A God only Brueggemann may understand
By James D. Berkley, The Layman, November 10, 2008
Walter Brueggemann MINNEAPOLIS – Walter Brueggemann made the church sanctuary a thicket of multisyllabic phrases on Friday morning at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. His densely packed address on being “Summoned to a dialogic life” demanded of his Covenant Network audience nimble minds. Dictionaries in the pew racks would have been useful, and perhaps a “pause” or “instant-replay” feature for the rich semantic strands that slipped tantalizingly away in the abundance of his thoughts.
Brueggemann is professor of Old Testament Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. The Covenant Network held its annual conference November 6-8, with the theme of “Covenant: God is faithful still.”
A lecture by Brueggemann comes to one like the backwash of a jet engine. His thoughts are complex and intellectual – and not a little puckish. Every phrase could merit a pause to contemplate the depth and art of its construction, and perhaps to argue with it a little in one’s mind. But there is no such luxury, for the next exquisite word combination floods out on the traces of the first, and another soon after. If there is such a thing as mind aerobics, surely a listen to Brueggemann would qualify.
The gist of the lecture appeared to be that God is complicated, unable to be made either thesis or antithesis, to use a dialectical way of thinking. God must be a synthesis of apparently contradictory factors, just as God’s attributes and God’s Word must also be a similarly complicated mixture of A and Not-A that add up to something altogether unexpected and rather chaotic and untamable.
Perhaps that is kind of what Brueggemann posited. One never knows.
The bottom line seemed to be the implied conclusion that homosexual practice should not be much of a concern, since God is self-contradictory and too almighty complex to be consistent even with his own moral laws. Apparently only little minds could get stuck on saying homosexual practice is morally unacceptable – minds that cannot abide a wild and crazy God of contradictions.
“Covenant is always an unsettled truth that cannot be brought down on one side or another,” Brueggemann began. For instance, “Abraham is given an unconditional covenant that is unilateral; Moses is given a bilateral covenant that is conditional.” In other words, what was all God’s gift for Abraham became quite conditional and reciprocal for Moses: “If you pay attention, you will be my people; if you don’t, you won’t.”
Brueggemann proceeded to provide a number of contrasts, both sides of which describe God in a kind of perplexing, messy truth: “One God, who is both unilateral in generosity and bilateral in requirements,” “the God who endlessly negotiates for us is the God who will receive glory and will not be mocked,” “because of God’s complex interiority, God is capable of more than one possibility,” and “the narrative of the God of fidelity lives in deep conflict with the syllogism of the God of certitude.”
He described how God’s double bind when dealing with humankind in law and love is like the state of mind of a parent who has a teenager who gets home safely but far beyond curfew: “You don’t know whether to reprimand or to hug. Well, you’ll do both, but the main thing is that which you will do last.”
Brueggemann would never be confused with a classical Reformed systematic theologian. For instance, he has discarded as seemingly inadequate such divine attributes as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence. “Such a God requires a forced reading of Scripture,” he argued. “The stuff of sovereign authority and unchallengeable control – we are here [at this conference] because we know it will not work.”
Brueggemann claimed it will not work Biblically, theologically or pastorally. On the latter, his proof was pastoral experience: “You may talk [of certainty] on Sunday morning, but when people come around to the back door, you will not talk that way. Who in agony or ecstasy needs a God of certainty?”
Brueggemann’s criticism of “flat certitude” about God eventually took on a hard edge. Soon after waxing poetic of “a God whose innards press toward new possibility,” Brueggemann became alarmist: “Where there is no such artistry, there can only be denial and despair, resentment, self-indulgence and finally violence.” The “no such artistry” would appear to describe the simple faith that so many believers cherish in a sovereign God, who has revealed Himself sufficiently if not exhaustively throughout history and in truth in the Incarnation.
“This holy God is never fixed and settled,” declared Brueggemann. “This is no unmoved mover, no settled certitude. … God is dialogical, expecting to be changed– and we are in God’s image.” Thus, certitude about God, certitude about theology, certitude about morality– all such certitude is apparently supposed to be overtaken by some grand paroxysm of ambiguity– which, to the uninitiated, might seem strangely similar to making up God as convenience dictates.
Brueggemann himself cautioned against two troubling “escape hatches.” The first, the reflexive escape of conservatives, is a “flight to absolutism, which nullifies the risks of dialogue into a settled docetic state of being.” In fact, Brueggemann argued, that is the problem of the classical theologians, who have, as he put it, “settled for a God who is an absolute sovereign.”
Brueggemann points out trouble with this supposedly trite orthodoxy. “The spinoff of that absolutism is inevitably a moral conformity, an absolute morality that is said to derive from an absolute deity. God is reduced to a settled formula.” And there is more: “In the Bible the lust for absolutism eventually ends in idolatry.”
The escape of the progressives is the opposite. “Dialogical existence is so demanding,” notes Brueggemann, “that there is a flight to autonomy, and that is the liberal problem.” It is characterized, he says, by the common excuse that “I am spiritual but not religious,” and “it results in a society that is endlessly acquisitive of other persons’ resources and is inevitably violent.”
The choice of absolutism, which is idolatry, or autonomy, which is atheism, presents “twin violations that make life unlivable,” Brueggemann warns darkly. And what’s worse, the twin practices can even be practiced at the same time: Exacting absolute conformity on others, and expecting autonomy for oneself.
Oh, wretched people that we are, who can save us from this body of sin? Brueggemann tries. We just need to be more like the mass of contradictions that God supposedly is. “God is willing to violate the Torah for the sake of relationship,” Brueggemann posits. By analogy, one might conclude, so must the church be willing to violate standards of sexual morality, again for the sake of relationship.
What we need, Brueggemann suggests, is “a community of conservative covenanters and liberal covenanters.” We need “a form of freedom that is disciplined.” We need to be “more ready to support than to judge.” Yes, “there are sanctions, but the sanctions are provisional and penultimate, because there is more to the covenant than rules.”
Not everyone would agree. Not everyone would even understand.