Living Wittily

Walter Brueggeman: For the Bible tells me,.....not so!

Do we tell the Bible what it is, or does it tell us who we are? 

Do we tell the Bible what it's for, or does it tell us what we are for?

Is the text of Scripture ours to interpret, or is Scripture God's way of enabling us to interpret ourselves, our world and God's ways in the light of Christ?

Here's Brueggemann in full flow:

"My theme is the practice of imagination entrusted to us in the church, a capability of otherwise so deep in our call, so urgent in our context, so dangerous in our practice.

This practice of imagination is textual. It arises from the intense and sustained study of this inexhaustible text that we take to be Holy Scripture. We notice regularly that this text comprises for us and offers to us what is not otherwise known. This text-driven, text-compelled imagination keeps us under the discipline of close study, for it is not free-lance fantasy. The matter of the text is urgent, precisely because a "modernist" church - liberal and conservative - has largely given up on the text as our gospel script of otherwise".
                      Walter Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise. The Witness of Elijah and Elisha (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), page 40.

Forget about Bible reading and "the quiet time"; Bible reading is the disquiet time. And don't read Scripture text to fuel devotional feelings, but to ignite imaginative faith in the God who dares us to think and act otherwise. Scripture text is not intended to confirm for us our spiritual and theological status quo, but to call us and our communities of faith into question, to unsettle our settled convictions because God is always urging us beyond what we already know and have learned to live with.

"In truth, if one examines the great hymns and prayers or the sacramental cadences of the church, it is abundantly clear that the characteristic rhetoric of the church, when it speaks its own 'mother tongue' is in images and metaphors and narratives and songs and oracles that make almost no concession to dominant definitions of the possible". (page 41) 

And in all our talk about vision and strategy, emergent church, transformative practices, alternative community, this text becomes a sifting interrogative voice, that compels our attention, requires our responsive listening and subverts those "dominant definitions of the possible" that limit the range and reach of the Gospel. Amongst the most important contributions Brueggemann has made to the Christian community is this call to so live in the text of Scripture that we bear witness and give testimony to a Gospel that makes the world otherwise. How does the church embody a life that is so "otherwise" it is good news for the world? The question would be an interesting evaluative criterion for church programmes, Christian community lifestyle and individual Christians' daily discipleship.   

Finally Comes the Poet: We have only the Word, but the Word will do

Along with my conviction that important conversations must take place between theology and poetry, is another conviction, just as central to my understanding of the preacher's vocation. In a world awash with spin, half-truth, exaggerated sales language, verbal violence and other features of a culture suffering linguistic deflation, the voice of preacher and poet, and preacher as poet, has become crucial for the life of the church and the healing of the world.

Walter Brueggemann's thought has shaped my own thinking and guided my approach to Scripture for years now. No I don't always feel comfortable with either his starting points or conclusions; but he is far too good and honest a scholar to want his readers to be that unthinking anyway! But no one else cuts it for me. I'm not using colloquial slang here. I mean, no one else cuts the diamond of the text with more instinctive precision, at that optimum point where it's inner light is released to glint with the beauty of a truth I would otherwise have missed.

So when he comes to the end of these lectures on preaching, Finally Comes the Poet, I am moved more deeply, more reaffirmed vocationally, than by any amount of advice, theory, or instruction on homiletic technique, hermeneutical frameworks, or hortatory manuals on what preaching is or is not. Here's the conclusion to a book I've read several times now, and which does what only the very best books on preaching do - rekindles the passion and hopefulness of the preacher. Passion to ensure that words are rightly used, and hopefulness that when words are indeed rightly used, then the transformative, disruptive Word of grace is spoken - in the poetic speech of the preacher.

"Despite the seeming odds against the poem, however, despite the awesome challenge of the task, perhaps better, because of the odds and the challenge, the preacher must speak. Our lives wait in the balance, hoping, yearning for the promissory, transforming word of the gospel. In the end, all we have is the word of the gospel. There are evidences and signs all around us, however, in the great brutal confrontations of public power and in the weeping hiddenness of hurt in persons, that this odd speech of the gospel matters decisively. We have only the word, but the word will do. It will do because it is true that the poem heals and transforms and rescues, that the poem enters like a thief in the night and gives new life, fresh from the word and from nowhere else.

There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens - "finally comes the poet" - finally."
                                                    (Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, 142)

Finally Comes the Poet: The poet in the moment of preaching.

"The event of preaching is an event in transformed imagination. Poets, in the moment of preaching, are permitted to perceive and voice the world differently, to dare a new phrase, a new picture, a fresh juxtaposition of matters long known. Poets are authorized to invite a new conversation, with new voices sounded, new hearings possible. The new conversation may end in freedom to trust and courage to relinquish. The new conversation, on which our very lives depend, requires a poet and not a moralist. Because finally church people are like other people; we are not changed by new rules. The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are not ultimately reached by instruction. Those places of resistance and embrace are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors, and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt. The reflection that comes from the poet requires playfulness, imagination and interpretation. The new conversation allows for ambiguity, probe, and daring hunch. It is only free people, in contexts of trust, who are able to walk close to the scandal, to be seen in its presence, to live by its gifts. (Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, page 109-110)

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More and more I'm discovering important connections between theology and poetry as two different forms of utterance that make possible an expressive construal of how we see the world and understand our experience within it. Brueggemann's point is that preaching and poetry are also related forms of speech, acts of utterance which change the way we or others see the world and ourselves in it. Brueggemann understands as few others do, that the gift of language makes it possible to conceive of alternative worlds, to build hope into the future, to configure a worldview that is not closed but open to the possibility of God's own speech being heard and action being discerned.

Brueggemann accords preaching a role and a seriousness in the life of the Christian community unmatched amongst other contemporary biblical scholars. And this book is where he gathers his most provocative and purposeful thoughts on what can and should happen when the preacher's words faithfully echo and question the Word.

Finally Comes the Poet: Brueggemann on Job

One of the long term benefits of conversation with Walter Brueggemann is the familiarity of surprise. That isn't an oxymoron. It's a promise. Those who read Brueggemann will find that his take on a text can seem at first odd and off centre - surprisingly so. And then you realise that the text he is exploring is itself odd and off-centre. Indeed texts that deal with God, human longing, a broken, angry or frightened world, are likely to be texts that don't easily fit our conceptual comfort zones.

Take for example the two or three pages on Job, when Brueggemann is dealing with God's response to the insistent human voice of faith. Last autumn I read the superb commentary on Job by Samuel Balentine - that was an education in exegesis, pastoral theology and literature-enriched reflection on human life as free and constrained, as tragedy and praise, as faith at the wild extremes of created experience. That great nugget masterpiece Job, attracts some of the most creative theological minds and sympathetic textual interpreters - including Brueggemann.

Amongst the comments of Brueggemann on Job, (I so wish he would write a commentary on that book), are several paragraphs where his concern is to point to an honest preaching of texts whose oddity defies neat categories, and whose purpose is to embrace the strangeness of texts which deal with the ultimacy of God for human life. So here is some of Brueggemann on Job (illustrated by one of William Blake's paintings - themselves eerie and profound commentary on Job):

"Job pushes his attack on God as far as a voice in israel dare push. In chapter 9 Job asserts not only that God is unrelaible, but is in fact a liar (20-22). Job never pushes to God's nonexistence, for then he would quit speaking and be reduced to silence. Muteness is practical atheism. Job keeps believing and speaking; he lives for the dispute. Likely that is why in ancient israel there are no atheists. The conversation of faith is the best action in town. Job is characteristic of Jewishness that finds dispute a viable, crucial form of faith. Job delineates his experience of negation, of God's absence and silence, of God's refusal to deal with his issues. Job yearns most for an anaswer, any answer, because he prefers harsh dialogue to an empty monologue.

....Faith if it is to survive knowingly and honestly, must live in an unjust world....Job learns that while the world may not be to his liking, the world will hold at its centre because it is God's world. The world does not rest in Job's virtue. In the end Job is released for yielding and submission, for trust and praise, and finally he is released for freedom to live."
(Finally Comes the Poet, 61, 62)

Finally Comes the Poet: sovereign, suffering love

Speaking as communion, and thus speaking with God, has become problematic in a culture soaked in superficial speech and content with surface skating relationships. So when it comes to speaking with God, and in God's name, it's hard to find a secure covenantal basis for words to create, sustain and nourish communion.

Walter Brueggemann has thought deeply on speech as communion and words as sacrament. Our lost capacity to speak with candour and trust makes the encounter with God a time replete with posssibility for renewal, when we can be renewed in the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit. And enabled again to speak, and commune with each other.

"Our reductionisms in speech reflect a larger reductionism about communion. There is something convenantal, mutual, risking, demanding, surprising, frightening, and unsettling about real communion. Communion with the holy one is nearly more than we can bear, because we shrink from a meeting shaped by a massive sovereignty before which we bow, or by sufffering love that is self giving".

"We are always shocked that the massive sovereignty of God yields before us, and the suffering love of God demands so much. We can hardly endure the strange juxtaposition of sovereignty and grace: the sovereign one who is shockingly gracious, the gracious one who is stunningly sovereign. The shock of such a partner destabilises us too much. The risk is too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life".

(Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet, pages 44-5).

Finally Comes the Poet 3: "God is more for us than we are for ourselves"

I've nothing important to add to the following paragraphs from Brueggemann's brilliant book. (I don't use the word 'brilliant' often, and never as lazy superlative cliche!). Those who preach and those who listen - feel the passion of the Gospel.

"Real guilt requires real repentance. Finally, however, guilt requires a flood of self-gift from one outside ourselves. This gift overwhelms us, because the one who gives self stands in solidarity with us at great cost. Evangelical faith is a study of how God is more for us than we are for ourselves. (Rom. 8.31-39.) It is the very life of God that deals with the lingering poison of our "evil conscience", poison that causes death to us and those around us. God's way with us emerges out of God's deep love that cannot stand by while we die of the poison. In the priestly version of God's care, it is God's blood, God's self, God's own life, God's love that is passionately, generously recklessly thrown across the poison of guilt". (p.36)

"Evangelical preaching is invited to break out of the conservatism that makes God function mechanically, for such a scholastic God has no power to save. Preaching is invited to break out of the liveralism that believes we finally can manage on our own, for managing never gives life. Preaching has to do with a life poured out for us to deal with the residue of guilt left untouched by reparations". (p.36)

"The preacher renders a world not known in advance. It requires no great cleverness to speak such a world, but it requires closeness to those texts that know secrets that mediate life. These texts voice life that is given nowhere else. The preaching moment is a moment for the gift of God's life in the midst of our tired alienation. For this the church and indeed the world awaits. They wait until, finally, the poet comes, until finally the poet comes". (p.41)

Finally Comes the Poet 2. Through (most of) the Year with Walter Brueggemann

There are theologians whose thought we try to understand; and then there are theologians who shape the way we understand.

Put another way, there are those theologians whose way of thinking about God is attractively coherent, intellectually and spiritually satisfying in a demanding way, whose vision of God and the world deserves our serious attention.

But then there are those other (but few) theologians, whose vision of God and the world is lived in such a way that they draw a deeper response of personal engagement, they demand our attention. In that sense their theology becomes transformative for us, working our deeper soil to a more fertile tilth, out of which the fruit of our own theology begins to grow and bear the fruit of the Spirit of Christ in performative and transformative Gospel practices.

Theology at its best is communal, shared conversation about God, a communion of the saints through shared insight. Theological discussion is a fellowship of minds and hearts, like informal prayer when we talk about God in God's presence, but without the rudeness of ignoring that Presence. In my current ministry which is theological education and pastoral formation, I try very hard to avoid those ways of doing theology that attract the pejorative and reductionist use of 'academic' - as if talk of God could be detached from the life we live, abstract rather than livingly engaged, an inner discipline of thought without the outer performance of faith.

If my own theological reflection has been kept rooted in Christian practice, prayer, and personal conviction, I think it's because of time spent in conversation and discussion with those theologians who work my deeper soil, who have shaped the way I think of God, and whose lived theology has impinged in transformative ways on my own attempts to follow more faithfully after Christ. It's one of the responsible joys of life to share those fruits with others in a process of theological networking through pastoral friendships, personal encounter, widening circles of conversation beyond the church.

Several theologians whose writing has worked itself deeply into my way of thinking have remained frequent and sometimes awkward conversation partners. I trust them. Not because they are always right, or above criticism themselves. But because they provide reference points for my own journey, correctives to my perspective, retardants to my prejudices - and because in them I see and hear the voice of the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. (By the way there are other kinds of theologian, who might not use or own the term, but who paint, compose music, write poetry and story, embody loving practices that humanise - and in their gift they live their faith and deepen ours. But that's another story worth the telling.)

Over the next while I'd like to work out what it is about those Christian theologians I've unwittingly turned into my own canon of Christians to attend to, and why it is they do it for me. Some told their truth, made their mark, and I moved on the better for meeting them. Others have stayed around, their voices still amongst those I listen to most carefully. And then there are new voices saying things that not everyone wants to hear, too easily drowned out by the din of hyper-marketed voices hawking Christian consumer religion. But which of these new voices now to attend to, and how to decide, and what they are saying that needs to be heard, spoken and lived, here, now? 

God's voice is of the heart.

I do not therefore say,

all voices of the heart are God's,

and to discern His voice amidst the voices

is that hard task to which we each are born.

One of those long time conversation partners, a voice I've found it important and demanding to attend to, is Walter Brueggemann. I've already posted on him, (on Jan 25), touching on one of his major contributions - giving the Gospel back to the preacher and the preacher back to the Gospel. In the wiriting of Brueggemann, the Gospel comes to us, individually and as the community of Christ, as both cultural critique and invasive grace. Every Friday for the rest of this this year I'll come back to him here - a kind of Through (most of) the Year with Walter Brueggemann!

Finally Comes the Poet. 1 Reducing mystery to problem.

The following from Walter Brueggemann. Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation, (Fortress, 1989), p. 1-2.

"The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without noticing the urge to tansformation that is not readily compatible with our comfortable believing, that asks little and receives less.

The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, revises quality into quantity, and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes

Preaching among us happens in this context in which the gospel is greatly reduced. That means the gospel may have been twisted, pressed, tailored, gerrymandered until it is comfortable with technological reason that leaves us unbothered, and with ideology that leaves us with uncriticized absolutes. When truth is mediated in such positivistic, ideological and therefore partisan ways, humaneness wavers, the prospect of humanness is at risk, and unchecked brutality makes its appearance. We shall not be the community we hope to be if our primary communications are in modes of utilitarian technology and managed, conformed values."

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Walter Brueggemann is one of those writers on the Bible who decisively shapes how we think and shakes up our cherished but unexamined assumptions. Long before he became the doyen of Old Testament scholarship at its provocative best, I've read him regularly. From his early work on the land, the prophets and a quite wonderful book on shalom since reprinted, and then over thirty years of productive writing, he has given the church a constant flow of biblical theology whose foundation pillars are plunged deep into bedrock scriptural text.

Brueggemann is a scholar not always at home in a church at times too keen to buy into the values and techniques of consumer culture and what he calls the hegemony of empire! He is a biblical theologian who deeply reveres the biblical text, a preacher who creatively and disturbingly sets ancient text and contemporary western culture on a collision course. And in his preaching and writing he warns that the church  inevitably feels the impact of that text as it allows itself to be too closely aligned with a prevailing culture under judgement.

Over the next while I'll post some further extracts from his lectures on preaching, with the characteristically enigmatic title, Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation. This book is now 20 years old, pre-dates fashionably post-modern jargon, and therefore demonstrates Brueggemann's prescience about the dis-ease of consumer driven culture, and the capacity of the biblical text to address postmodern ambiguities with "thickly textured" hopefulness. In this as in all his books, Brueggemann gets under our skin as readers and hearers, by an exegesis of the biblical text as that word from God that tears down and builds up, that breaks open in order to heal deeply, that calls us in question, in order to call us again to obedient grateful living.