The Creative Word

Canon as a Model for Biblical Education

Walter Brueggemann, Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451499582
• eBook ISBN: 9781506400242
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Every faith community knows the challenges of inviting new members and the next generation into its shared life without falling into an arid traditionalism or a shallow relativism. Renowned scholar Walter Brueggemann finds a framework for education in the structure of the Hebrew Bible canon, with its assertion of center and limit (in the Torah), of challenge (in the Prophets), and of inquiry (in the Writings). Incorporating the best insights from his own career and from the fields of canonical criticism, Old Testament theology, and pedagogical theory, Brueggemann offers a vision of how the community can draw on the shape of Scripture to educate its members. First published in 1982, The Creative Word is now updated and introduced with a foreword by Amy Erickson of Iliff School of Theology.

3

The Disruption for Justice

“Is There any Word from the Lord?”
(Jeremiah 37:17)

A community that educates its members in the Torah will do them a great service. It will make available a center for life, a core of memory, a focus around which to organize all of experience. But if a community educates only in the Torah, it may also do a disservice to its members. It may nourish them to fixity, to stability that becomes rigidity, to a kind of certitude that believes all of the important questions are settled. The answers need only to be recited again and again.

That is why, alongside of the Torah, there is a second division of the canon. This prophetic part of the canon consists of eight “books,” the four former prophets—Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—and the latter prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve. When we come to the second part of Israel’s canon, it is clear that we face a very different mode of knowledge and a very different substantive claim. In Jer. 18:18, our “presenting text,” the second element in a general summary of Israel’s authoritative teaching is “the word from the prophet.” As is well known among us, the word of the prophet stands in some contrast to the Torah of the priest. We have seen that the Torah deals in that which is normative, known, and given. It answers the child’s question about who we are and what we are about. The answer is already known and settled. The torah provides (or offers) answers about which there is a consensus. It is essentially uncritical or precritical. It does not invite intellectual curiosity, penetration, or analysis. The Torah is not debatable. It states the basis on which analysis and debate can take place. The Torah itself, however, is positioned to be beyond such questioning.

In contrast to all of that, the word of the prophet is something immediate, intrusive, and surprising. It is not normative. It is not known in advance. It is a way of knowledge that is not known until it is uttered. When it is uttered, its function may be to break the Torah, to challenge the consensus, to practice criticism on that which, until now, has been beyond criticism. Much recent scholarship has shown that the prophets depend on and are informed by the Torah.^[1] There is an important dimension of continuity between the Torah and the prophets. This continuity is important for education and for the life of the church. A community illiterate of the Torah will not understand the prophet. But Zimmerli^[2] showed that the prophets use the Torah to argue against the Torah. They not only honor the Torah, but they mean to critique the Torah and move beyond it. Or to say it another way, the Torah is the “Yes” of God to Israel (2 Cor. 1:19). “Yes, I will be your God. Yes, you are my people. Yes, I will be with you.” The prophets add a critical footnote to all of this: “Yes, but what if . . .” Thus there is a tension between Torah and prophets which must always be attended to in education. The tension is between the dialectic of establishing or asserting the consensus, and then raising questions which break or challenge or criticize the consensus for the sake of a new word from the Lord. The two divisions (Torah/prophets) of the canon together suggest that education is the nurture of a restlessness with every old truth for the sake of a new truth that is just breaking upon us.

When we come to the prophetic materials, we are obviously in another world, a strange world. The text which gives us our title is an episode in Jer. 37:16-21. The narrative itself suggests a great deal about how we may understand prophecy. First, there is an encounter with the king at a time of great public crisis. That is when prophecy surfaces. The young king, Jehoiachin, has been exiled to Babylon. Armies are invading, just as Jeremiah said they would. The kingdom of Judah is in great danger. Zedekiah, the uncle of the young king, must now act as king, even though he is no king. As a regent or pretender, he is frightened, vascillating, intimidated, inept, unable to make a decision. He holds all the formal apparatus of power, undoubtedly including limousine and briefcase. But he knows he has no power to act in any way that will impact events. He has lost initiative. This is a characteristic reading of kings in the prophetic literature. Thus the narrative is not a neutral presentation, but in its structuring of the meeting, already makes a prophetic judgment. Kings, according to prophetic literature, are the embodiment of official power and public knowledge. But the prophetic literature is not terribly impressed with public definitions of reality. Kings must not be taken too seriously. Thus education in the prophetic means teaching folks to be suspicious about official truths about fact, knowledge, value, or power.^[3]

The other party to this encounter is Jeremiah the prophet. He is not an impressive figure here. He had announced to any who would listen that the end was coming, the end of the life-world^[4] so carefully constructed by kings in the interest of kings. Not only would Babylon destroy Judah, he said, but this destruction would happen because of Yahweh’s will. God willed the destruction of his special people. How is that for flying in the face of the certitudes of the Torah? You only have I known of all the peoples of the earth (cf. Gen. 18:19). You only have I chosen; therefore . . . (Amos 3:2). The destruction plays from the Torah, but surely moves beyond it. In Jer. 37:13-14, just before our passage, Jeremiah is imprisoned as a deserter. In 38:4, just after our passage, he is accused of treason. So here he is in a dungeon without power, influence, authority, or credentials. He is characteristically in trouble with the authorities. Among the authorities with whom he is in trouble are the teachers of the Torah.^[5]

Being in trouble with the authorities need not mean public demonstrations in the streets, although it may mean that. Being in trouble is about more elemental things, like the formation of an alternative imagination^[6] that never ceases questioning the managers of the Torah, that never concedes ultimate authority to any public claim, and that never fully settles for the “official truth” of the realm.^[7]

So there is an encounter between these two, the king who has no kingly initiative in his hands, and the prophet who is a dangerous person. But the strangeness is in this: the king comes to the prophet. That the king comes is no doubt terribly important, surely a bit of gloating irony on the part of the prophetic narrative. It is not that the prophet goes to confront the king (as with Elijah in 1 Kgs. 18:1). Here the prophet need only wait, for eventually the king will have played out his string. Eventually the king will have no alternative. The one with all the forms of power comes for help to this one who has none of the forms of power. There is in this narrative a radical and remarkable epistemological reversal that we will have to take seriously if we are to understand this second part of the canon. That the movement is from king to prophet is reminiscent of the awesome meeting of Yahweh with Abraham in Gen. 18:22. The narrator there is aware of the nuances of the meeting. The text as we now have it reports, as we might expect, “Abraham stood before the Lord.” That is as we would expect it: human agent before the throne of God. But the scribal evidence is that in the earlier version of that text it said, “The Lord stood before Abraham.” Imagine, the great God stood to be instructed by this father of faith! The text has been changed because the irony of that confrontation was too much to bear. In the analogous meeting in Jeremiah 37, however, the text has not been changed. Of course the person of God is not at issue. But the person and office and claim of the king are very much at issue. Now the king is clearly the suppliant.

The one who is supposed to know is the king. That is the function of the king. He has all the formal channels of intelligence. Yet he comes to this isolated one who has no claim to know anything. The entire narrative (and both parties accept the point) is that knowledge for the crisis is not given in normal channels and by regular means. Pertinent knowledge is given in ways we would rather not accept. The “old truth” over which the king presides is not adequate for the crisis. The “new word” now needed is not easily administered.^[8] It does not conform to the definitional world of the king. There is no reliable one-to-one correlation between the structures of society and the in-breaking of new truth from God. That is the most important critical aspect of this part of the canon. It is hard for us to take. Yet everything is at stake in this claim. We are accustomed to think that there is some match-up between the substance of truth and the structures of authority. The better off we are, educationally and economically, the more we like to rely on the match. So we expect religious leaders to know about the handling of sin. We expect doctors to know most about illness and health. We count on government leaders to know most about such embarrassments as Vietnam and Iraq. And we do believe that somewhere, if we can find them, there are consultants who know the best truth about every problem. The decent ordering of society depends on willingness to credit the authorities with having authority and access to reliable information. When that linkage gets questioned, then everything is at risk. That is what is happening in this dramatic meeting. The leader of the authority structure no longer has access to the truth.

How dramatic and how subversive it is for the king to come to the prophet. He came secretly. The text says “in hiddenness.” Of course he did, like Nicodemus at night (John 3:2). He did not make a public pilgrimage to get advice. He managed to keep his public form intact. But by his coming, he conceded everything to the prophet. That, then, is the claim of this part of the canon—that the public, official ways to life finally cannot deliver. We must await unadministered disruption. The disruptions are unpleasant and unwelcome, but they are the only hope we have in a society hellbent to death.

So the king came with the one question he dare not ask and remain king. “Is there any word from the Lord?” The king now comes as suppliant. The traitor is now recognized as the source of saving knowledge. The prophet must have enjoyed the scene at long last. He is justifiably coy. He says, “There is.” There must have been a pause at that point, a long pause. The prophet knows. The king does not know. The literature savors this moment of deep inversion. The king has all the apparatus of knowledge and knows everything except what he needs to know. Normative, public knowledge is like a fabric of lies fashioned by “the best and the brightest.”^[9]

In the exchange that happens in the text, two things are asserted. First, it is Yahweh who causes things to happen, not Zedekiah or Judah or Babylon or Egypt. The official versions of public life are finally irrelevant. The empty-handed posture of the king is a delegitimation of every earthly authority. The ones charged with knowing do not know. Imagine having that in the canon! Imagine teaching it in the church. Every form of human knowledge and human power is provisional. Second, the narrative asserts that Jeremiah, the imprisoned traitor, has access to Yahweh’s intent. He is a nobody whom the king thought he had disposed of. But Jeremiah is not so readily disposed of. In this drama the king is seen to be no king. He cannot do what must be done to rule. He does not know. He cannot decide. He must go hat (crown?) in hand to the prophet. So we are at a summit meeting between the powerful king who is powerless and the powerless prophet who has power over the realm. The first here are embarrassingly the last, and the last first. The humbled one is exalted. The exalted one is humbled. And there is a claim here about knowledge and modes of knowing.

At least three other incidents speak to our epistemological concern regardin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the 1982 edition
• Canon and the Educational Repertoire
• The Disclosure of Binding
• The Disruption for Justice
• The Discernment of Order
• Obedience as a Mode of Knowledge
• Abbreviations
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture References