Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience

Walter Brueggemann, K. C. Hanson, Hanson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781610972345, 9781498213608
• eBook ISBN: 9781621890638
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

"Those who serve as truth-tellers in the church, like those who listen to the truth-telling in the church, are a mix of yearning and fearfulness, of receptiveness and collusion. In the end, the work of truth-telling is not to offer a new package of certitudes that displaces old certitudes. This truth to be uttered and acted, rather, is the enactment and conveyance of this Person who is truth, so that truth comes as bodily fidelity that stays reliably present to the pain of the world." --from the Preface

1

Duty as Delight and Desire

We may as well concede at the outset that we live, all of us, in a promiscuous, self-indulgent society that prizes autonomy.1 As a consequence, “obedience” is a tough notion, which we settle mostly either by the vaguest of generalizations, or by confining subject matter to those areas already agreed upon.

Two Dimensions of the Problem

The fearfulness and avoidance of obedience, as conventionally understood among us, has in my judgment two root causes, both of which are alive and powerful, even though not often frontally articulated.

The first dimension of the problem is the Augustinian-Lutheran dichotomy of “grace and law,” which runs very deep in Western theology. In his treatment of Paul, Augustine considerably upped the stakes of the issue in his crushing opposition to Pelagius, and Luther solidified that theological claim by boldly inserting the word “alone” in his reading of Paul, thus “grace alone” It is clear that by “law” Luther meant many different things, seemingly focused especially on life apart from the gospel. The result, however, has been a remarkable aversion to “works,” as though obedience to the commands of God, that is, performances of “works,” is in and of itself a denial of the gospel. Luther is of course much more subtle and knowing than this, but he has thus been conventionally interpreted. The outcome has been a notion of gospel without demand, a notion that plays well in a “therapeutic” society.

An aspect of this strong dichotomy has been a latent but pervasive anti-Jewish stereotype. Thus “law” is easily assigned to the “Jews,” and the Old Testament becomes a book of commandments that has been “superseded” by the free gospel of Christ. Such a common maneuver of course fails to understand the core dynamic of covenantal faith shared by Jews and Christians, and inevitably feeds anti-Semitism.2 It is sufficient here simply to observe that such a reading of the gospel of Paul, powerfully reinforced by a sustained German-Lutheran reading of Romans, is at least open to question. Krister Stendahl has proposed that Augustine and Luther have massively misread Paul, who is concerned not with “guilt,” but with Jewish-Christian relations in the early church.3 And E. P. Sanders has contributed greatly to the exposition of Stendahl’s proposal, so that this governing dichotomy needs to be seriously challenged and reconsidered.4 The task of such reconsideration is a difficult one, given the force of these old categories.

The second dimension of our problem is the Enlightenment notion of unfettered freedom of “Man Come of Age.” Indeed, the central program of the Enlightenment has been to slough off any larger authority to which obedience is owed, and that with special reference to the traditional authority of the church.5 This notion of freedom is already rooted in Descartes’s establishment of the human doubter as the norm of truth. Locke contributed to the cause with his notion of the human person as a rational, free decider, and Kant completed the “Turn Toward the Subject,” in making the human autonomous actor the one who will shape functional reality. This Enlightenment ideology has received its popular form in a Freudian theory of repression in which human maturation is the process of emancipation from communal authority that is extrinsic to the individual person and therefore fundamentally alien to mature humanness. Thus the human goal is movement beyond any restraints that come under the category of repression.

It turns out, of course, that such a model of unfettered freedom is an unreachable mirage. The individual person is never so contextless, and in the end the fantasy of such freedom has culminated in the most choking of conformities.6 There is, to be sure, an element of truth in Enlightenment models of liberation, but such a notion is almost always insufficiently dialectical to bear upon the actual human situation.

These theological-theoretical matters may seem quite remote from the concrete task of “preaching obedience.” In my judgment, however, pastor and congregation must engage these powerful (even if hidden) categories and assumptions in critical and knowing ways, in order to face the commands of God honestly. The reason they must be faced is that they are concretely powerful, even if mostly unarticulated. It is false to take the “law/grace” dichotomy at face value, as though the creator of heaven and earth has no overriding, non-negotiable intention for God’s creatures. It is equally false to accept the phoney freedom of autonomy, and find ourselves more deeply enmeshed in the commands of death. Only the exposure of these false articulations can permit the community of the gospel to discern and accept its true position before God, who loves, delivers, summons, and commands.7

Conditional Relationships

A rereading of the gospel of grace and a reconsideration of Enlightenment ideology, in my judgment, will lead to a stunning and compelling fresh awareness: our most serious relationships, including our relationship to the God of the gospel, are, at the same time, profoundly unconditional and massively conditional. One can, I submit, test this odd claim, both in terms of our normative theological materials and in terms of our lived experience. Such a notion of course violates all of our either/or Aristotelian logic, but our most treasured relations are not subject to such an exclusionary logic.

Much Old Testament scholarship (including some of my own) has championed the notion that there are two traditions of covenant in the Old Testament, one unconditional (Abraham and David) and one conditional (Moses).8 While this is critically correct, our theological task is to try to understand these textual claims taken all together.9 The evidence to which I am drawn suggests in powerful ways that “conditional/unconditional” and “law/grace” are unworkable categories for understanding our most serious and treasured relationships. And these misguided polarities create great crises for understanding the odd dialectical character of the gospel.

We may take as emblematic of such relationships that are neither conditional nor unconditional, as does the Old Testament texts, the relations of husband-wife and parent-child. In either of these at its best, it is clear that the relationship is unconditional, that is, there is no circumstance under which the relationship will be voided. And yet in these very same relationships, there are high and insistent “expectations” of the other which shade over into demands.10 And when these expectations are not met, there may be woundedness, alienation, or even rejection, even though the wounded party is powerfully committed.11 The truth is that there is something inscrutable about such relationships that are both conditional and unconditional; or perhaps we should say neither unconditional nor conditional. If one seeks to make one term or the other final in characterizing such a relationship, we destroy the inscrutability that belongs to and defines the relationship.12

It may indeed be regarded as a far leap from our experience with such relationships as husband-wife and parent-child to our relation with God. It is of course a leap made artistically and boldly in the text itself. It will, moreover, be objected that one cannot reason by analogy or metaphor about God, and yet it is the only language we have for this most serious and freighted of all relationships. Moreover, we must ask why the poets of ancient Israel chose to speak this way about God. I suggest that such images are utilized because the poets who have given us our primal language for God are seeking a way to voice an inscrutability that overrides our logic and is more like the inscrutability of serious relationships than it is like anything else.13

The covenant God has with us, with Israel, with the world, is a command-premised relation. The covenant is based in command, and God expects to be obeyed.14 There are, moreover, sanctions and consequences of disobedience that cannot be avoided, even as there are gifts and joys along with obedience.15 The torah is given for guidance, so that Israel (and all of Israel’s belated heirs) are “clued in” to the defining expectations of this relationship. The torah makes clear that the holy “Other” in this relationship is an Agent with will and purpose that must be taken seriously and cannot be disregarded or mocked.

Thus it is a covenantal relation which is the “underneath category” to which “grace and law,” “conditional and unconditional” are subsets.16 The “Other” in this relation is a real, live Other who initiates, shapes, watches over, and cares about the relation. The “Other” is both mutual with us and incommensurate with us, in a way not unlike a parent is mutual and incommensurate with a child, or a teacher is mutual and incommensurate with a student. This means that the relation is endlessly open, alive, giving and demanding, and at risk. This Holy Other may on occasion act in stunning mutuality, being with and for the second party, and so draw close in mercy and compassion, in suffering and forgiveness. It is, however, this same God who may exhibi...

Table of contents

• Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Duty as Delight and Desire
• Chapter 2: I Will Do It . . . But You Go
• Chapter 3: Mission as Hope in Action
• Chapter 4: The Proclamation of Resurrection in the Old Testament
• Chapter 5: The Commandments and Liberated, Liberating Bonding
• Chapter 6: Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience
• Chapter 7: Truth-Telling Comfort
• Chapter 8: “Until” . . . Endlessly Enacted, Now Urgent
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Names