Richard Beck on Brueggemann

Check out the promo videos, including this one where Beck talks about Brueggemann's influence on his book, Unclean. Beck on Brueggemann

We are going to have an outstanding conference at Streaming 2012: Mercy, Not Sacrifice. Help us get the word out. Bloggers, help us.

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Mercy, Not Sacrifice: Brueggemann Comes to Rochester College

When I was just beginning in ministry, I received the book, The Land, by Walter Brueggemann as a Christmas present. I had a big chair in the corner of my office that was my reading spot. I got comfortable, opened the book, and didn't move until I was finished.

Now, that's quite a statement coming from a guy like me given my tendencies toward attention deficit. But I read the book through in one sitting. I was deeply moved. At various points, tears came to my eyes. I was moved by several things. I was moved by this vision of God and his relationship with Israel. I was moved by the way Brueggemann allowed the biblical text to speak directly to our world. I was moved by the prose, by his writing, by the passion that moved through the ink on the page into my heart and mind.

After reading the land, I quickly bought David's Truth, the Prophetic Imagination, and Hopeful Imagination (my favorite). I probably have over twenty Brueggemann titles on my bookshelves. No biblical scholar has impacted me more. When I was preaching in Oregon, I had a member approach me after a sermon. He asked, "Is this Brueggemann guy available so that we could just cut out the middle man?" Yeah, I'm that guy when it come to Brueggemann.

So, I'm thrilled that I received an email from Walter Brueggemann yesterday accepting an invitation to be our featured speaker at Streaming: Biblical Conversations from the Missional Frontier, June 18-20, 2012, at Rochester College. Our theme for the conference will be "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

The following sentences were part of the invitation I extended. I hope they will entice you to attend as well.

This coming year’s theme will be “I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice.” We can think of no one better to address this theme than you. In your work you have emphasized the tensions between justice and purity traditions in Israel’s response to Yahweh. You not only demonstrate the priority of the justice or mercy strand, but you do so without jettisoning the purity dimension as an ordering response to “an unsettled residue of ache.”

This work has been picked up by many in fruitful ways beyond the areas of biblical interpretation. One recent work is Richard Beck’s fascinating study, Unclean. Beck is an experimental psychologist who is particularly interested in the psychological dimensions of disgust, contagion and their relation to mortality. He proposes a radical notion of hospitality as a response to our tendencies toward socio-moral disgust. Along the way, he dialogues with theologians including Volf, Heim, and yourself.

This large conversation related to justice and purity is very important to the emerging missional church conversation. This literature encourages a new engagement for congregations within Western cultures—an engagement not beholden to the powers that sponsor a life defined primarily by economic interests related to consumption. Churches that serve the broader society as “vendors of religious goods and services” do so at the cost of a reduced significance. The missional impulse, in contrast, invites the church to consider its life once again from the margins, as a people sent, or as an outpost for the reign of God. This move to the margins is impossible apart from a searching and probing conversation on the tensions between justice and purity—a conversation that has not yet appeared prominently in the missional church literature.

Thoughts on Scripture: A Stranger Among Us

"The Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a bestseller, is a chink--often the only chink--through which winds howl. It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple worlds strays and vanishes. We crack open its pages at our peril. Many educated, urbane, and flourishing experts in every aspect of business, culture, and science have felt pulled by this anachronistic, semibarbaric mass of antique laws and fabulous tales from far away; they entered it queer, strait gates and were lost. Eyes open, heads high, in full possession of their critical minds, they obeyed the high, inaudible whistle, and let the gates close behind them."

These wonderful words are Annie Dillard's from her essay, "The Gospel of Luke." I call them wonderful because they get at something that's important for me: they capture the distance between the world imagined in Scripture and the world we construe for ourselves every day.

Now, I'm the first to admit that some things in Scripture are more than problematic. If I were voting, there would certainly be stories I would toss. I'm with Jesus and many other biblical figures/writers. Not all Scripture is created equal. And part of a critical approach to Scripture is making sense of the diversity of witnesses to God's work in the world found under one cover.

The temptation in this critical task, however, is to domesticate Scripture, to make it all seem accessible or sensible. To make it our next door neighbor or best friend. To think of the Bible as we do a pair of old slippers. When we lose the "queer, strait gates" sense of Scripture, we are at risk of losing God as well.

As Brueggemann puts this, "I propose the stories must be kept in their embarrassing ancientness, for along with the refusal of modernity comes God as a vital and key character in this account of our lives. It is not, so it seems, to modernize the narratives without losing the primitiveness of this character who must be kept as the focal point of 'the news.' The ancient stories of the Bible are indeed sense-making midst our pervasive 'non-sense.'"

Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that Scripture does not need to be interpreted in relation to our setting. I am not advocating for a literalist reading of Scripture. Far from it. Again, I am offended by some of what I find in Scripture and part of faithful interpretation is struggling with this offense. I am suggesting that the foreign-ness of Scripture is necessary for us to keep from over-identifying our own sensibility with God's. That the strange parts keep us from nesting too quickly. Taken together, they keep the possibility of a God who evades our grasp alive. And this is our only hope.

I think we assume that the first readers of Scripture found it all familiar, given their cultural proximity to its production. But I think otherwise. I think it has always been a strange book. How could it be otherwise and make any pretense as Sacred?

Finally, it seems to me that many modern approaches to Scripture of both the liberal and fundamentalist variety are to make it familiar. Views of inerrancy, for instance, are attempts to make the Bible explainable, stable, neighborly. They may provide some sense of stability, but at the expense of God as a character, and ironically at the expense of Scripture itself.

I am teaching an introduction to the Bible course for undergrads this summer. I will have students for whom the Bible is strange indeed, and students who think the Bible is their neighbor. While I'm hoping to make Scripture a little less strange, I don't want to do that at the expense of the great Stranger who calls us to inhabit a different world.

Preaching, the Thick and Thin of It

In recent posts, I've talked about my evolution over time related to my understanding and practice of preaching. That shift is a move away from a "bridge" theory of preaching. According to the bridge theory, we have two static objects, the text and the contemporary world, that are separated by a massive temporal gulf. The trick is to lift something universal out of the particularity of the text, walk it across the homiletical bridge, and find its dynamic equivalent in the contemporary world.

This is a tall task, and has three built-in deficits that I am trying to overcome. First, it leaves the particularity of the text behind in favor of some universal principle lifted from the text. Second, the quest for the dynamic equivalent is very difficult to calibrate. We've all had the experience of our illustrations overpowering everything else in the sermon. It's hard to measure those things out, find a term that weighs the same as another.

Which brings me to my third problem. Meaning making is far "thicker" than translating one term for another. The bridge theory is a "thin" strategy for finding meaning between two subjects. The "point" of the text, some universal meaning that transcends culture, is a thin strand around which to find shared meaning. This is not typically how we come to understand something or someone, particularly when that something is culturally distant (like the Bible).

Clifford Geertz, a significant cultural anthropologist, marveled at the capacity of humans to gain understanding of each other across massive cultural divides. For Geertz, it was impossible to escape one's own cultural trappings in order to think like a native. It was equally impossible to find universals that could be taken for granted in every culture, thus providing a basis for translating one cultural meaning straight into another cultural setting. Against these "thin" strategies, Geertz proposed "thick" description as the way most of us come to understand one another across cultures. The more thickly we describe our own context and that of the other (through empathy), the more opportunity we have for meaning making. We're not looking for a thin link, but a web of overlap between two thickly construed realities.

While this produces understanding, it also simultaneously creates a new understanding. To understand oneself through another always makes for something new, what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons. The attempt to understand creates a new horizon of meaning. (The word is living and active...).

Brueggemann is one biblical scholar who takes Geertz (and Geertz's influence-r, Ricouer) seriously in the task of biblical interpretation. Brueggemann sees understanding occurring between two thickly contested worlds--the world of the text, and the world of the reader/listener. By rendering both thickly, Brueggemann sees the possibility for artful appropriation. Brueggemann doesn't see a text as simply making a point. A text is an exercise in power--in naming and shaping a world. And meanings in these are always contested, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Faithful preaching takes the claims and counterclaims of both worlds (biblical and contemporary) seriously through thick description. For Brueggemann this moves preaching from a monological endeavor where all the traffic moves one way or the other, to a dialogical event where text and world are simultaneously active. (Monologue=thin, dialogue=thick).

This is how I think about preaching. I want to render both text and world so thickly that new meaning emerges. I want to move past just making points and illustrating them to creating alternative worlds. For my money, it is only this kind of preaching that lives up to the qualifier "gospel."

To Perform the World Beyond the Reach of Pharaoh

On of the benefits of sojourning at a seminary is that you get to hear the guys who write the books. Today, my favorite author on matters pertaining to Scripture (particularly the Old Testament) is on campus. Walter Brueggemann just spoke on Exodus at a conference on Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World. WB never disappoints, and so I have a little theology geek buzz going.

I'll just mention one point that WB made today that presses some on what I've been blogging about of late. WB sees the decalogue (10 commandments) as counter commandments, standing in contrast to Pharaoh's commandments about production, bricks, and straw in Exodus 5. Against the insatiable culture of slave production under Pharaoh's control, the way of YHWH provides a coventantal neighborliness that allows acts of kindness toward others.

In the middle of this wonderful exposition of Scripture, Brueggemann made comments about God and the world. He was taught in seminary, he told us, that if you begin theology with God's initiative you're likely doing good theology (I was taught the same thing). Problem is, he said, the biblical writers weren't clued in to this little theological key. Brueggemann refers to the middle part of Exodus as the narrative of departure and noted today that it is human initiative that pushes the story along. Pharaoah produces a cry through oppression, Israel cries out againts Pharaoh's reach, and God responds to the cry of Israel.

The initiative of the Exodus is located in the cry of the slaves that move beyond Pharaoh's reach. The cry is the refusal of a dehumanizing way of life built around insatiable production. The one who is other than Pharaoh (the holy one of Israel), hears Israel's cry and calls them into the performance of a counter story.

I simply want to point out here that creation is active in the drama of redepmtion. The story of God-world is not just a story of God's initiative. God is moved by human initiative. This is not to say that humans can provide their own deliverance, or that God is not an initiator. It is to say that God's relationship with creation is ust that--a relationship. The world is not simply a passive recipient of God's irresistable plan. The world is a real participant in the drama of redemption.

This dynamic view of God suffers with the negotiations made by early Christian apologists with a Greek thinking world. Stan Grenz, and others, refer to the theology that emerges in this period as onto-theology. That is, thinking about God that is rooted in a certain notion of being, namely a substantialist perspective that divides the world into subjects and objects. And in this world, God only works if God is impassable, that is not affected by the world. God is a persisting subject--omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. In Trinitarian thought, great pains were made to shield the Father from the suffering of the Son.

We still live with much of this today. With regard to mission, we have used passages like Matthew 28 and the biblical language of sending to support a substantialist notion of God. God sends the Son, sends the Spirit (a point of contention between East and West), sends the church. The world is simply an object. The church simply an obedient instrument of God, on the side of God in a series of sendings. The result is a strategic view of mission rooted in a paternalism, often resulting in a heavy-handed imperialism or ethnocentrism parading as the kingdom of God.

The biblical story is not one of an impassable God, a persisting Subject, but of a God who is revealed in relation to human cries, whether of the cries of slaves in Egypt, or of the Son in the Garden of Gethsemane.

WB always raises the spectre of an unmanagable God who if faithful, consistent, precisely in response to human suffering. This, I believe, is the necessary starting place for "Engaging Scripture for the Sake of the World."