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Counterscript: living with the elusive God
Christian Century, Nov 29, 2005 by Walter Brueggemann
7. It is the task of the church and its ministry to detach us from that powerful script. This has been the work of the biblical tradition since Moses and the subsequent work of the Deuteronomists, the prophets and the scribes. Moses had to make the case that the pharaonic arrangement of brickyard quotas was not the true destiny of the Israelite community. In the text we can see that such a descripting was a risky calling, entailing repeated challenges to his leadership and recurring proposals for a return to that exploitative Egyptian arrangement (Exod. 16:3; Num. 11:4-6). Later the Jerusalem establishment was caught in its own illusion of security; the prophets repeatedly urged Israel to give up its illusion of entitlement and to face the reality of covenantal requirements. And of course Jesus delineated a regime change in Mark 1:14-15 that was nothing less than a call to descript from Rome and from what had become an exploitative religious system.
8. The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is undertaken through the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe and joyous. We have become so jaded in the church--most particularly in the liberal church--that we have forgotten what has been entrusted to us. We have forgotten that the script entrusted to us is really an alternative and not an echo. Liberals tend to get so engaged in the issues of the day, urgent and important as those issues are, that we forget that behind such issues is a meta-narrative that is not about our particular social passion but about the world beyond our control. The claim of that alternative script is that there is at work among us a Truth that makes us safe, that makes us free, that makes us joyous in a way that the comfort and ease of the consumer economy cannot even imagine. It would make a difference if the church were candid in its acknowledgment that that is the work to which it is called.
9. The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and enacted through the tradition of the church. Many of us have become embarrassed about that ancient script because of our awareness of the ideological failures that are present in it. We are too ready to hand it over to the waiting arms of the dominant ideology; we have given up on the hard work of hearing and speaking the alternative message in what Karl Barth termed "the strange new world within the Bible." Barth understood that we cannot find in the Bible many of the things for which we look. But what we find there is an alternative world, an alternative network of symbols and signs that stitched together yield a coherence that subverts dominant scripts, a world in which newness keeps welling up.
10. The defining factor of the alternative script is the God of the Bible, who, fleshed in Jesus, is variously Lord and Savior of Israel and Creator of heaven and Earth, and whom we name as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The alternative script is about God, about a particular God whose name we know, whose story we tell. The historians of Israelite religion have traced all of the borrowings and appropriations from ancient Near Eastern culture and religion. They have in general concluded that for all the borrowings and appropriations there is something inexplicable and underived, something originary, in the God of Israel who blew over waters of disorder, who summoned Abraham and Sarah abruptly, and who came in a burning bush to give Moses an unbearable assignment.
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