A text that redescribes

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Brueggemann, Walter

It is more or less a given, by convention if not by conviction, that one must have a biblical text for a sermon. Sometimes the text is more than that, utterly absolutized. Often it is a lot less than that, a text read but not taken seriously. The text is a given, nonetheless, in the churches of the Reformation. It is a given that requires, in our time, a fresh consideration.

THE DOMINANT SCRIPT

The requirement of a fresh reconsideration is (1) because of our awareness, fresh awareness, of the problematic of the text with reference to historical questions; (2) because the text is seen to be laden with deep ideological force that is dangerous; and (3) because our church situation is now so greatly pluralized that the claim for this particular text-even in the church-is not obviously normative, as the slippage between text and gospel seems wide and gaping.

The text is problematic enough-historically and ideologically-that we might do better to leave off the text and go with "experience," what George Lindbeck terms "experiential-expressive" modes of discourse! Except that it readily becomes obvious that when the church works from its experience-or, worse, from the experience of the preacher-things very quickly become thin, boring, and predictable, perhaps too congenial or alternatively too angry and coercive, depending on the preacher's "experience." Any large vision of saving transcendence, moreover, devolves into the family or tribe, either in blase comfort or in militant crusading, either way with a very low ceiling. The failure of such thinness makes clear that we need a text that addresses us inscrutably, from beyond us, beyond the low ceiling of the congregation and the short horizon of the preacher.

If we cannot get along without a text, should we not be candid enough to say that we already have a text? We already have a text that we bring to church and carry home with us. We may characterize that hidden, powerful, authoritative text in various ways, here all critical if not polemical. It is the text of the Enlightenment, of modernity, that received its decisive articulation within decades of the final edition of Calvin's Institutes. The turn of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries-in Hobbes, Descartes, Galileo, and Locke-worked an incredible gain of emancipation in western culture, a knowing revolt against superstitious traditionalism in the church, a rejection of the kind of absolutism that still operates in the "religious wars" of our own time, that produced the Thirty Years War and rendered Europe bloody. This new, emerging text, culminating in the immense rational powers of Immanuel Kant, was perhaps a gift from God and was received as such by its formulators.

That text has become an unquestioned, normative narrative that has permeated western consciousness, of believer and nonbeliever alike, with reasonableness and autonomous freedom. It is, however, a huge leap from the reasoned intentionality of the formulators of that text to the present-- tense derivations and extrapolations now so forceful among us:

Do I go on too long with this? Do I overstate? I take so much time, because I believe this text that we already have-which is dangerous to criticize in public-is deep in the church and in our listening apparatus. The power of this text shows up in an excessive theological conservatism that has transposed fidelity into certitude, and that believes that if we go deep enough we will find certitudes that are absolutes about morality as about theology, as though somewhere there are rational formulations that will powerfully veto the human ambiguities so palpable among us. The power of this text also shows up in overstated theological liberalism in which every woman and every man is one's own pope, in which autonomous freedom becomes a fetish and all notions of communal accountability evaporate into a polite but innocuous mantra of "each to her own."

THE TEXT LOST

In the presence of that powerful, extrapolated text of Enlightenment autonomy, we become aware of how feeble the biblical text has become among us. Likely we should say that in the Bible we had a text for preaching; but it was largely, unwittingly lost among us and has stayed largely lost. In the interest of the recovery of that text, we may reflect on how we lost it.

We have lost the text, in a measure, because we have wanted to press the text to yield dogmatic certitudes that it does not offer. The playfulness of the text has left things too open-or as we say, "polyvalent"-for our comfort. That playfulness, openness, and ambiguity were consequently made to yield to a scholastic pattern of conclusions that make the text almost too predictable and familiar to bother with.

We have lost the text, in a measure, because, like Uzzah in 2 Sam 6:6, we touch the ark; we get too close to its inscrutability. Or, like the janitor in I Kgs 8:9, we have looked into the ark and discovered it was empty, except for the tablets of Torah. We have become critically knowing and busy with explanation. Our loss has come with "historical criticism" to which we all, in one way or another, are committed. The project of historical criticism began with an attempt to place and locate texts in context, believing that context illuminates text. But the project went on to make the text congenial to modem rationality, with the dismissal of inconvenience through glosses, the slicing into sources where the tension offends, all of which culminates, for example, in the Jesus Seminar. The outcome, of course, is a respectable text, one emptied of its unfamiliarity.