Encountering Walter Brueggermann

Posted on the Theotalk Listserv in 2005.  Brueggemann was a major influence on my faith journey at a critical point in time.

Walter Brueggemann’s theology strength, in my view, in addition to his profound understanding of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is his knowledge of post-reformation theology and his powerful exegesis, as exemplified in his various collections of essays.  Also, extremely provocative is his tapping into the imagination as the most potent means of linking the biblical text to the ethos of the contemporary setting.  In this respect he may be viewed as the apostle to the postmodern secularists.  In this capacity he would play a formidable role in the UCC God is still speaking campaign http://www.stillspeaking.com/intro1.htm. For those on the margins of faith and doubt, WB, on personal testimony, offers an extremely powerful way of re-entering the strange new world within the Bible that for many, more dogmatic approaches would not have been convincing.  The seeming irrelevance of the Bible is a phenomenon that shapes the thinking of more than a few who attend mainline (or perhaps even evangelical) congregations, who, at some level, are still seeking a Word where one has not been found for a long time.  The deep influence of secularization, even in the midst of our congregations, is a factor that cannot be lightly dismissed, in which the pastoral call very well may be, in WB’s terms, that “funding” of the Word of God, one verse, one miracle, one revelation at a time, in which to attempt more could very well turn into sterile bibliolatry.  I hope it is clear that I am speaking at the level of reception and I am speaking for some and not for all. 

 In any event WB played a very similar role with me that Jurgen Moltmann did some years earlier in opening up the hermeneutical possibility that God could speak a vital Word through his text.  I spent a good part of two years pouring over everything I could get my hands on by WB. In the process of following the trajectory of his interpretations, I also read substantial portions of the OT.

 I also experienced some limitations, such as WB’s privileging of some texts over the others, which I interpret as at least partially contradicting the spirit of 2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”  While WB might have viewed it as ironic, my re-encountering the Bible through his theology pushed me toward an evangelical faith retrieval of some enduring stability, which I needed to reclaim if the Christian faith were going to prevail in my life in a compellingly vital way.  This retrieval— illuminated, as far as I could discern by the Holy Spirit—has depended, in no small measure, on the capacity to embrace the Bible full without privileging certain texts over others, as the very source of my ultimate vocabulary. 

 The second, and related limitation I find in WB, is, notwithstanding the “existential” power of his “funding” of postmodernity one text, one miracle, one revelation at a time, is that I simply could not fathom how, at least, I could construct a stable religious life from that basis, or how a congregation could establish an ecclesiology which could mediate the religious needs and passions of a congregation from week to week.

 I could imagine, in theory, a postmodern/post-Christian congregation, which gathered week-to-week from their travails within the secular city.  This ideal congregation would encounter the Word once again through the imaginative dynamic of the charismatic preacher who would reach those in the pews through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, where the Word would come alive, once again one verse, one miracle one revelation at a time.  I do believe this is a place where many people, and perhaps congregations in such denominations like the United Church of Christ are, and in this respect, the voice coming out of the theology of WB may very well be the authentic Word of God that such a congregation may need to hear.  Interpreted from this vantage pint WB is an authentic UCC voice that needs to be thoroughly heard and respected within the Confessing Christ network, at least as a viable Kairotic option of where a certain sector of the faith community may be in our secular era of modernity/ postmodernity  http://confessingchrist.net/.

 Yet, if taken as the gospel itself, or as THE authoritative theology of our times, WB’s vision could also be viewed as extremely repressive and oppressive to boot.  The possibility for a thoroughly biblically based evangelical encounter through the likes of Bloesch, Vanhoozer, Barth, Henry, Fackre, Lints, and others is also a critical need which has been profoundly repressed within the mainline denominations going back to the struggles with fundamentalism at the beginning of the 20th century.  In order to get at the root of these issues, the historical dynamics that lent them their intensity would need to be imaginatively re-encountered and reconstructed.  That is work for another message. 

 

Dialogue on Philosopher, John Dewey and Religion

 This is from a listerv discussion that I carried out with a now, unknown interlocuter on the  relationship between the traditional orthodox Christian understanding of God the pragmatic philosopher, John Dewey's appropriation of the term, "god," that he sought to interpret through exclusively on naturalistic terms. The dialogue also references on Dewey's 1884 essay, "On the Obligation to Know God," which he wrote in his avowedly Christian faith, which he later abandoned. I am pressing Dewey to own that obligation. 

BD: Dewey said that we have no warrant to believe in a supernatural God, and so we shouldn’t. 

 GD:  “No warrant” is a strong claim for a consistent fallibilist.  Agnosticism with an open mind would be the more reasonable position.  In terms of warrant, as a fallible presupposition, at least in terms of a biblically based belief (“we see in a glass darkly”), we have the witness of the Bible writers themselves, and the continuation of the basic biblical narrative, including many autobiographies, which range over hundreds of years over a wide geographic span.  This includes highly informed contemporary expositors, many of whom have grappled profoundly with the relationship between faith (what the NT describes as “the faith that was once delivered to the saints,” Jude, vs 3) and the challenges of modernity/postmodernity like N.T. Wright. http://www.ntwrightpage.com/. I do no offer this as proof.  I do offer it in light of your claim of “no warrant,” what the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews refers to as “a mighty cloud of witnesses” (Heb 11:1).

 BD: Why shouldn’t Dewey “work against” theism if he believed it wrong?  You could say that anyone who expressed himself strongly is unreasonably prejudiced against the belief he opposed. 

 GD:  No problem there, but in doing so Dewey’s concept of religion, and even “the religious,” at least from the perspective of radical monotheism and 2000-2500 years of history is highly truncated.  If he described what he was getting at as “plenitude of being” I would have no objection.  And then when he injects the term “God” to define either the operation beneath the formation of the more “inclusive whole,” or the inclusive whole as such (I’m not sure), then I object to his naturalistic appropriation of the concept of God, which in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam means something fundamentally different than what Dewey was getting at.

 BD: I agree with Dewey: belief in the supernatural is not just a wrong opinion, it is a dangerous one that has caused much mischief.

 GD:  As a fallibalist, it would be illegitimate for Dewey to have made such a claim, which is not the same as identifying certain problems with traditional religious beliefs—traditions that at least in part have evolved a great deal through history while maintaining an underlying identifiable and durable framework.  Religion can be dangerous.  So can atheism and agnosticism.  So can life.  Still, we need to decide and attempt to live by the consequences and implications of our choices.  Moreover, notwithstanding certain abuses, which would pertain to many areas of life, I submit that it is doctrinaire simply to assert flat out that religion, ipso facto, is dangerous, or for that matter, wrong.  From a knowledge perspective, a questioning agnosticism would seem to me the more reasonable stance.  Even then, “prejudices” are unavoidable.  Hans Georg Gadamar as quoted from Truth and Method gets at this:

 Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth.  In fact, the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience.  Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world.  They are simply conditions whereby we experience something—whereby what we encounter says something to us.  This formulation certainly does not mean that we are enclosed within a wall of prejudices and only let through the narrow portals those things that can produce a pass saying, “Nothing new will be said here.”  Instead we welcome just that guest who promises something new to our curiosity.

 BD: Why criticize Dewey for not reading theologians if he knew that they supported the concept of a supernatural God?  Do you think if he had (assuming he didn’t) it would that have invalidated his position? 

 GD: If religion was his topic of focus why wouldn’t he take a serious look at what various contemporary theologians have written?  By not doing so he severely limited the range of the scope of his probing. In terms of your second question, it could have even strengthened his argument, but in any event would have forced him to have made his case in response to 20th century theological perspectives of some substantive worth rather than the straw men of his caricature.  He might have been re-converted.  While this may seem facetious, the prospect is based on the assumption that Dewey, at some level repressed, or at least profoundly sublimated the obligation of knowledge of God, which, if he lent his mind, heart, strength, and soul to it an empathetic reading of Barth’s, The Epistle to the Romans http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195002946/103-0467076-4409414?v=glance&n=283155 might have re-ignited. Greater miracles of such reversals have been known to have happened.  Of course, by that time Dewey was in his anti-German phase, but that’s another matter that Jim Good describes in the last chapter of his excellent new book, A Search for Unity in Diversity:  The “Permanent Hegelian Deposit” in the Philosophy of John Dewey.

 BD: Did Barth publish empirical data? 

 GD:  I’m not sure.  I suppose that would depend in part on definition.  I can say that in his multi-volume theological texts he examined a great many topics in considerable detail and knew a fair amount about the intellectual currents of his time, particularly Feurbach Marx, Nietzche, and Freud, as well as the prevailing tenets Protestant liberalism, both of which his “neo-orthodox” faith sought to address.  Perhaps he was empirically-focused based on the subject matter of his topic, in an analogous way, say to Dewey’s best works http://www.island-of-freedom.com/BARTH.HTM.

BD: Your position reminds me of Dosteovky’s “Grand Inquisitor” who told Jesus the people needed someone to tell them what to do.  Dewey would say we should persuade people to think clearly without bias, then enough people would accept the best morality of the situation.  Dewey had trust in the common people. 

 GD: Christianity is a lot more complex than that, which includes very clear thinking, personal responsibility, and highly focused commitment.  In terms of bias, at some level, in the Gadamerian sense, it is unavoidable, which is obviously the case with Dewey.  Specifically, he had a bias toward naturalism and a bias against revealed religion, including the religion in which he was raised, and which at least partially formed his early adulthood, a viewpoint capsulated in his talk on “The Obligation of Knowledge of God.” A fair reading of the New Testament would show a Christian vision. in which the world was turned upside down.  The Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus the Christ is anything but elitist, a reversal Nietzsche could not grasp, particularly in his analysis of Paul.  While Christ and the early church preached to and healed the poor Jesus did not romanticize them.  Rather, he brought “good news” to rich and poor alike, but only by entering into the kingdom that he preached, by the narrow gate.

 

Faith and Politics: Contrastive Perspectives

  This was initially printed in my hometown newspaper, the East Hartford Gazette

A few weeks ago, the East Hartford Gazette published a letter written by a self-identified Christian who expressed his views on the critical issues that established his political values in determining which candidate best supported his positions. I am grateful for this writer for identifying the importance of public issues in shaping his faith and in their significance in relation to the political climate of our times. I also admire the writer’s civility in expressing his views and in honoring the confidentiality of the local politicians he contacted to obtain their perspective on his views.

The writer identified three central issues that formed his public theology: abortion, homosexuality, and “religious freedom.” All these topics can be debated within Christianity, as well as throughout US society through a more pluralistic set of perspectives. The positions argued for by the writer contain considerable cultural force because of their central role within the religious right as a powerful social movement, rooted in a morally absolutist frame of reference, which I believe are not central to the primary teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, as reflected in the Sermon on the Mount.

An adequate discussion of the letter writer’s position requires more space than I can respond to here. On abortion, I can only acknowledge that a fetus, even at the earliest stages, is, in some respect, a form of human life. Five matters remain disputable: whether a fetus is an “unborn child,” whether the legal status of a human being starts at birth or conception, whether the legal elimination of abortion is the best and only legitimate way of addressing this issue, whether one can personally oppose abortion while accepting choice as legally legitimate, and whether legal priority should be granted to a woman’s right to establish her own reproductive freedom.

My point is that these issues are under debate across the faith-based sector, in which there is no singular Christian perspective on them. As with abortion, so it is a similarly complex matter regarding homosexuality and what is referred to as “religious freedom,” the specifics of which I leave for another discussion. I do not reject, so much, the validity underlying a given stance on any of these issues—though I question some of these points of view more than others—than the intellectual certainty and moral absolutism on which they are typically held.

I view these public stances as ultimately secondary matters, which require considerable probing from a variety of ethical, legal, and theological perspectives when contrasted to the primary ones of faith on the core relationship between God, Christ, and humanity in regard to matters of temporal and eternal destiny.  When such secondary matters as these are so held as primary, they are given a false power they do not merit. To be clear, it is not so much a particular view that concerns me—even ones with which I heartily disagree—as to the unconditional manner in which they are held, which I view as an attempt to attribute divine authority for positions that are not meant to bear that much baggage. As implied above, the views expressed by the writer are at the center of an ideological framework grounded in the merger between a political and religious fundamentalism of an extreme conservative ideology extending back to the early Reagan era, which has linked faithfulness to Christ with allegiance to the Republican Party.

My own political beliefs are based on a different set of values, focusing on social and economic justice, racial equality, the importance of responsible governmental regulation to offset the undue influence of an unregulated corporate sector, the need for an effective long-range response to the environmental crisis, and immigration reform. To this last issue, I include a robust refugee policy reflective of the vast financial and geographic resources of the US, our historical legacy as a nation of immigrants, and as one reasoned response to the crisis that millions of people face throughout the world provoking them to leave their homelands amid much turmoil and oppression.

The formation of my political beliefs was rooted in an educational framework that developed before my conversion to Christianity in 1972. These views were largely reinforced by my religious values, as reflected in certain gospel teachings in support of the poor and the outcast, as well as to themes related to loving the world and social justice pervasive throughout the Bible.  Like those of the letter writer, my views are also contestable.  Also, like him, I maintain that the political beliefs expressed by the various constituencies throughout the household of faith are worthy of public scrutiny given their potential influence throughout the body politic, even if they cannot carry the theological weight certain advocates on both sides of the political terrain would like to attribute to them.