IN THE PREFACE to his great and unsettling book An Unsettling God, Walter Brueggemann touches on the uniqueness of the God of the Jewish Scriptures:
The God of Israel is confessed to be sovereign over the nations. This is not an easy case to make in the modern world of autonomous national states. Much modern thought has solved the problem by leaving God to be engaged by individual persons, and leaving the public sphere of life to be "might makes right." But of course the Old Testament is unwilling to leave any part of life including international life- outside the scope of God's dialogic engagement.
The great temptation of modern national states is to imagine independent autonomy without answering to anyone. There is, moreover, no more blatant example of such arrogant autonomy than the recent unilateralism of the United States that has conducted policy on the assumption that it could do anything it wanted, that it owed nothing to other nations, and that there was no compelling moral limit to aggressive acquisitiveness.
But arrogant national states, all the way back to ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon, have assumed the same. The faith of ancient Israel, especially voiced in prophetic oracles, asserts that there are God given, God-enforced limits and lines of accountability that curb and chasten raw power. A study of this dimension of Old Testament faith poses exceedingly difficult questions about the governing limits of God in internal affairs:
- Could it possibly be that South African apartheid reached its limit because such brutality was beyond the limit of God?
I will, of course, break in here to point out
a. that, as we have recently been reminded that the late Jimmy Carter pointed out that the modern state of Israel, which in no way should be mistaken as a religiously governed entity, practices an apartheid against Palestinians, both those who live in the occupied territories and those who are held as semi-citizens of Israel, live under an apartheid more severe than South African apartheid.
b. that the American apartheid which has been brutally powerful from before the Revolutionary war and which the Civil War certainly did not much blunt, is again empowered around the country under Republican-fascism as reimposed in the overturning of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and other such laws which all too temporarily countered that major legal and political force in American life and law.
I will propose that the impending Roberts Court imposed Trumpian-Vancean despotism may well be just such a fall for the corrupt 18th century style liberal democracy that is crumbling here as in other countries which adopted such notions of non-egalitarian democracy. We are about to find that many white People who had in previous decades and centuries escaped the worst of American apartheid will now experience more of that than they are accustomed to thinking about. Though, as in all apartheid systems, it depends on there being a subject population which the class that corresponds to the traditional American "poor whites" were encouraged to look down on, fear and despise. It will take a severe punishment for the merely relatively less oppressed to learn what's needed in terms of equal justice, including that most necessary form of justice, economic justice. It has been the genius of American apartheid that the ruling class has always managed the corruption of poor whites to its advantage, that is the basis of the Goldwater-Nixon "Southern strategy" that has led to our current crisis.
To complete Brueggemann's list of consequences to contemplate:
- Could it be that the fall of the Soviet Union occurred because the power of the state outran what could be borne in the world of God?
- And if one entertains such thought, then one may ask, What are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power?
Of course, one is not permitted to entertain such thoughts, certainly not about the consequences for the United States - though Lincoln certainly contemplated them as he ruefully wondered if every drop shed by the enslavers whip would have to be matched by blood shed in the Civil War. If such thoughts had been common during and in the aftermath of the Civil War instead of the dulling stupidity of modern secularism, perhaps the reempowerment of the slave-power (with de facto instead of de jure slavery) wouldn't have happened and the United States would have avoided the massive corruption of the late 19th and 20th centuries, bleeding well into the present day.
The message of the Old Testament Prophets and the historical books is that there are consequences for injustice, for inequality, for brutality most often wielded on behalf of and for the benefit of economic and political and legal elites. You won't hear many "white evangelicals" and fewer "trad-Catholics" being willing to acknowledge the obviousness of that. You certainly won't hear it from secularists or those within atheist-materialist scientism (or academia outside of the theology department, for short). You certainly won't get it from the legal profession, the judges and especially not the "justices," such ideas being verboten no matter how many times such consequences are experienced. If there's one thing that I've learned in the past quarter of a century, it is that there are few areas held in intellectual repute more resistant to learning from even the hardest of experience than the legal racket. See also my many posts pointing out that free speech-press absolutism takes "never again" and turns it into "always again." And the United States isn't alone, Israel, backed by the American empire is even more bold in its insistence that its repeated brutality will buy it peace, though I think what its leaders actually want is ever more land cleared of Palestinians. The consequences will be terrible for us all when they come and I believe they are coming.
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