is no more absurd than the idea that science can provide something to focus on using the tools of science which, in any case, don't work on what it can't observe with any reliability. That the Old Testament practice doesn't try that is, it seems to me, a step up in doing so with some honesty. If you reject its method of using history and human experience and prophetic insight on the basis of those not being scientific, well, neither is the science that claims to substitute scientific method for that.
But it goes farther than that and is more basic. What right thinking person in the United States in 2023 could object to universal human autonomy? That is the central argument for Women's ownership of their own bodies, of LGBTQ+ equality, of the dignity and rights of People of Color and other subjugated People. But all of those political issues are dealing with People subjugated by other People, the unequal, all too human and so always at risk of injustice which is always present when that is arises from human choice. The need to assert autonomy is against human injustice and subjugation, whether by political powers or institutional powers or church hierarchies, etc. The Jewish Scriptural conception of God is different. The God who I find ever more credible as I look farther into Scripture and the kind of commentary I quote. That God, not the all-too-human gods of classical paganism or modern "New Age" romantic recreation of those, can be trusted to be just and so considering personal rights and justice in even our flawed human perception of this God that is a huge step up in what we can depend on. Issues of human autonomy at the very least will fall into the background when considering our life with such a God as Walter Brueggemann lays out in this book. That may be why:
The Old Testament has no interest in such a notion , because its articulation of what it means to be human is characteristically situated in its own Yahwistic, covenantal, interactionist mode of reality, so that humanness is always Yahwistic humanness or, we may say, Jewish humanness. The Old Testament, for the most part, is unable and unwilling - as well as uninterested - to think outside the categories and boundaries of its own sense of YHWH and YHWH's partner. As a consequence, the primary categories of Israel's faith - sovereignty, fidelity, covenant, and obedience - pertain for this topic as well, Israel makes tis claim for all human persons, including those well beyond its own community. Thus Emmanuel Levinas is correct when he writes in his own mystical, lyrical way of the human person:
"But his soul, which Genesis 2:7 calls divine breath, remains near the Throne of God, around which are gathered all the souls of Israel, i.e., Iwe must accept this terminology!) all the souls of the authentically humna humanity, which is conceived in Hiam of Volozhen as being subsumed beneath the category of Israel. . . . Hence, there is a privileged relationship between the human soul, the soul of Israel, and God. There is a connaturnalitly between man and the manifold entirety of the creature on the one hand, and a special intimacy between man and Elohim on the other."
Levinas goes on to speak of "man's" commitment to the Torah as decisive for the well-being of the world.
Such an odd linkage between the human and Israel does not mean that the Old Testament yields nothing beyond Jewishness. Nor does it mean that Jewish persons are superior human beings. It means, rather, that in the Old Testament all human persons are understood as situated in the same transactional processes with the holiness of YHWH as is Israel, so that in a general way the character and destiny of human persons replicates and reiterates the character and destiny of Israel. This transactional process causes a biblical understanding of human persons to stand at a critical distance and as a critical protest against all modern notions of humanness that move in the direction of autonomy. This means that when the Old Testament speaks of the human person, its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated.
How far does that go beyond any secular notion of human autonomy which can never find an explanation of its origin? It's the ultimate justification of and legitimate articulation of it WITHIN THAT HUMAN AND GOD RELATIONSHIP. I would go so far as to say any notion of it outside of that acknowledgement of our origin in God is a flimsy substitute for the real thing bound to prove more damaging than merely useless, in the end. The presumptuous concept of humanism, the idea that "man is the measure of all things" especially in its modern secular (not to say antireligious) form is absurdly inadequate as compared to this Scriptural conception of what it is to be human in relationship with God.
. . . its primary and inescapable tendency is to think first of the Israelite human person, from which all others are extrapolated, is something which so many who misread the conception of the "chosenness" of the Children of Israel in the Bible as it would be read outside of that context, the way that "American exceptionalism," French Chauvinism, and any other myriad expressions of vainglory and ranking of human beings on the basis of nationality would have it. The idea from the first time that Scripture presents God as setting Abraham and his descendants apart gives them the responsibility of being an example of holiness to the world from whom "all nations" will learn the way. There is all the difference between that and the "White man's burden," slogan of British imperialism, "making the world safe for democracy," under America's military hegemony, and many other such national myths which don't go through the pretenses of a pantomime of moral responsibility.
You can compare that to the foremost model of modernism which I have devoted so much time to exposing and attacking, the Darwinian-Malthusian separation of human beings on the basis of their "biological fitness," really their economic utility and the ranking of humans on an individual scale up to and including the ranking of entire "races" and other crude, unscientific and often entirely imaginary human groupings. That would be on the basis of their autonomous existence as opposed to their relationship to God. That notion of human beings is inevitably anti-egalitarian, inevitably hierarchical in ways that the Old Testament is generally not. As I've mentioned in these posts, one of the things that brought me back to believing the Hebrew Scriptural monotheistic tradition was its acknowledgement that not only all humans. even nationalities who oppose, invade and colonize The Children of Israel and who hold them in captive exile but "all flesh" shares in that relationship to God which exceeds materialistic, atheistic notions of such autonomy and which has possibilities undreamed of by modernism with its idolization of science above other ideas.
I have pointed out any number of times how when that supremely clever man, the young Thomas Jefferson was tasked with explaining the right of Americans to be free of the British monarchy, a man of current fashion who must have hated to have to make resort to our endowment of a right to such autonomy by God had no alternative but to make that argument that God was the source of human rights, the one who endowed human beings with rights. Rights which he, one of the idols of our American secular piety, immediately denied to those he held in slavery, his devotion to slavery growing even as his United States became a reality. The idols of secularism all have feet of clay.
It is one of the ironies of late-stage, decadent modernism that the very thing which demands equal justice by People for all People and living beings, this very religious assertion of all life being related to God is presented as the foremost oppressor of People. That use of Jewish-Christian-Islamic monotheism as an attack on the most vigorous asserted origin of the right to equal justice and environmental justice is complicated by the denial of that by various churches, right now the Southern Baptist cult which holds so much of the country under its political influence, insisting on the subjugation of Women, born in the rejection of racial equality and maintaining a wealthy, corrupt clergy is one such force. Mike Johnson is merely emblematic of the complete hypocrisy and corruption of it. You can say the same about other denominations especially those with political and social influence, the current make up of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops and, especially, the media star bishops among them, who, ironically, are as opposed to the most Catholic president in our history, Joe Biden as Southern Baptists were to the previous one, JFK.
A lot of the public vulnerability to the atheist and anti-Christian attack on Christianity is a direct result of the corrupt uses of the name of Jesus and the idea of "The Bible," that thing that Donald Trump was so unused to holding that he held it upside down, a man who, when visiting the church he was brought to as a child as a campaign stunt had to ask if Presbyterians were Christians. The man who Mike Johnson and his fascist House caucus take instruction for on whose behalf no lie is beyond telling. Such "Christianity" and, or more rarely,"Judaism" is a false-front fraud of religion. Why would anyone be surprised that now when almost all Americans' minds are filled up with the smoke and mirror illusions of TV and movies and the internet would be unable to distinguish the fake from the real? Such is another illusion of modern notions of freedom.
The fact is that there is no alternative to this view of human beings in the world that will elevate them to the point where they believe that they can know the truth and the truth can make them free. That that very status comes only with the assertion that God endowed human beings with an ability to be free and who has endowed us all with human rights, there is no scientific, mathematical or social-scientific articulation of it which is convincing and durable enough to overcome our weakness, our laziness, our feeling of being beleaguered and overwhelmed. Our fear of violence if we assert our rights and our autonomy within the realm of our relationships with other human beings, especially those who hold superior power. I've looked at the academically respectable alternatives, libertarianism, liberal democracy, anarchism, the double-speak of Marxism, etc. and none of those work. I have not, once, found one of those which is not guaranteed to produce the same horrors of human history because of the human tendency to want a strong-man to make us feel safe and secure. If liberal democracy really worked, here, in the United States, where we like to believe we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, the most pathetic and ridiculous As Seen On TV strong man phony would never have gotten the traction he did, the power that the damned U.S. Constitution handed him as he lost an election. The same can be seen in liberal democracies around the world, just now. The "more speech" of an unregulated media free to tell any lie for the most profit, the thing that so many idiotic American liberals of my generation believed would be the great savior is just another empty idol. That those things have failed is certainly evidence of what I've come to conclude that only that view of human beings in relationship with God has the strength to SOMETIMES, MORE OFTEN THAN ANY OTHER SYSTEM, result on something better. I think America's and Europe's endangerment by media driven fascism as it wallows in freedom-fetishistic autonomy granted by "free speech-press" absolutism is certainly an indictment of those 18th century "enlightenment" idols. I think the tragedy of modern Israel and Palestine is a part of that.
I don't think that it is impossible for other religions to find the same substance in their own tradition but I have not found it in several of those I've looked at as an outsider. Those forms of Hinduism that contain crushing inequality as a religious holding are guaranteed not to have it, though I've read there are streams of Hinduism that reject caste, especially in some regions of Southern India. I have talked about how arguing for the reality of justice with some Western Buddists led me away from that path, though the Engaged Buddhism emerging in Asia and elsewhere seems to find something like it. Scripture says God makes covenants with other Peoples, I don't think God leaves other People without the possibility to find what the Prophets of Israel, Moses being the first of those, found. I think it's not impossible that other religious traditions might develop such ideas out of their own experiences of God in their lives, no tradition is static and uninfluenced by continuing human experience. I think the more widespread that is among the religions, the better. It can't be found without really living out moral obligations that are, in our wrongheaded human calculations, a negation of "autonomy." Doing what's good for others which you feel is bad for yourself is the very basis of egalitarian human governance, democracy and the possibility of a decent life. Materialism, atheism and scientism all eventually attack that. Many other ideologies of the past, some of those religious ideologies, have been poison to those but modernism is probably the most poisonous of all and deceptively packaged for easy consumption by the gullible and weak.
Going through this book during Advent I've come to the conclusion that it deserves a lot longer than forty days. So I intend to go over it at length for myself during the coming year, going through as many of the cited materials as I can get access to. I can honestly say that it has had an unusually deep impact on both my intellectual idea of God and far more deeply my life as a believer in the God of Moses, the Prophets and Jesus.
