Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World - Softcover

Brueggemann, Walter; Miller, Patrick D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0800632370 ISBN 13: 9780800632373

Publisher: Fortress Press, 2000

Synopsis

The leading Old Testament theologian reflects on the meaning of the gospel in today's world.These studies on a variety of biblical texts focus deftly on reading, listening to, and proclaiming the gospel in a broken, fragmented, and "post-Christendom" world. Brueggemann explores how these traditions have the potential to continually resonate in our contemporary communities and individual lives.

About this title

About the Authors

Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary. An ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, he is regarded as the premier Old Testament interpreter and biblical theologian of today. Among his many publications are Prophetic Imagination and Old Testament Theology.

Patrick D. Miller is Charles T. Haley Professor of Old Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of two Fortress Press volumes: They Cried to the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (1994) and Interpreting the Psalms (1986).

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From Chapter One (pre-publication version):

Preaching as Sub-Version
There was a time, perhaps 250 years ago, when the Christian preacher could count on the shared premises of the listening community, reflective of a large theological consensus. There was a time, a very long time, when the assumption of God completely dominated Western imagination, and the holy catholic church roughly uttered the shared consensus of all parties. That shared consensus was rough and perhaps not very healthy, but at least the preacher could work from it.

In that ancient world moving to the modern the consensus, deep and broad, made it all but impossible to be an atheist. Not only was the thought of a-theism intellectually not available, but emotionally and culturally there was no receptive context for such a notion. Indeed, Michael Buckley has traced the intellectual developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that made a-theism a credible intellectual alternative for the first time, and then an emotionally and culturally bearable interpretive posture. As time has gone on, through the nineteenth century, citizens of the Western world have had to make a series of adjustments and settlements, seemingly unending adjustments and settlements, always at the expense of theism and in concessions to a-theism. Those concessions have been required primarily because of the emergence of a thinking autonomy in the world, rooted in Descartes and expressed belatedly in Robert Bellah s report on Sheilaism. By the time of the twentieth century, the settlement largely had been that God is still a cherished affirmation in private matters ( family values ), but the public realm is largely a-theistic, without God, so that might makes right. Appeal is characteristically made to legitimation other than God, appeal to a public God having become increasingly difficult and embarrassing.

And now, so it seems to me, by the time of the twenty-first century, the intellectual-emotional-cultural situation of the seventeenth century, for complex reasons, has been completely reversed. A-theism is now a credible, perhaps a consensus, option for what is serious in life, and the articulation of life-with-God has become a risky intellectual outpost, perhaps as difficult and as odd and as embarrassing as was a-theism in the seventeenth century. It seems to me not so important to review all of the complex reasons for that inversion reasons that include the rise of scientific thinking, the emergence of Enlightenment autonomy, and the shift into high-gear technology as the way to better our life, high-gear technology that begins in Research and Development and that ends, inevitably I believe, in militarism. It is more important to recognize our fairly recently changed intellectual-emotional-theological situation in which we do our preaching and, for that matter, in which we do what we can of our own trusting and believing.

I
In the seventeenth century, it was hard, courageous work to imagine consequently reimagine the world without God. And now, into the twenty-first century, in the face of Enlightenment autonomy issuing in autonomous power and autonomous knowledge, it is hard, courageous work to imagine consequently reimagine the world with God.

Of course, you understand I am speaking with evangelical particularity. I have used the terms a-theism and theism for purposes of symmetry. But you will understand that I do not in fact mean theism, for theism of sorts is alive and well in our postmodern world. Indeed, the polls show that, in its indeterminate forms, almost everybody believes in God. But I mean, as you would expect, the peculiar trinitarian claims for God concerning the one we confess in the history of Israel and in the narrative of Jesus. Theism of certain kinds is still culturally credible, but we are speaking of none other than the creator of heaven and earth whose quintessential intention showed up, we confess, in the absence of Good Friday.

And so I pursue with you the single point. In a culture that has learned well how to imagine how to make sense of the world without reference to the God of the Bible, it is the preacher s primal responsibility to invite and empower and equip the community to reimagine the world as though Yahweh were a key and decisive player. The task is as upstream as was seventeenth-century a-theism. This is an uncommonly difficult intellectual task, almost sure to be misunderstood. Its difficulty is compounded, moreover, by its inescapable economic by-product, because the God of the Bible is endlessly restless with socioeconomic power arrangements that the world takes as normal. If you are like me, you keep hoping Sunday by Sunday, as we do our hard intellectual work, that folks will not immediately notice the inescapable economic implications that come with it.

I recently gave some lectures at Baldwin-Wallace College. The lectures were endowed by a very generous family that is concerned that religion should be prominent in the life of the college. Two sons of the original donor, enterprising, gracious businessmen, attended the lecture in which I did a biblical critique of capitalism. The task was not easy. It turned out all right, however, because all that was noticed by the appreciative donors was that I had quoted lots of the Bible. The rest was happily lost on them. I understand the moment of preaching, in the designated place of preaching, to be a freeing and primitive act that flies in the face of all our accepted certitudes, conservative and liberal.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0800632370
• ISBN 13: 9780800632373
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168