Dr. Brueggemann offers Old Testament lifelines to a secular society

By Carol Sowa
Today’s Catholic

    SAN ANTONIO • More than 250 persons converged on Oblate School of Theology’s renewal center for the symposium, Missionaries to a Secular Culture, convened by Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, Oct. 21-23.
    Leading focus sessions for this spiritual exploration, in addition to Father Rolheiser, were Father Richard Rohr, OFM, of the Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, N.M.; Michael Downey of the Office of the Cardinal, Los Angeles; Sister Donna Ciangio, OP, of the National Pastoral Life Center, N.Y.; Father Robert Schreiter, CPPS of the Catholic Theological Union, Chicago; and Father Tom Rosica, CSB, of the Catholic Media Foundation, Toronto. John Allen, journalist for the National Catholic Reporter, attended from Rome to add to the discussion.
    The keynote address was presented by noted scholar and author, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. Brueggemann previously taught at Union Theological Seminary and is an ordained minister in the Church of Christ. His address was open to the public, who packed Immaculate Conception Chapel for the occasion.
Brueggemann noted the issue of nurturing a faith community in a secular environment, “is an urgent task among us, but it is not a new task. It is a very, very old task.” He pointed out that both Israel of the Old Testament and the church of the New Testament face the same things, with biblical text “exactly positioned for the questions that we are trying to ask.”
    Drawing on the three canons of the Old Testament (the Torah, the prophets and the writings), he presented significant text. He began by citing Catholic theologian William T. Cavanaugh’s book, Torture and the Eucharist. “He makes the argument what the church in Chile had to do was out-imagine the Pinochet regime,” said Brueggemann. “What we Christians must do is to ‘out-imagine’ secular society.” Brueggemann suggested the Bible as our script for this “alternative imagination.”

    He noted three marks of a secular society that define the task at hand. “First,” he said, “that we are witnessing the shriveling of the human spirit by the pressures of consumerism; second, that we are watching the failure of the communal infrastructure and the notion of the public transposed into the notion of market; and third, we are watching the nullification of holiness, in which everything is reduced to technological control that leaves nothing to the imagination.”
    He sees the missionary task of the church being, “First, to enhance the human for the sake of our common humanity.” The second task he puts forth as reconstructing “the neighborly infrastructure” (involving symbols and images) and the third is, “recovery of the sense of the holy that undermines all of our easy absolutes.”
    He continued, “I propose that our task is to help people host an alternative world of imagination that arises from narratives and oracles. … I know that those of you who are engaged in pastoral work and education work have been doing all of that forever. … What I have to say to you is to remind you of the clarity of task and remind you of some resources that are perhaps sometimes neglected among us.”
    Referring to the Torah as “a collage of concrete miracles that calls into question the conventional world of social reality,” he noted that this is accomplished through the telling of stories which “invites the children into an amazed, dazzled world of miracles.”
    He noted that elaborate descriptions, such as those which tell how to correctly celebrate the Passover in Exodus 12 and 13, are done for a specific reason. “The purpose of this entire liturgic transaction is not for the sake of the liturgy,” he said. “It is for the sake of the children, that they make that clear that we are special people who have miracles of death to life, slavery to freedom, poverty to wealth, wretchedness to well-being… . The more scientific and the more technological you become, the more difficult it is for our children, and people generally in our society, to remember that we do live by miracles.”
    Describing the scriptural repetition of God’s miracles as “saturation education,” Brueggemann noted the same holds true in the narrative of Israel crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land. He explained the impression from Joshua 4 is that the people must go down to the Jordan River and cross it each year, when actually the description of the twelve stones for crossing the river was to serve as a reminder of their crossing the Red Sea out of Egypt on dry land. “What you’re supposed to pick up,” he added, “is the world is filled with crossings of safety and well-being.” These crossings would be impossible but for the miracles of God. “So we need huge hunks of text,” he said. “All those words are synonyms; they are the stuff out of which new life is given.”

    Going on to the second canon of the Old Testament, he referred to “oracles of holiness … highly stylized utterances that are given by uncredentialed people that challenge all settled certitudes.” He pointed out that words of this nature, such as those of the prophet Amos, are often rejected but never disappear. “You can’t get rid of the Book of Amos,” he quipped.
    “The narratives of the Torah are designed to construct an alternative world. The oracles of the prophets are basically designed to subvert…. to call into question, to expose its (the world’s) inadequacy and phoniness.”
    Brueggemann advised noting what goes on in these oracles that we need to replicate today and described the biblical oracles as poetry. “You can’t get rid of a poem, because somebody somewhere is going remember it. And they’re really going to remember if you stick it in the bible and it’s Holy Scripture,” he added. “What a poet does is to turn the world so you can see it a little different way.”
He explained the third section of the Old Testament as “an ongoing conversation” that invites to a “full, rich imagination that is an alternative to pornography.” He continued, “My definition of pornography is anything that leaves nothing to the imagination. … And what the third canon in the Old Testament wants to do is see there’s a lot left to the imagination and you are invited and summoned to do some of the work.”
    In Psalm 44, “harsh, fierce engagement is an act of hope,” he observed, finding it extraordinary that in it the Israelites actually challenge God. He sees a strong relationship in the text of Proverbs to the present day. “You can’t eat by your power and technology,” he paraphrased. “You can’t make the world happen on our terms. … We can produce endless paths of anger and we can produce inhumane prisons and we can enact much violence, but the future is not in our hands.”
    Brueggemann sees the words in Proverbs ringing true today, exhorting us to recognize the equality of all before God, our maker. “It’s about money and class and tax law … and the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the keeping out of poor immigrants,” he said.
    “The question is,” he added, “whether the church can nurture enough people who will take the responsibility … or whether the church can become one more place for frightened people to hide.” He went on to relate the story of Job, with its challenges “to unlearn moral symmetry and risk the mystery.” He concluded by saying, “Huge gifts are entrusted to us, and we must not lose heart.”