Tenacious Solidarity

Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy

Walter Brueggemann, Davis Hankins

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781506447704
• eBook ISBN: 9781506447711
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Tenacious Solidarity features essays and new writings from 2014 to 2018. As all of Walter Brueggemann's writing is, the chapters are deeply biblical while also concerned with the identities, practices, and obligations of religious communities in contemporary contexts within the United States. Brueggemann consistently attempts to weave the biblical texts--vested as they are with the authority of a storyteller--into the deep contours of his readers' experiences, in order to foster a tenacious solidarity that might overcome both the psychic numbness cultivated by a 24-hour news cycle as well as the anxious possessiveness nurtured by so many privatized spiritualities. Brueggemann brings the "transformative potential" of the biblical texts to bear on critical contemporary contexts, including but not limited to economic disparities, racial injustice and white supremacy, climate and care for creation, and the power of memory and mentoring. He delves deeply in the Psalms, which he says, "provides a foundational script for living into the fullest and deepest realities of human existence." And he draws from the Prophets his foundational concept of totalism, which he defines as "automated fragmentation of social life such that we habitually and callously disregard our relations with others."

IV

Tradition, Memory, and Identity

12

Memory (I): Amnesia and the
Need to Remember

This chapter was originally given at a colloquium at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, on April 20, 2015. The title of the colloquium, organized by Dr. Erskine Clarke, was “The Church Facing the Future: Memory, Hope, and Obedience.”

Another characteristic of this crushing form of economic Darwinism is that it thrives on a kind of social amnesia that erases critical thought, historical analysis, and any understanding of broader systemic relations.^[1]

Jesus told a series of kingdom parables. Then he asked his disciples, “Have you understood all of this?” And they answer, “Yes.” They answer tersely and unambiguously. And then he took them to the next level:

Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. (Matt 13:52)

He characterizes discipleship as an exercise in agile hermeneutical imagination, a movement of old and new, of tradition and vision. And now for our context I propose it is an agile process of remembering and forgetting for the sake of obedient newness. The aim of such obedient agility is to serve the kingdom of heaven, that is, participate in the coming rule of the God of the gospel in the world. Such participation requires schooling, in the NRSV, being “trained.” Or better, being “discipled.” The process of old/new, tradition/imagination is not an obvious or natural activity; it requires intentionality and discipline. I take this process of “old/new” as the subject of our reflection in these days. It is clear that some of us would prefer to keep drawing out the old in resistance to the new; some of us would prefer to embrace the new and move away from what is old as quickly as possible. Jesus’s terse comment, however, precludes both temptations and summons his followers to the more difficult and challenging enterprise of a both/and rather than an either/or. The practice of old and new as a both/and is not a finger exercise or an experiment in cleverness. It is an urgent preoccupation for participation in the kingdom. When the disciples answered, “Yes,” they little understood what was required of them.

I

In ancient Israel, the endless challenge was the articulation and maintenance of a distinct identity in cultural contexts that wanted, whenever possible, to nullify that distinct identity. In the premonarchical period, in the wake of the exodus, the pressure of Pharaoh on the one hand and the seduction of Canaan on the other worked powerfully against a distinct covenantal identity. Israel wanted always to return to the reliable world of Pharaoh and his fleshpots. Israel found it often compelling to go after other gods in the land. It was the tradition, wrought through the steadiness of Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, that preserved distinctiveness.

In the monarchical period, the problem was internal to Israel. The establishment of Jerusalem, with king, temple, and surplus wealth, always wanted to be “like the nations” with a predatory economy sanctioned by the great state myths reflected in the “Songs of Zion.” It was the sustained effort of the prophetic tradition that kept summoning Israel back to its odd identity with all of its socioethical implications.

In the vexed exilic/postexilic periods, it was the relentless force of empire that wanted to undo Israelite distinctiveness. In sequence the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and finally the Roman Empire with its overlay of Hellenistic culture found Jewish identity to be a deep inconvenience. As a result, political pressure and cultural expectation wanted to make Jewish oddity at least an embarrassment if not unbearable. We may take the reported temptation of the Maccabean period to “undo circumcision” as a durable epitome of the erosion of distinct identity that was under immense cultural pressure (1 Macc 1:15).

In the face of premonarchical, monarchical, and postmonarchical pressure against peculiar identity, an urgent task in the community was to maintain a distinct identity and vocation that had theological rootage and socioethical implications. It is evident that the primary resource for such maintenance of identity and vocation was narrative saturation, sustained, intentional remembering in which the lines between educational inculcation and liturgical reperformance were completely blurred or disregarded.^[2] The leadership responsible for this distinct identity—which we may regard as nearly fanatical—concluded that narrative reiteration was crucial, because such narrative testimony focused on the particular in defiance of imperial universals that dismissed the remembered particularity as impossible. Thus, nurture through educational inculcation and liturgy was taken seriously in order that the people not be embarrassed about the claims of particularity that were in reality embarrassing in a more urbane universalizing venue. So the teachers endlessly attested of Passover:

When you come into the land that the Lord will give you as he has promised, you shall keep this observance. And when your children ask you, “What do you mean by this observance?” you shall say, “It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses. (Exod 12:25–27)

The point of Passover is to raise the question to which the narrative gives the answer. Parents, moreover, are recruited into saturation education:

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you arise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them, as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut 6:6–9)

The intent is that the recital will provide a narrative horizon and plot for the children. In the narrative at the entry into the land, moreover, one can see a process of typology at work in which “this” is offered as a way to reiterate “that.” Thus, in the confusing report on the stones for the crossing of the Jordan River into the land of promise, Joshua can say:

When your children ask their parents in time to come, “What do these stones mean?” then you shall let your children know, “Israel crossed over the Jordan here on dry ground.” For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you to you cross over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we crossed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, and so that you may fear the Lord your God forever.” (Josh 4:21–24)

The process of question and answer is the same. But the interpretive clue is “as,” what Garrett Green has called the “copula of imagination” in which the crossing of the Jordan is an occasion for recalling the crossing of the Red Sea, so that the performed narrative becomes a cluster of narratives, all of which together attest a distinct identity with socioethical implications.^[3] The reiteration and reperformance of that cluster were a primary form of resistance against the pressure and seduction of empire that wanted always to refuse the inconvenience of communities of particularity.

II

The remembered, remembering narrative of Israel, however, is not as straightforward as we might wish. The dynamic and complex traditioning process that Gerhard von Rad has articulated so masterfully has, since von Rad, become even more complex and problematic.^[4] Not so long ago, thanks to the Albright school, the tradition to be remembered seemed fixed and reliable.^[5] Now, however, in a season of skepticism, the matter is acutely complex. Beginning with John Van Seters’s proposal that the ancestral narrative of Abraham comes very late, current majority critical opinion has come to judge that the early traditions lack early historical rootage.^[6] Specifically, scholars judge that it is in the Persian postexilic period that Israel did much of its creative work in formulating the tradition that it situated and came to think of as old. Whether the material originated then or not, it was a time of immense creative generativity in shaping the tradition as a usable memory. To be sure, such a critical judgment about the memory is unnerving for those who hope for a flat, fixed past. But given Jesus’s mandate to his disciples concerning interpretive agility, we may be grateful for current critical judgment.

1. The idea of a belated generativity reminds us that the remembered tradition is dynamic and has vitality.

2. The idea of belated generativity asserts that every “present form” of the tradition in some part is evoked by context and circumstance, so that we may every time anticipate some acute contemporaneity in the tradition.

3. The idea of a belated generativity asserts that in any generation we are not simply passive recipients of the tradition, but, as Ricoeur has seen, we have a voice in constructing how the past goes.^[7] Or, as my friend Peter Block has said of the Soviet Union, “the past is quite unpredictable.” But of course much of the memory of the Old Testament is open to reformulation in which the new generation always has a voice. Or, as Moses asserts in Deuteronomy:

Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here, alive today. (Deut 5:3)

This sequence of terse words, “us, all of us, here, alive, today,” bespeaks intensity and urgency beyond any settled tradition.

4. The idea of a belated generativity means that the memory is indeed “thick” in the sense of Clifford Geertz and George Lindbeck, who, following Geertz can say:

Thick description, it should be noted, is not to be confused with Baconian empiricism, with sticking to current facts. It is rather the full range of the interpretive medium which needs to be exhibited, and because this range in the case of religion is potentially all-encompassing, description has a creative aspect. There is, indeed, no more demanding exercise of the inventive and imaginative powers than to explore how a language, culture, or religion may ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Editor’s Preface: Tenacious Solidarity against Rapacious Totalisms
• Preface
• Economics and Social Possibilities
• Relinquishing Ethnocentric Ideologies for Sustainable Societies
• Creation and Climate
• Tradition, Memory, and Identity
• Best Practices for Tenacious Solidarity
• Appendixes: Futures in Biblical Studies
• Appendix A: Prophetic Studies
• Appendix B: Biblical Theology: Testimony vs. Totalism
• Appendix C: Biblical Interpretation
• Index of Biblical Passages
• Index of Names