Reality, Grief, Hope

Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467440363
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione, politica e Stato

Walter Brueggemann is one of the most highly regarded Old Testament scholars of our time; talk-show host Krista Tippett has even called him "a kind of theological rock star." In this new book Brueggemann incisively probes our society-in-crisis from the ground up.Pointing out striking correlations between the catastrophe of 9/11 and the destruction of ancient Jerusalem, Brueggemann shows how the prophetic biblical response to that crisis was truth-telling in the face of ideology, grief in the face of denial, and hope in the face of despair. He argues that the same prophetic responses are urgently required from us now if we are to escape the deathliness of denial and despair.Brueggemann's Reality, Grief, Hope boldly confronts the dominant forces of our time, taking on principalities and powers that vie for our souls, and calls the church to courageous action.

II

Reality amid Ideology

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue
It isn’t very hard to do
And you’ll find happiness without an end
Whenever you pretend.

Brenda Lee

The destruction of Jerusalem in 587 b.c.e. at the hands of the Babylonians constituted the defining experience of ancient Israel given us in the Old Testament. This was “a supreme social and, therefore, religious catastrophe.”1 That destruction shattered the socio-­political life of the community and destroyed the social institutions that ordered that society. More important, that destruction reached into the depth of Israel’s theological understanding and called into question the most elemental theological certitudes that Israel had imagined. What follows here is a reflection upon that crisis and the engagement made with it by the prophets, in anticipation and in response to it.

I will propose in what follows, moreover, that in our contemporary social crisis in the United States, the destruction of the World Trade Center and the intended destruction of the Pentagon on 9/11 together constituted a quite parallel experience in this country. On that day the attacks not only caused many deaths, but disrupted the economic life of our society. More than that, I propose, the attacks reached to the depth of theological self-­understanding in the United States as a nation and called into question the most elemental theological certitudes that we have been able to imagine. Thus the symbolic import of that attack is more elemental and more urgent than the visible, physical-­political concreteness. It is for that reason that the event continues to draw our attention and our pathos. In what follows I will consider the engagement of contemporary prophetic voices with that event, both in anticipation and in response to it.

I.

Royal Jerusalem in ancient Israel was deeply enthralled to an ideology of chosenness. The Jerusalem destroyed in 587 b.c.e. was a product and carrier of the elemental conviction of Israel — and more specifically of the urban elite in the Jerusalem establishment — that it was indeed YHWH’s chosen people and so enjoyed the full commitment of YHWH as patron and guarantor. That conviction of chosenness had old rootage in the traditions of Israel, however one assesses the historicity of that tradition. Michael Walzer has most recently reviewed the double rootage of chosenness and covenant in the tradition. On the one hand, the covenant YHWH made with Abraham is a “covenant of the flesh” having to do with the family (“seed”) of Abraham.2 It is often noted that this covenant is based on the unconditional promise of God to Abraham, an unconditionality that was later important to the Jerusalem establishment. On the other hand, the covenant made at Sinai was made with “a mixed multitude,” not an identifiable family group, and is a “covenant of law.”3 As is often noted of the Sinai covenant, it is conditional, based on the defining “if” of covenantal obedience (Exodus 19:5). Walzer terms the first of these a “birth model” of covenant that favors “nativism and exclusion.”4 The second he terms the “adherence model” that offers “a politics of openness and welcome, proselytism and expansion.” This covenant can be entered into by the consent of those who had not previously joined, by agreeing to the terms and conditions of the covenant. Such adherence is evident, for example, in the negotiations of Joshua 24. The two covenants together constitute the basis of Israel’s theological self-­understanding.

That covenantal self-­understanding, moreover, was dramatically encoded in the covenantal rhetoric of Deuteronomy, a tradition surely formulated in the middle years of the Davidic dynasty:

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7:6)

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 14:2)

The horizon of Deuteronomy is largely committed to the “cov­enant of law”:

Today you have obtained the Lord’s agreement: to be your God; and for you to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, his commandments, and his ordinances, and to obey him. Today the Lord has obtained your agreement: to be his treasured people, as he promised you, and to keep his commandments; for him to set you high above all nations that he has made, in praise and in fame and in honor; and for you to be a people holy to the Lord your God, as he promised. (Deuteronomy 26:17-19)

An effort is made in the tradition to connect the covenant of Sinai to the promises to Abraham, thus coalescing the tradition with a coherent claim (see Deuteronomy 6:10; 9:5, 27; 29:13; 30:20). In this consolidation of the notion of chosenness, it was not necessary, so it seems, to sort out the distinctions between the two traditions. In its various nuances, the tradition consistently attested the peculiar status of Israel as YHWH’s chosen people.

These traditions, as we have them and without regard to what they may have been in their origin, have now been filtered through the forceful claims of the Jerusalem establishment. It is impossible to overstate the power of the Jerusalem establishment in galvanizing and making normative the conviction of being chosen for covenant. Thus I suggest that the use made of these old claims by the Jerusalem establishment amounts to the articulation of an ideology that would frame the life, faith, and imagination of the community and would consequently shape policy. I use the term “ideology,” slippery as it is, to indicate the defining importance of the memory of chosenness for the Jerusalem establishment in giving legitimacy to its power and its way in the world. As is well known, Karl Marx took “ideology” to refer to “false consciousness,” a misconstrual of reality to serve particular interests.5 Paul Ricoeur, more benignly, has understood “ideology” to refer to any framing story of a society, without reference to its legitimacy or distorting function.6 I intend here to use the term in the way that Marx understood it, so that the old traditions of chosenness are utilized to legitimate the socio-­economic, political, liturgic claims of the Jerusalem establishment. I suggest that Solomon’s transport of the ark of the covenant into the city and into his temple is a dramatic indication of the way in which the old tradition has been co-­opted for pragmatic use in Jerusalem (see 1 Kings 8:1-13). The ark is the icon of the old covenantal tradition vouching for the presence of YHWH; but that icon has now been preempted by the Jerusalem establishment as an emblem of its legitimacy. What are legitimated in that act are the power, privilege, and entitlement of the urban elite who clustered around the king and who lived off the produce of the peasant economy that surrounded the city. The enumeration of the tax districts of Solomon (1 Kings 4:7-19) and the inventory of consumption in Solomon’s entourage (1 Kings 4:22-23) evidence that the urban establishment lived very well off of that peasant produce.

In the development of the tradition, however, that socioeconomic advantage is effectively disguised in the tradition that came to function in liturgical settings. I suggest that the following texts evidence the “ideological cover-­up” that intentionally hid the social-­economic reality that only belatedly and negatively erupted among the peasants.7

Psal...