THE REASON I HAD to delay going on with Walter Brueggemann's first lesson on Jeremiah was because I had intended to transcribe a lot of what he said about the section that is often labeled as the "calling" or "commissioning" of Jeremiah as a prophet which states what his assignment was. Brueggemann names it as the key text to understanding the whole book. That begins at about 57:40 of the video. Much as I'd like to put that down in text, I haven't gotten around to it yet. That is found in Jeremiah 1:4-10, I'll link to the Revised Standard Version because somewhere someone says that is what the group he was giving the lesson to was using and it uses the language he addresses.
He points out that the text gives the prophet four negative things to do and two positive ones.
9 Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
“Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.
10 See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”
Brueggemann sets out his intention to deal with the plucking up and tearing down, the destruction and the overthrowing in the next lesson and the building and planting in the third one. As a preliminary this is the part of the lesson in which he compares what the prophet, Jeremiah said about plucking up and breaking down with the sermon of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright in which he prophetically said "Goddamn America" pointing out that what he said offended a lot of people, it was used politically in a short and, so, distorted clip as seen on cabloid "news" and elsewhere to attack Barack Obama. He points out that the book that has resided in the Bible, indeed prophesy about the destruction of Jerusalem as a result of the evil and immorality and, I'd argue the far worse amorality of the Jerusalem political-economic-religious establishment, is far more offensive in its own terms than anything Reverend Wright said but which, since he says it about the injustice and so evil of our American establishment, we have no problem being offended by it.
Brueggemann, in this first lecture talks about the psychological consequences of all of this in denial and rejection and anger then - and of course just as we don't like what our prophets have to say and the prophecy of our experience that results from our injustice and evil, the same reaction that those got in Jermiah's day is here now among us.
I will point, again, to what Marilynne Robinson said about the fact that every report of their own culpability in their own misfortune, all of the confessions of injustice and other evil that comes down to us IS THERE BECAUSE IT IS REPORTED IN THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS SCRIPTURE, BY THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY'S JEWS.
Scholarly books on the Scriptures typically claim objectivity, and may sometimes aspire to it, though their definitions of objectivity inevitably vary with the intentions of their writers. But to assume a posture of seeming objectivity relative to any controverted subject is a very old polemical maneuver. David Hume, in an endnote to his Natural History of Religion (written in 1751 , published in 1779), quotes Chevalier Ramsay, who quotes an imagined Chinese or Indian philosopher’s reaction to Christianity: ‘“The God of the Jews is a most cruel, unjust, partial, and fantastical being … This chosen nation was … the most stupid, ungrateful, rebellious and perfidious of all nations … [God’s son dies to appease his vindictive wrath, but the vast majority of the world are excluded from any benefit. This makes God] … a cruel, vindictive tyrant, an impotent or a wrathful daemon.’” And so on.
Even pious critics seem never to remember that, in the Old Testament, the Jews were talking among themselves, interpreting their own experience to themselves. Every negative thing we know about them, every phrase that is used to condemn them, they supplied, in their incredible self-scrutiny and self-judgment. Who but the ancient Jews would have thought to blame themselves for, in effect, lying along the invasion route of the Babylonians? They preserved and magnified their vision of the high holiness of God by absorbing into themselves responsibility for their sufferings, and this made them passionately self-accusatory, in ways no other people would have thought of being. This incomparable literature would surely have been lost if they had imagined the use it would be put to, and had written to justify themselves and to defend their descendants in the eyes of the nations rather than to ponder their life in openness toward God. By what standard but their own could Israel have been considered ungrateful or rebellious or corrupt? Granting crimes and errors, which they recorded, and preserved and pondered the records of for centuries, and which were otherwise so historically minor that no one would ever have heard of them — how do these crimes compare with those of other peoples, their contemporaries or ours? When Hume wrote, the English gibbets More describes were still as full as ever. The grandeur of the Old Testament, and the fact that such great significance is attached to it, distracts readers from a sense of its unique communal inwardnesss. It is an endless reconciliation achieved at great cost by a people whose relation to God is astonishingly brave and generous. To misappropriate it as a damning witness against the Jews and “the Jewish God” is vulgar beyond belief. And not at all uncommon, therefore. It is useful to consider how the New Testament would read, if it had gone on to chronicle the crusades and the inquisition.
If there is one thing they knew, it was that actions had consequences, even if those consequences seemed remote and only subtly related to the actions that led to those consequences.
In her discussion of both the distortions and lies that are the bread and butter of popular and academic claims about the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish and Christian religions that come from that tradition and the unparalleled self-criticism that is both the glory of that monotheistic tradition and the raw material of those who attack it, she gives a milder version of what the Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, pointing out that it isn't only in the documents Walter Brueggemann is dealing with here that carries prophetic warnings to those who are identified as chosen from among the nations that that doesn't mean they can get away with injustice, internally or externally. In discussing the description of the conquest and subduing of the Canaanites as fund in Joshua, she said.
As ancient narrative, and as history, this story of conquest is certainly the least remarkable part of the Bible, and a very modest event as conquests go, the gradual claiming of an enclave in a territory that would be utterly negligible by the lights of real conquerors such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar or even Ashurbanipal. The suggestion that God was behind it may make it worse than the campaigns of self-aggrandizement that destroyed many larger and greater cities, though it is not clear to me that it should. A consequence which follows from God’s role in the conquest of Canaan, asserted with terrible emphasis in Leviticus and elsewhere, is that God will deal with the Israelites exactly as he has dealt with the Canaanites, casting them out of the land in their turn if they cease to deserve it. Abraham is told in a dream that possession of the promised land will be delayed an astonishing four hundred years until, in effect, the Amorites (that is, Canaanites) have lost their right to it. We Anglo-European invaders do not know yet if we will have four hundred years in this land.
Imagine if our founding documents the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence had dared to give that kind of warning to those intent on founding a new nation, a new order for the ages. Imagine how we would bury that as we did at least as bad and, I'd argue, worse than the Children of Israel did - the form of slavery laid out in The Law of Moses was far, far less horrible than that practiced in the United States PERMITTED TO DO SO BY THE CONSTITUTION. I would argue that the real, though unofficial slavery under Jim Crow was far worse in reality in many respects, not to mention the genocide against the native population of North and South America and elsewhere.
I do believe that one of the things that makes these Scriptures of such enduring interest and importance is just this, their unique example of this level of internal criticism, this self-exposure as constantly failing to come up to the level of their own chosen standard of moral and ethical behavior even as they are the ones who warn themselves of the results of that failure. That is something the United States does to an extent and, perhaps, sometimes, is better for it until the demons of our more typical behavior gain the upper hand as they certainly have done in the period when Republicans, as they have fallen into vulgar and, to a lesser extent ideological materialism, much of that materialism consisting of a debasement of so-called Christianity of the Trumpist white evangelicals and, to some extent, Judaism of the kind exemplified by the Jared Kuschner family and the pimp of Macau, Sheldon Adelson and as allied to the former leader of the state of Israel.
To be continued.
