A text that redescribes

Theology Today, Jan 2002 by Brueggemann, Walter

We have lost the text, in a measure, because we have become knowing and technologically competent, and one cannot build public greatness on the foundation of an irascible Holiness who subverts. Our controlling power and self-confidence have come to require a text not so disruptive, either this one smoothed to management or another one in its place.

We have lost the text, in a measure, because we have become self-- sufficient and affluent, and we no longer need to be reminded of the more dangerous powers that still float around in our bodies and in the body politic. Self-sufficiency makes the primal categories of this text not only an unwelcome disruption with its talk about gifts, wonders, and obedience, but so remote that it sounds like a language we do not know and do not intend to learn. We are long aware of tales from the "mission fields" in Africa where it was so difficult to do "mission" because the tribes have no vocabulary for grace or atonement or whatever. Mutatis mutandis, we, in our technological affluence, have no vocabulary for "presence" or "holiness" or "discipleship." And the preacher chatters on in a foreign tongue.

We have lost the text, in a measure, because in our moral earnestness we have willed that the text should be relevant; by twists and turns of a thousand kinds, we have helped the text speak directly to us concerning our passionate convictions about sexuality, money, capital punishment, abortion, the Panama Canal, and whatever-a text now speaking to us in cadences that sound strangely like our own. Because the text is not so immediately interested in our burning contemporary crises, I think sometimes the text finds us not very interesting at all.

We have lost the text, in a measure. I have, by inference, been characterizing the text itself as the antithesis of each of these dimensions of loss. That is, the strangeness of the text itself illuminates the reasons we have scuttled it. With the inchoate recognition of loss, moreover, we hold conferences like this one on the recovery of the text. We may consider, at the beginning, what would happen if we set about the recovery of the text in ways that:

moved past fascination with our own experience,

moved past packaged certitudes familiar to us,

risked unlearning much that we have known too long.

RECOVERING THE TEXT

I suggest that recovery entails and produces:

(1) A deep and inescapable awareness of how this text, and the life it fosters, lives in deep tension with the dominant text of the global market, a tension to be entrusted to those who speak and listen to this text.

(2) An openness to a text that resists reduction and explanation, that traffics in metaphor, image, tease, and possibility, but that is short on conclusions and directives.

(3) A hosting of the seething, unrelieved ambiguities hidden deep within human life that operate with enormous leverage among us. The seething ambiguities have now been channeled into "counseling," an important legacy of Freud who did not flinch from that which was denied. "Counseling" as a pastoral chance is surely important; as we practice it, however, it remains mostly unconnected to the public realities. We have arrived where we can scarcely acknowledge the unresolved ambiguities that characterize our life, public and personal.