Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life.

Pop quiz. Which public figure prophesied the downfall of Babylon? Who cursed a fig tree? Where did Noah’s ark finally land? Who was King Uzziah, or Hezekiah or Jeremiah? Now, I am sure you know all of this and that’s why you’re today—to hear more about them—but in case you don’t, we have someone here who’s been teaching people about those things for a great many years. Walter Brueggemann is with us, the author of over sixty books focusing on the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, and what it means for the church today. Walter Brueggemann is a distinguished Hebrew biblical scholar, also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and an extremely popular and much in demand speaker and preacher for a great many years. He has received just about every theological award there is to receive, and now he’s finally made it to the Sunday Forum. [laughter] Congratulations. [laughter]

Walter, let’s begin at a fairly basic point. You’ve had a long career teaching seminarians, teaching in theological schools, writing books of biblical theology, but supposing someone is out there, there might be someone somewhere who doesn’t know the Hebrew Bible very well. Could you say something about why you think even we as Christians who focus so much on the [New Testament] ought to know something significant things about the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible?

Dr. Brueggemann: Well, I think the Old Testament offers the categories and a vision of how to create a viable working society. And in tracing out that vision, it grounds that vision in a Holy God who is endlessly elusive and beyond our control. Now, having said that, one has immediately to say that the Old Testament has many dimensions of violence and brutality that are an enormous embarrassment to Jews and to Christians. But if one can wade through that, then the categories of covenantal justice and covenantal peace and an ordered creation provide the kind of revolutionary notions that have really fed most of the human revolutions in the history of the world. So it is an endless process of interpretation and sorting out what is usable and what we take to be true.

Lloyd: Would you say that the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures, are writing a more public theology than the New Testament is, more focused on the structures in society, how people relate in society, what does the good society look like?

Brueggemann: I think that is right, and I think the experience of the church is that, whenever the church focuses on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old Testament, it loses its public dimension, and reduces stuff to quite intimate questions, of sin and salvation; so the work of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition has always been to call the church back to public questions of justice.

Lloyd: And the New Testament does not supersede the Old, but what would be your language? Builds on it and yet also rereads it, transforms it?

Brueggemann: Yes. As you know, it is an endlessly problematic question, and I suppose interpreters vary on insisting on the continuity between the two Testaments and the discontinuity. And people who are more progressive are more likely to insist upon the continuity, whereas people who do not want to be progressive want to cut the New Testament off from the Old, so we have to stay at that question.

Lloyd: What about the old stereotype that the Old Testament focuses more on a God of wrath and the New Testament on a God of love?

Brueggemann: That obviously is a statement that comes from somebody who never read either Testament. [laughter] I was ready for that one. [laughter]

Lloyd: [laughter] I’ve heard it from somebody else, it’s not from me.

Brueggemann: Yes, I have a friend who thinks that. [laughter] Well, it is simply the case that the compassion and the mercy and the generosity of God is all over the Old Testament; but, probably from having read Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in high school, we generalize from that and miss all that other stuff.

Lloyd: Yes, one of the words you pluck out or highlight from the Old Testament a great deal is the whole notion of covenant: God’s covenant with God’s people, covenants that are struck and faithful to, covenants that are broken. Say something, something about the role of covenant as it works through the Old Testament.

Brueggemann: I think that the way we in our time would talk about covenant is the capacity to receive life from the other who is unlike us. So God receives some life from Israel, Israel receives life from God, the world receives life from God. And to keep that covenantal transaction alive requires some engagement and some passion from both parties. And it occurs to me that there are two ways of wanting to fall out of covenant. One is absolutism, which means that I endlessly defer to the other party, who surely must be right. Or autonomy, which says, “I don’t have to be connected to anybody.” And it seems to me those are the two great threats to biblical faith that are immediately contemporary. Progressives tend to tilt toward autonomy, and more conservative people tend to tilt toward absolutism.

Lloyd: You’ve written recently about how you believe Christian faith, but especially Old Testament faith, speaks to the economic crisis. And you talk about the dangers of autonomy, and anxiety and greed. Say something about your theological read as an Old Testament scholar, on what’s happened to us as a country, say, over the last ten years leading to this crisis, how our faith and these Scriptures can provides us guideposts as we move forward.

Brueggemann: I think that behind our undisciplined greed is an ideology of individualism, that the individual is the ultimate unit of meaning. And I think that the Bible, both Testaments, always insist that the community is the unit of meaning and that individuals have worth and significance because they are members of that community. And if one takes the community as the defining unit of social existence, then the question is always, Who is my brother? Who is my sister? Who is my neighbor? Who belongs in the community with me? If you take the individual as the unit of meaning, then the question disappears, and I think we have been on a wild goose chase of trying to establish individuals who can be self-sufficient and safe and happy on their own, and now that has all come home to us, that here are limits to that, and it will not work.

Lloyd: So what would you say… I know that you are a Biblical theologian and not a pastoral theologian, but what do you think that says about the work of the church these days? If we’ve got the wrong model, if radical individualism has become the defining philosophy or the defining sense of who we are, what do you see the work of the church is? What do you see the role of Scriptures to be in that?

Brueggemann: I think the pastoral work of the church is to help people disengage from the ideology of individualism, which is so pervasive and so coercive among us, and to nurture a sense that our life really consists in being with the brothers and the sisters. And I think that Scripture provides the field of imagination around which we can reimagine our lives as participating members in a society where people really belong to each other and care for each other and engage with each other.

Lloyd: By telling the stories of Scriptures, telling the stories of the people of Israel and Moses leading the people, and the Ten Commandments, and the ways a people is formed.

Brueggemann: And by practicing the disciplines that that are so evident in, for example, the book of Acts.

Lloyd: By living a distinctive, interdependent, committed communal life, even in a society like this.

Brueggemann: That’s right. So I have thought in the Episcopal Baptismal service, whenever we say, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” which I think most people think is sex.

Lloyd: Is that why we are declining in numbers?

Brueggemann: [laughter] That’s right. It may well be that the particular form of Satan and all his works that is so alive among us now is exactly the ideology of individualism that we are called to renounce.

Lloyd: One of the, one of your path-opening books was a fairly early book of yours called The Prophetic Imagination, which has come out in a new edition. And in it you portray two fundamental, what you call two fundamental consciousnesses, two ways of looking at the world around us, each of them, vividly embodied in the Old Testament stories around us, the royal consciousness and the prophetic consciousness. And it seems to me going back to that, that those categories are very fruitful for thinking about what is going on. Would you say a little something about each of those?

Brueggemann: Well I think in the Old Testament, the lead figure in the Old Testament royal consciousness is Solomon, who thought he could accumulate and control everything.

Lloyd: Could you say who Solomon was?

Brueggemann: Solomon was David’s son and is the great King in the Old Testament who built the temple and had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. He really was an accumulator. [laughter] and it always interests me, in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus is instructing his disciples not to be anxious, he models birds and flowers who are not anxious, says he. And then he says, “Not even Solomon with all of his accumulation was as well off as a bird,” so that seems to me to be the recurring critique of Solomon, that the royal consciousness is an endless commitment to anxiety, because one never has enough, or one has never done enough, or one is not yet safe enough, or enough or enough. And I think that the prophetic consciousness, which keeps offering an alternative to that is the only way to security or to happiness, is to be in a covenantal neighborhood where the neighbor is taken seriously and is honored. There are no neighbors in the royal consciousness.

Lloyd: And so, in the stream of the Old Testament, probably going certainly back to Pharaoh and coming forward through the developing kingship [and] David and Solomon, all the way up to the later kings as well, they are the embodiment of a mindset, the way you are describing it, is a mindset we are still living inside of today. So royal consciousness is a way of describing this sense of never enough-ness, this sense of scarcity which now is part of what drives our lives and economy today.

Brueggemann: That’s right. It is not a big leap of imagination to say that it is that same consciousness that has ended us in the economic crisis we are in, because it is a practice of continually overreaching to gain more and to control more and consume more, as though there were no limits.

Lloyd: And so then these noisy prophets turn up and start challenging all of this—an Amos, or a Micah, or an Isaiah or Jeremiah—who start saying, “That is not the way.” And what are they challenging the people of Israel to be or to become?

Brueggemann: Well, the way they present it is they are challenging people to obey the Torah, to obey the commandments, but that probably means particularly the Book of Deuteronomy, and the Book of Deuteronomy is always about justice for the neighbor, justice for the widow, for the orphan, justice for the immigrant, justice for all of the [marginalized] people who cannot secure justice for themselves. So the prophetic argument, rather consistently, is that it is the practice of social economic justice that will make a society safe; and arms, or any of our seductions about self-sufficiency, will never make us safe.

Lloyd: You talk, in your article about the economy, about the numbing effects of affluence and technology, the ways that our minds just get settled into ruts and we don’t see and don’t pay attention, and one of your favorite words through your books is the word imagination, prophetic imagination, and the job of Scripture, the job of preaching, is to open up the imagination. Could you say something about the numbness that settles in, in the ways we think and how that can be broken open and the role of Scripture in that?

Brueggemann: I think that the way I use the word numbness, I mean the assumption that the way the world looks in front of us is the only way the world could be. It’s astonishing, if you think about our numbness, that we are now having discussions about whether water boarding is a good thing to do. And we have to ask, how did that happen to us, that we have become so insensitive that we can even entertain the question?

So the work of imagination is to entertain the thought that the world doesn’t have to be the way it is, that the world could be different, and if you believe the promises of God, the world will be different. And you know, I think the obvious example of that are Jesus’ parables, which are acts of imagination that invite his listeners to think of a man who had two sons, or a man who was on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, or whatever: that is, that the world in the narrative account is different from the world that is in front of us. And so I think it is obviously the church, in its liturgy and in its teaching, is to invite people to imagine the world in a way other than the one that is in front of us.

Lloyd: Shifting course a little bit… You mentioned earlier in your remarks, when you were talking about the importance of the Old Testament, you were also acknowledging that there are some very problematic parts of the Old Testament.

And you mentioned the importance of our gleaning the good spots and avoiding the bad spots. We know that’s been a very tricky proposition down through the centuries, that there are a lot of spots there, and some of them are quite violent and troubling in all kinds of ways. People have not always in the same way picked and chosen which were the right ones.

I understand you’ve been doing some work on the Book of Joshua lately, which is about quite a bit of violence and killing and celebrating God’s helping people kill in the name of God. What do we do with texts like that, that are deeply disturbing in the ways that they seem to invite holy war, religious war? We talk about it in Muslim texts, but we have a lot of that in our own texts.

Brueggemann: Well, our usual way of handling that as Christians is to explain it away through a theory of editorial redaction to say, “This is a projection of somebody who’s kind of sick and you don’t have to take it seriously.” I am a kind of a realist, a theological realist, and I want to say that in the book of Joshua, God was really like that, that God had such passion for Israel that God was blind to everything else. So the way I think about that is that the God of the Bible is in recovery: that God has been addicted to violence and, like all people who are addicted and in recovery, it’s long hard work with regressions.

Now the pastoral payoff to that is that, if I’m made in the image of that God, then I have to face up to the fact that I also am in recovery from violence. And what we know in our society is that we are all at the edge of violence. You can see it in road rage or in a lot of other ways, and I find it useful to think of the church as a recovery movement, in which we are tracking the way God continually moves toward mercy and compassion, and we are engaged in the practice of moving in those directions ourself. So I don’t want to dismiss the violence of God in the Old Testament, and explain it away. I want to say it’s a part of our inheritance, and we’ve got to be honest about it, and then we have to process it.

Lloyd: But doesn’t that say something extraordinary if you’re suggesting that God’s got to grow up here and the One we call pure unbounded Love, from time unimaginable to time unimaginable, that God’s got to work through this violence problem God has? I find that amazing. Do you really think that?

Brueggemann: Yeah, that’s what makes the Old Testament so interesting and so difficult, that God is given to us in the Old Testament in categories that do not accommodate any of our usual theological interpretive categories. And so this God is always engaged in a kind of a taut interaction that’s filled with surprises and disappointments and alienations and forgiveness, and it’s a lot like the human scene. Now, it’s easy to say that all of that’s a human projection onto God,

Lloyd: An emerging understanding of the nature of God which is that…

Brueggemann: That’s right.

Lloyd: I fall on the other side. People say this is the text, people in a different time trying to make sense and understand who God is, and this is the best they could do—a very troubling best they could do.

Brueggemann: That’s right.

Lloyd: But you are pitching it right back at God himself.

Brueggemann: I do not want to let God off the hook. I’ve taught a long time in a Presbyterian seminary, and what I’ve noticed is that Presbyterian students feel obligated to protect God. And the rabbis do not protect God. The rabbis just put it right there to God, and I think that is what we have to do. Because if we don’t, if we don’t engage that stuff, what follows is a denial about our own unsettled stuff. And I find that having a full say about God permits us to have a full say about ourself. And then the pastoral task is to be asking, “How are we on the way to our better selves?”

Lloyd: So we and God are growing up together. Is that right?

Brueggemann: I think God, if you think that God’s history reaches a climax in Jesus of Nazareth, then God is well ahead of us on this movement. [laughter]

Lloyd: This is new territory for me, I have to say [more laughter], so let’s try another topic. One of the interesting things I understand you have been thinking about lately, I hope less interesting than what we just talked about, is the notion that we in the mainline churches that are declining in numbers might look to some surprising pieces of the Old Testament for counsel… a lot of thinking about where the church is now is focused on what it means to be in exile. A lot of the language that mainline denominations have used is the sense that we who were once part of Christendom, the way the world is put together, have now become an increasingly marginalized piece of what’s happening, and so you’ve been helpful in helping us think about what that means in terms of the exile of the people of Israel, Jerusalem being captured, being taken off into exile in Babylon, and what it means to be a minority on the edges and not at the center and in charge.

Now, having helped us think that way, you’ve come up with a new way of thinking, turning to the rebuilders of Jerusalem in Ezra and Nehemiah as a fresh image for us now: not just exile, but rebuilding. Could you say something about that?

Brueggemann: Ezra and Nehemiah—for some of you who do not know them, they were Jews, Jewish leaders who returned from Babylon 450 BCE, thereabouts. And when they came back to Jerusalem, particularly Ezra, who was a scribe, is reported to have conducted liturgies in which he reintroduced the whole covenant notion of Sinai and probably the book of Deuteronomy, in which the Jews—who had lost their way theologically and morally—were invited again to return to the basics of covenant commitments. And it was an attempt to recover Jewish identity in the empire.

Now, by way of analogue, my reasoning is that it is time in our society for the church to reengage those basic claims and to ask what that kind of promise and what that kind of obedience might mean in a very intentional way in our society. So it was a matter of tracing out a distinct minority identity that, in some important ways, was over against the identity of the empire. And I think that’s a pertinent way to try to think in the U.S. church.

Lloyd: That was the period, Ezra and Nehemiah, both of the rebuilding of the devastated temple, the putting back in place the centerpiece of their faith, but it was the birth of the synagogue…

Brueggemann: That’s correct.

Lloyd: …the local community that came together to read the Torah, which provided the scriptural practices and disciplines for their life. So, when all the structures in society weren’t going to reflect their life any more, they built one centerpiece to turn to symbolically, but the real life was focused on what was happening in these small communities, in living these practices together.

Brueggemann: That’s right. There is a text in Nehemiah that says that “Ezra read the Torah with interpretation” [Neh 8:8]. That seems to be very important. There is no strict constructionism about the Torah, but it’s got to be interpreted to make it contemporary, and of course that’s the teaching work of the church all the time.

Lloyd: And so I’ve thought, even to this day, that in many ways, the life of the Jewish community in a Christian society provides a pretty lively model for what mainline Christianity increasingly is feeling like, which is keeping something vibrant and alive going, but we’re not running society anymore; and looking at the way the Jewish community maintains disciplines like a Saturday Sabbath, the Friday Seder, the family gathering, that helps them preserve their oddness—

Brueggemann: That’s right.

Lloyd: —that they are out of step, or in a counter step with the culture around them in relationship to it, but living this defined kind of life. And if ours were a society of the kind of autonomy and individualism you are describing, you are going to need something like that to explain our life now.

Brueggemann: That is correct. There is a new book by Michael Fishbane, who is a Jewish scholar in Chicago, called Sacred Attunement, and it is a reflection on why Jews do all these funny practices. And he says it’s to keep us mindful. And then he says that’s really important in a society that has become mindless. So to have a mindful church in a mindless society is really important.

Lloyd: It takes funny practices.

Brueggemann: That’s right. [laughter]

Lloyd: One more question and then we are going to go to the audience. Please feel free to fill out your questions and pass them forward. Deryl will collect them. One other word you use a great deal in your writing is doxology. We’re here this morning for worship; that’s what we come for. Doxology is giving praise and glory to God. But you find in the practice of doxology something revolutionary. It’s not just coming in and singing nice songs and hearing or reading nice songs, but something quite revolutionary is happening in the process of doxology. Would you say something about that?

Brueggemann: Well, it is, some Psalms suggest, that the singing of doxology—I am going to go again, Sam, where you don’t want to go—but the singing of doxology magnifies God, makes God bigger, makes God to be more God against the rival gods who are idols. So if our doxology is to the Father and the Son and the Spirit, then we mean to be enhancing God, who is bigger and better than the national security state or the market economy or any of the other idols that keep bidding for our loyalty. So I think it very helpful to think that the act of Doxology is a [performative] political act and not just nice.

Lloyd: So that when we sing, for example, “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven,” it’s actually a revolutionary act, because we are saying that all those other pretenders to be king in this world are not king at all, but this King is. So to sing our most beautiful, simple, straightforward songs of praise are in fact very bold provocative acts.

Brueggemann: That’s right.

Lloyd: Questions?

Deryl Davis: As I begin reading these, I’ll ask that if you have questions, you begin passing those to the center aisle. The first question, Dr. Brueggemann, is, “What is the role of people of faith in interacting and perhaps shaping government in terms of this dichotomy you have described between individualism and community?”

Brueggemann: Well, many of you who live in this city know more about and have thought more about that than I have. But I would say that it is the role of the church and of church people to keep testifying in all the ways that we can think of, to keep testifying that the political economy could be organized differently for the sake of the neighborhood. And I think, when you come down to such specific questions, such as health care policy, then the testimony of the church about that is enormously important because, if the church does not keep up its testimony about a covenantally imagined society, then the forces of greed and self-sufficiency will always carry the day. So I think we have to move from our vision to the most concrete issues and make those connections in the way that we can make them.

Davis: This question is, “How do we deal with the parts, particularly of the Hebrew Scriptures, which are difficult in regard to the depiction of women and have a very strongly patriarchal point of view?”

Brueggemann: Well, I think those texts need to be taken seriously. They must not be glossed over, because they teach us our shabby, wounded history. And everybody who is engaged in psychotherapy knows that the only way you can deal with your shabby wounded history is to walk through it and then relinquish it. And you cannot walk through it and relinquish it if you pretend it is not there.

I think those texts need to be heavily criticized, but before they are criticized, they need to be taken seriously; and then they should be criticized. And by and large, the practice of the church that doesn’t want to go there is just to screen those texts out so that they never come up in our awareness. And that’s a recipe for disaster, because we have to own who we have been in the past.

Davis: We’ve talked a good deal about security this morning and what security leads to. What do the Hebrew Scriptures or the Old Testament have to teach us about terrorism or the increasing Balkanization of so much of the world?

Brueggemann: Well I don’t think there is any direct connection. I think to move from the Bible to those kinds of questions requires huge acts of imagination. But what we do know is that the pursuit of security through violence will produce more violence. So what would happen to our national budget if we began to think about those unimaginable sums of money being used to create covenantal transactions? You know, it is the process, it is the long-term difficult process of turning enemies into friends, whereas much of our policy turns would-be friends into greater enemies. And how we reverse that process is obviously enormously complex. But there is not a doubt that the primary gospel trajectory of the Bible has to do with binding greater and greater and greater zones of reality into covenantal reality. That’s what we have to work at in every way we can imagine.

Davis: This question is about approaching reading the Bible and incorporating it into our daily lives. It is, “What would you suggest are some best practices for incorporating the Bible into daily life?” And maybe we would add, perhaps for those who are not very familiar with it to start with.

Brueggemann: Well, it is essentially an educational process, first of all, of getting familiar with the repertoire. You have to know the texts. And obviously there has been a great loss about that in the U.S. church, so we have to undertake enormous education about that. And after we have some familiarity with the text, then we have to develop the kind of imagination that will begin to make connections to the contemporary world. And I believe that we need to learn from models of the church in Third World countries, where these connections are being made all the time, much better than do we.

I don’t think any of that is easy or obvious, but I think the church has to decide whether the Bible is really that important. I belong to the United Church of Christ, which is as liberal as it can always imagine itself to be. And in the United Church of Christ, we find almost everything more interesting to study than the Bible—we would much rather study the Qur’an—rather than anything else. And we should study all that, but I don’t think we can neglect our homework of saying as baptized people, this is our natural habitat, and we need to be at work on that.

Davis: You’ve offered us a critique of individualism this morning and this question is, “Should we not be celebrating dynamic, driven individuals who create new solutions for the larger community?”

Brueggemann: Well, yes, but individualism is very different from celebrating healthy, imaginative persons who are contributing members of the community. So the “ism” part is a way of thinking that assumes that the individual person is not connected to the future and wellbeing of the community. So you have to appreciate that I was stressing the ‘ism” part. Obviously, provocative, artistic, contributing individual persons should be celebrated, supported, and validated.

Davis: A couple of questions here approach the idea about the God we see in the Hebrew Scriptures and the God we see in the New Testament, and how we reconcile the two and put them together. [Could you address that?] Could you say more about that… putting these two visions together?

Brueggemann: Well, Sam said it: that the New Testament is a reinterpretation or re-performance of the Old Testament, so I am wont to stress the continuity. So when Jesus talks about God as Father, the notion of God being our Father goes all the way back in the Old Testament to Exodus. And by and large the New Testament trades on the images and the metaphors of the Old Testament, so you can’t really understand what the New Testament is talking about if you don’t go back and recover the reference points to which it is appealing.

You can make the case, obviously, that in some parts the New Testament reaches beyond the Old Testament. But it’s also true that contemporary Judaism, in many of its more recent documents, also reaches beyond the Old Testament. So nobody is locked into the Old Testament. I call the Old Testament the compost pile. It is the compost pile from which sprouts all kinds of new growths of faith. But if you don’t have a compost pile, you aren’t going to get the new growth. So that is why we have to care for it and attend to it, both Jews and Christians.

Davis: This question is, “What is your evaluation of the state of preaching today, especially the more public or public theology type of preaching?”

Brueggemann: Well it depends on who you are talking about. I don’t care much about Joel Osteen’s preaching, if you call that public preaching.

Lloyd: Why not?

Brueggemann: Well, because it is vacuous and because it is committed to individualism and it doesn’t call anybody to accountability or really offer any good news. Other than that, it’s okay. [laughter]

I think there is a great deal of courageous public preaching, but there are also many places where the church is in such malaise that the preacher doesn’t have room or courage to do that.

So I don’t want to talk about the state of preaching. I want to talk about the state of the church, because it is the state of the church that makes preaching possible or impossible. I think that there are many smart, courageous preachers who are at work on the big issues.

Lloyd: Walter, why don’t you say something about the state of the church?

Brueggemann: Well, I think we have gone through a time when the church has accommodated itself to the American system and that has caused the church to lose its edge and to lose its nerve. And now I think we are—like the God of violence, we are in a phase of recovery. We are recovering our nerve and our courage, because we are coming to see that the dominant system of our culture is not a good ally for us.

And therefore one of the tasks of the contemporary church, it seems to me, is to create some daylight between the dominant system of our society and the claims of the Gospel, where very many people who haven’t thought much, believe that the dominant system and the claims of the Gospel are synonymous. And when the church thinks that, it has no energy for mission and it has no resources for mission.

But I believe there is—for obvious reasons, there is now a growing awareness that you cannot contain the promise of the Gospel in the dominant system. And then you have to ask, “Well, what else is there about the promise of the Gospel beyond that?” And that gives us an edge for preaching and teaching and missional obedience, and I think that’s happening in a lot of places. So it may be that that’s a good outcome of the state in which our society finds itself.

Davis: Modern Christian fundamentalism has brought a little reading of Scripture to the American consciousness. “Where did this view of Scripture originate and how does the seeking lay person approach the Bible?”

Brueggemann: Well, I think you get literalism whenever you get frightened one-dimensionalized people. You can trace back to the earliest twentieth century, the intellectual founding of fundamentalism that came through the Scofield Bible, that laid out all these time lines about the Anti-Christ, I think. So if you want to talk about that… but I don’t think that’s the real deal.

The real deal is this frightened quest for certitude that is commensurate with the level of anxiety that we feel, and I think that what the church has to continually witness to is that the offer of the Gospel is not certitude: it is fidelity. And certitude is no good trade-off for fidelity. So I believe that the great pathology of our society is anxiety, and I believe that the managers of the dominant society want us to stay frightened and anxious, because frightened anxious people are not likely to risk much. That’s why we are kept on orange alert all the time. [laughter] [applause]

Davis: This question is asking about different Messianic traditions found in the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament and how we reconcile those and what they may mean for thinking about our faith.

Brueggemann: That’s kind of vague.

Davis: Specifically, this questioner is asking, “A Messianic tradition running from Joshua to the Maccabees and David, the other grounded in Isaiah, Daniel and the Book of Jonah.”

Walter Brueggemann: Well, I think that the Old Testament is a collage of promises of all kinds. All kinds of people across the theological spectrum articulate their hope and most of them got in the book. What the New Testament did was to make use of many of them to try to understand this strange phenomenon of Jesus.

Martin Buber, the great Jewish teacher, was once with a group of Christian clergy, and they asked why Jews didn’t believe in Jesus. And Buber says, “You Christians think that the Messiah has already been here and will come again, and we Jews think that when the Messiah comes again, it will be for the first time. So when he comes again, or when he comes, we will ask Him, “Have you been here before?”

And Buber said, “I will whisper in His ear, ‘Do not answer.’”

So you can’t take the promises of the Messiah as though they are flat formulae to be enacted, but they are scenarios of hope and possibility, and the church needs to surround itself with many modes of promise, all of which attest that the world isn’t going to be this way. “We do not know how it will be,” writes John, but “we know that we will be like Him.” [I John 3:2] That’s enough. Then you act on that hope.

Lloyd: This has been a great conversation. It has been wonderful listening to you Walter.

I hope you will join us next week as we explore A History of Prayer in America. James Dobson—James Moore has written a book on prayer. I’m sorry, two different people [laughter]. We hope you will stay for the service which comes in just a few moments. There’s coffee in back of the church, but by all means be here at 11:15 when Dr. Brueggemann will be our preacher. Please join me in thanking Dr. Brueggemann. [Applause].