As a prelude to this post, please watch Walter Brueggemann on the Bible.
While I appreciate the influence Brueggemann has had in and on scholarship, I am not a fan. In fact, my own Old Testament theology is directly antithetical to his own. However, there are three things Brueggemann says in that video that I strongly appreciate. The quotes below, elaborated by my own commentary, represent a recent revelatory breakthrough. This post is deeply personal and may turn out to be the most important thing I have to say on this blog all year. I know there are multitudes out there, both those with faith and those without, who have very real issues with the biblical texts and with the God therein. I hope that the following analysis will deal with some of these tough questions and issues and will prove as liberating for them as it has for me.
The God of the Bible is deeply implicated in, uh, in this inheritance of violence.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
First is the recognition that the God of the OT (and even the NT—the “God of Love” that is so frequently identified in the NT is just as vividly present in the OT and the “God of Judgment” so frequently identified in the OT is just as vividly present in the NT—but we are speaking of the Hebrew scriptures at the moment) sometimes stands condemned according to modern moral judgment. Held up to the lens of the way we think about and understand ourselves and our world, YHWH has been blood-thirsty, violent, and oppressive, and has committed heinous and grotesque atrocities. But it will not do for us who face this reality and dislike it to therefore deny it or try to cover it over with clever scholarship or smooth-sounding apologetics (and vice versa)—to lie for God as Job says in accusation of his “pious” friends. No, to do so would either be to deny our own world-view and cut ourselves off from the present (and therefore to either become enemies of the present or lose all ability to communicate with it) or to hijack the past and reshape it in the image of ourselves. And this is based on the second vital recognition:
The big revelatory moments before Jesus and Jesus and after Jesus are characteristically departures from what has been taken for granted.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
The God of ancient Israel thought and operated (and the people who wrote of him thought and operated) in a way that is very different from how we think and operate today. And that is precisely why we face this conflict of interest in which the very God we would turn to for a moral compass in our lives appears sometimes to be an abomination of it instead—because we have radically departed from the way things used to be and gone in new and different directions. Moral and ethical perspectives that were taken for granted or even heartily supported thousands of years ago are either no longer operative or adamantly opposed today. But the texts we are reading were not written today, they were written thousands of years ago outside of our perspectives and without foundation in our values. There is a rift between ourselves and the characters in the scriptures—including YHWH himself in those scriptures—that crosses every field of our existence from language to culture to politics to philosophy to religion. That rift exists not because we have necessarily veered away from what the God of those scriptures would have of us (although we do!), but because humanity’s world-views, perspectives, values, and judgments have changed rather drastically over time while the scriptures have retained a great deal of their original perspectives, values, world-views, and judgments. In other words, we have moved so much faster and further than our scriptures that it has come to the point where the very scriptures we turn to are alien and oppositional to us. This, of course, is not a new phenomena—it has been happening for a long time—as long as the scriptures have preserved the integrity of their viewpoints and perspectives in the midst of human change. Yet amidst these competing claims, we need to be aware of the third vital component that Brueggemann draws our attention to:
Our faith is requiring us to move in a new direction . . . Eventually, those departures can only be explained by the movement of God’s spirit, far beyond all that we can ask or think or imagine.
Walter Brueggemann in video above
This is where the rubber hits the road. The texts are bound to particular perspectives and cultures and understandings (that we don’t share). In much the same sense, so are we in that we have changed and moved in directions for specific historical reasons and we cannot change the past. But the Spirit is not so bound. The Spirit of God is not imprisoned inside an ancient text with foreign values and alien perspectives, nor defined and developed by the progression of time and change as we are. Rather, the Spirit is separate from and moves through and within history (or “above the waters” as we read in Genesis). It is active in all modes and forms that human society undergoes. And it can act in different times in different ways to direct creation at that point in history. Our texts tell us about the Spirit’s work in particular moments in the distant past, but it is not a complete record of the Spirit’s work and it does not mean that whatever way the Spirit worked then must be the way it will work now. Behold, YHWH does a new thing! Something our mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers never saw and never knew! Something that contradicts what they thought or knew in their lifetimes—something that can even contradict what people in scripture saw and knew in theirs.
This is not itself a new idea for those of us who call ourselves Christians. Indeed, we claim that YHWH did something new in Christ—something no one before could have understood—something no one before could have participated in. A new covenant, a new kingship, a new Jerusalem, a new heavens and a new earth. And it is astonishing! It is astonishing, for instance, that women should be so abused and dehumanized in the ancient world and in our ancient scriptures and by our own ancient God within the ancient scriptures of the ancient world. And it is astonishing that the Spirit should bring us to a place outside the scriptures and outside that world where we can stand up for the dignity of women and fight against the silencing of their voices and work to release them from the shackles of male possession, dominance, and control. It is not biblical, but it is the Spirit of God active and alive in our history outside and beyond the biblical text.
The biblical God, confined to the texts, may sometimes appear vile to us looking in from outside that frame, but the extra-biblical God, the God who exists outside the frame of scripture and who cannot be contained by any text, surpasses such judgments just as he surpasses the texts and just as he surpasses ourselves. To say that the biblical God is misogynistic or any other number of modern judgments is not only short-sighted, since it pigeonholes God within a singular historical expression (the ancient text’s), it is anachronistic since it judges the biblical God as if he were acting within our perspectives, cultures, world-views, and values while denying him that very participation (since the biblical world is not our own). For us to adequately assess the biblical God, we have to enter the Biblical world in which he is operating, not pass judgment from outside. Would an ancient Babylonian or an ancient Egyptian or other ancient peoples have judged the Jewish God in the way we are tempted to do? Most likely not. Many things we would take strong moral issue with would be considered bizarre and laughed at in the biblical world within which the biblical God is operating. But when we look at the extra-biblical God, we see he is working to free womankind and to elevate this other whole of the divine image to her proper position. The God who in the scriptures did not condemn, but in fact supported and upheld human slavery as any good God would in the ancient world is the God who today has shattered the acceptance of human slavery amidst vast quarters of the world. The God who in the scriptures commanded the slaughtering of innocents and the extermination of peoples as any good God would in the ancient world is the God who later raised a son, Yeshua, Prince of Peace, to teach us the way of self-sacrifice and love toward our enemies instead of violence and slaughter. The God who in the scriptures supported and even initiated Jewish holocausts (Assyria, Babylon, and Rome) as any good God would in the ancient world who was wrathful against a people is the God who has since sought an end to all holocausts and has no continuance with Nazi Germany. It’s all about perspective. When we are reading the biblical texts, the God therein is operating according to a different perspective than our own. Realizing this will mean we are careful not to read our own contexts into those texts or into the God operating within them.