"then one may ask, What are are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power?"

IN MY NEVER ENDING, far from sophisticated program of continuing self-education,  I'm typing out and making notes on the late, much missed, Walter Brueggemann's  An Unsettling God:  The heart of the Hebrew Bible.  

It's a condensed, short, popular version of his Theology of the Old Testament, which I have but which is far, far longer and would take a large number of months to type out, maybe after I'm done with this book I'll do that.  

In today's portion,  I just typed out this text and as it's certainly highly relevant to us today,  thought I'd share it.  

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 with individual persons, and letting the public sphere of life 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 the 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 be possible that South African apartheid reached its limit because such brutality was beyond the limit of God?

- Could it be that the fall of the Soviet Union occurred because the power of the state outran what would be borne in the world of God?

- And if one entertains such thought, then one may ask, What  are are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power?

Study of this topic invites engagement with the prophetic rhetoric of the Old Testament that knows that the entire political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded.  Such thinking is reflected in the language of the church that prays regularly.  “Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”  The terms of the prayer, faithful to the Old Testament, are political in a way that places all other political claims in question  Study of this topic must resist “silly supernaturalism,” but may nonetheless take seriously the claim of God that renders all other claims as penultimate. 

I will note that the modern state of Israel follows the old pattern in the Hebrew Bible in which Israel, repeatedly, over and over again violates the limits just as the United States does,  only partially is that explanation that Israel is a client state of the United States,  its majority of voters makes their own choices and puts the governments it has in power.  

Under Trump we have gone far, far beyond what the Bush II criminals did when Brueggemann was writing this.  He wrote his Acknowledgements in September eighteen years ago, just as the 2008 financial crash was starting.   

I think it's well worth asking if Trump isn't all the rotten last kings of Judea rolled into one, or some combination of the final kings (according to the Roberts Court) of the US.  Perhaps our protest poets will add a new confessional Scripture to the ones the Prophets of Israel did as their nation refused to be a "priestly kingdom" in a way that was as blatant as the secular one that formed the modern Israel did as a matter of policy.  The Temple authorities, as well. 

It wouldn't surprise me if our Babylonian exile experience is about to really begin, if not the final calamity of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.   That one should start with the demolition of whatever Trump puts up and the Supreme Court's fascist-marble palace.  

It also sets me off thinking that along with such secular heresies I pursue, such as the dangers of "free speech and especially 'press'" and the evils of the Supreme Court and lawyers, anti-Darwinism,  to what extent is "might makes right" a foundation of liberal democracy in which a German election might result in a Hitler, an Israeli election, a Netanyahu, a Russian one a Putin or an American one a Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or a Trump?    Now that I've concluded that there can be nothing "right" about something that is wrong or certainly evil,  how does that apply when "democracy" produces evil results?  

I don't have any ultimate faith in any human institution, something I learned from reading the Hebrew Scriptures, not even the ones I support like egalitarian democracy (if we can ever achieve it under our corrupt system) but unless we deal with such problems, we won't avoid them or even recognize them when they are staring us in the face like climate change or nuclear war.