Paying Attention To The Sky

Dr. Walter Brueggemann

I was on a discussion forum recently where someone challenged me to show that the bible was historically accurate. Having seen several Discovery channel/PBS documentaries dealing with Biblical Archaeology, I couldn’t understand how my interlocutor could believe there weren’t more than several thousand.

Well it turns out that the Bible has a significant number of deniers who lurk about the Internet and I’m not speaking about those who reject the Bible as “inspired” text. These are folks who reject any historicity whatsoever. While elsewhere I have discussed the process by which Scripture became the Word of God  but Walter Brueggemann’s explanation of imaginative remembering here also shows how the interplay of imagination, ideology and inspiration cohere in the traditioning process and allows people of faith to find a trustworthy voice.

“Walter Brueggemann is the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. A graduate of Elmhurst College, Professor Brueggemann went on to study at the Eden Theological Seminary, receiving his Doctorate of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. from St. Louis University.

He has devoted his life to a passionate exploration of Old Testament theology, with an emphasis on the relation between the Old Testament and the Christian canonical works, the origins and history of Christian doctrine, and the dynamics of Jewish-Christian interactions. An unequaled passion for his subject has resulted in the publication of more than 58 books and hundreds of articles. This particular offering is a reading selection from his 2003 book An Introduction to the Old Testament.

Mark Thiessen Nation, program director at the London Mennonite Center (London, England) has commented of Professor Brueggemann, “No one writing on the Bible is more consistently provocative, interesting, challenging, and imaginative than Walter Brueggemann. I imagine there is no Scripture scholar in America who sells more books or informs more sermons. For those Christians who yearn for serious, biblically informed engagement with our contemporary world there is no one more stimulating to read than Brueggemann. The man rarely writes a boring page. He is thoroughly knowledgeable as an Old Testament scholar — not to mention reasonably informed on theology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and several other fields — and yet he writes with such verve that he is a joy to read.”
from theWords.com 

The interplay of historical reportage and canonical formation is endlessly complex. The process of that interplay is the work of tradition, the defining enterprise of biblical formation, transmission, and interpretation that we may term “imaginative remembering.”

The remembering part is done in the intergenerational community, as parents tell and retell to children and grandchildren what is most prized in community lore (see Exodus 10:1-2; 12:26; 13:8, 14; Deuteronomy 6:20; Joshua 4:21; and Psalms 78:5-8). One may assume that what is remembered is rooted in some occurrence. Thus, for example, the great exodus narrative surely has behind it some defining emancipatory happening. It is, however, an occurrence to which we have no access, and we cannot make certain the claim for its “happening.” Remembering, moreover, is itself shot through with imaginative freedom to extrapolate and move beyond whatever there may have been of “happening.” Sometimes that imaginative reconstrual is intentional, in order to permit the memory to be pertinent to a new generation.

Thus, for example, the exodus narrative of Exodus 1-15 contains exilic materials in order that the later generation of the sixth-century exile might understand the exodus memory in terms of its own emancipation from Babylon. Sometimes, surely, the imaginative construal that goes beyond “happening” is unworthy and untenable. Either way, the traditioning process of retelling does not intend to linger over old happening, but intends to recreate a rooted, lively world of meaning that is marked by both coherence and surprise in which the listening generation, time after time, can situate its own life.

This act of imaginative remembering, I believe, is the clue to valuing the Bible as a trustworthy voice of faith while still taking seriously our best critical learning. Critical scholarship for a long time has tried to separate “reliable remembering” from imaginative extrapolation, thereby reducing matters to a bare minimum (von Rad 1962, 105—115, 302—305). Current scholarship is in a quite skeptical mood: on the one hand scholars increasingly judge the “historical” claim of the Old Testament to be mostly unreliable and unprovable, and often unlikely (Dever 2001; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001). On the other hand, scholars recognize that the texts are loaded with ideological freight so that they cannot be trusted as reliable (Barr 2000). The recognition of these critical judgments is important and warns against making irresponsible claims for the text.

At the same time, however, one can judge that the imposition of modernist tests of reliability on the text has been deeply wrongheaded and has asked of texts what they did not intend to deliver. Thus what parents have related to their children as normative tradition (that became canonized by long usage and has long been regarded as normative) is a world of meaning that has as its key character YHWH, the God of Israel, who operates in the narratives and songs of Israel that taken as reliable renderings of reality. Given all kinds of critical restraints and awarenesses, one can only allow that such retellings are a disciplined, emancipated act of imagination. It can of course be noted in passing that current skepticism about the text in some scholarly circles is also an act of interpretive imagination rooted in modernist positivism; I have, however, no wish to linger over that awareness.

The notion of the dynamism of the traditioning process is no new awareness in Old Testament studies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the matrix of Enlightenment rationality; the traditioning process was worked into a defining hypothesis concerning the emergence of Old Testament historical texts according to a series of proposed documents. That scholarly era thought in terms of “documents,” but we may recognize that the proposed “documents” are layers and way-stations in the ongoing traditioning process in the formation of the biblical text.

According to that most influential hypothesis that is still reported in many books, the ongoing tradition of Israel’s “historical remembering” is marked by fixed accent points in the tenth, ninth, seventh, and fifth centuries B.C.E., represented in hypothetical documents respectively designated as the Yahwist (J) the Elohist (F), the Deuteronomist (D), and the Priestly (P) tradition. Each stratum of tradition relied on what was remembered, took what it wanted and could use, neglected what it would not itself use, reformulated and resituated to make a new statement. The final form of the text is a combination of these several major attempts at reformulating the core tradition of that memory.

That hypothesis of documents was governed by a notion of the evolutionary development of Israelite religion that no longer pertains; but the dynamism of the process itself continues to be recognized, albeit in very different form. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that scholarship began to move away from “documents” to “traditions,” but the point of the dynamism is the same in either case. The tradition, including its final form, is a practice of imaginative remembering.

In the traditioning process of telling and retelling in order to make faith possible for the next generation, each version of retelling (of which there were surely many in the long-term process) intends, perforce, that its particular retelling should be the “final” and surely the correct one. In the event, however~ no account of traditioning turns out to be the “final” one, but each act of traditioning is eventually overcome and in fact displaced (“superseded”) by a fresher version. The later, displacing form of the tradition no doubt is assumed to be the “final and correct” one, but is in turn sure to be overcome and, in part, displaced by subsequent versions of the memory.

The complexity of the text evident on any careful reading is due to the happy reality that as new acts of traditioning overcome and partly displace older materials, the older material is retained alongside newer tradition. That retention is a happy one, because it very often happens that a still later traditionist returns to and finds useful older, “discarded” material thought to be beyond use.

The traditioning process that came to constitute the church’s Scripture is not an innocent act of reportage. It is, in each of its variations over time, an intentional advocacy that means to tilt the world of the next generation according to a conviction of faith. I may identity three facets of that intentionality that can be taken into account in our study.

1. First, I have already noted that the tradition that became Scripture is a relentless act of imagination (D. Brown 1999, 2000). That is, the literature is not merely descriptive of a commonsense world; it dares, by artistic sensibility and risk-taking rhetoric, to posit, characterize, and vouch for a world beyond the “common sense.” The theological aspect of this imagination is that the world is articulated with YHWH as the defining character, even though this character in all holiness defies every attempt to make this character available or accessible in any conventional mode. That theological dimension of Imagination — to render a world defined by the character of YHWH — is matched by a rich artistic sensibility that renders lived reality in song, story; oracle, and law. The artistic aspect of the text is not uniform and one-dimensional; in the narratives of Samuel, for example, or in the poetry of Job or in the metaphors of Jeremiah, we are offered “limit expressions” that render the “limit experiences” of the generation that offers its testimony and that invites “limit experiences” in the listening generation that would not be available without this shared limit language (Ricoeur 1975, 107-45).
2. Second, it is now widely recognized that the traditioning process is deeply permeated by ideology. The traditioning generation in each case is not a cast of automatons. Rather they are, even if unknown to us and unnamed by us, real people who live real lives in socioeconomic circumstances where they worried about, yearned for, and protected social advantage and property. Indeed, the traditionists surely constitute, every time, a case study in the Marxian insight that “truth” is inescapably filtered through “interest.” And while Marx focused on economic interest, it is not difficult to see in the traditioning process the working of interest expressed through gender, race, class, and ethnic distinctions (Jobling 1998; Schwartz 1997).Because the text is marked by these pressures, it is clear that the text is open, in retrospect, to critique. As David Brown has seen, the later traditioning process may indeed circle back and critique the older, established textual tradition. In doing so, of course, it is important to recognize that each subsequent critique of older tradition (including my own critique) is itself not likely to be innocent; it in turn is reflective of social location and interest.
3. Third, the religious communities of Judaism and Christianity that take this text to be normative will affirm in a variety of ways that this text is inspired. In this affirmation, the religious communities go beyond critical scholarship that in its characteristic skepticism avoids any such claim. These religious communities make this claim not because they are obscurantist or engaged in special pleading of a decisive kind, but because over time these communities have found these texts to be carriers of and witnesses to the most compelling offer of a meaningful, responsible, coherent life.

The term inspiration of course is not without its own complexity; If we recall the mention of “artistic imagination,” we may for starters say that the biblical text is “inspired” in the way that every gifted artistic accomplishment is inspired. It is recognized that the artist is peculiarly gifted and is able to move beyond ordinary capacity in an extraordinary moment of rendering. To say this much is to say a great deal: that the singers and story-tellers and poets who constituted the Old Testament did indeed reach beyond themselves in an extraordinary way.

But of course when Christians speak of the Bible as “inspired,” we mean to say much more than that. We mean to say that God’s own purpose, will, and presence have been “breathed” through these texts. Such a claim need not result in a literalist notion of “direct dictation” by God’s spirit, as though God were whispering in the ear of a human writer; it is clear that the claim of “inspired” is an inchoate way of saying that the entire traditioning process continues and embodies a surplus rendering of reality that discloses all of reality in light of the holiness of YHWH. Through that disclosure that happens in fits and starts through human imagination and human ideology — but is not finally domesticated by either human imagination or human ideology — we receive a “revelation” of the hiddenness of the life of the world and of God’s life in the world. And because we in the church find it so, we dare to say in the actual traditioning process with trembling lips, “The Word of the Lord.. Thanks be to God.”

Now it will occur to an attentive reader that these three facts of the traditioning process — imagination, ideology, and inspiration — do not easily cohere with each other. Specifically, the force of human ideology and the power of divine inspiration would seem to be definitionally at odds. Precisely! That is what causes the Old Testament to be endlessly complex and problematic, endlessly interesting and compelling. The interplay of human ideology sometimes of a crass kind, of divine inspiration of a hidden kind, and of human imagination that may be God-given (or may not be) is an endlessly recurring feature of the text that appears in many different configurations. It is that interplay of the three that requires that the text must always again be interpreted; the traditioning process, for that reason, cannot ever be concluded, because the text is endlessly needful of new rendering. (A case in point is the way in which the biblical teaching on slavery appeared at a time to be “inspired,” and now can be seen to be ideology [see Haynes 2001].) It is this strange mix that is always again sorted out afresh. It is, however, always a sorting out by church interpreters and scholars who themselves are inescapable mixes of imagination, ideology, and inspiration.

The traditioning process is endless and open-ended. We can, however, make this distinction.

1. First, there was a long process of traditioning prior to the fixing of the canon as text in normative form. Much of that process is hidden from us and beyond recovery. But we can see that in the pre-canonical traditioning process there was already a determined theological intentionality at work (J. Sanders 1976).
2. Second, the actual formation of the canon is a point in the traditioning process that gives us “Scripture” for synagogue and for church. We do not know much about the canonizing process, except to notice that long use, including dispute over the literature, arrived at a moment of recognition: Jewish, and subsequently Christian, communities knew which books were “in” and which were not.
3. But third, it is important to recognize that the fixing of the canon did not terminate the traditioning process. All the force of imaginative articulation and ideological passion and the hiddenness of divine inspiration have continued to operate in the ongoing interpretive task of synagogue and church until the present clay. In Judaism, that continuing traditioning process (which makes its own claims for normative authority) has taken the form of the great Talmuds, midrashic extrapolation, and ongoing rabbinic teaching.

In Christian tradition, we may see the New Testament as an immense act of interpretation of the Old Testament that itself of course became normative for the church (Moberly 1992), Beyond the New Testament, moreover, interpretation has continued both under church authority as well as in scholarly communities that regularly have had a wary relationship with church authority This ongoing interpretation has evoked interpreters who, in every generation and in every context of the church, have rearticulated faith in the intellectual categories and cultural environment where the church has lived. Thus, for example, the core claims of faith were articulated in terms of Neoplatonic Greek philosophy in the early centuries by the Apologists, in the categories of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas, through humanistic “new learning” by the Reformers and, in our own time, in the categories of Karl Marx in the work of liberation theologians.

It is, moreover, the case that every so often the post-canonical traditioning process has come to exercise decisive control over the biblical text itself, as is variously evident in Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, or Calvinist traditions. Post-canonical interpretation characteristically yields a certain casting of Scripture and thus on occasion — in the crisis of reform — the ongoing developed tradition is radically called into question by a fresh attentiveness to the canonical text.

It is in the very character of the text itself to require and generate ongoing interpretation that is itself imaginative and often laden with ideology. The very presence of “the book” in these religious communities bespeaks a kind of unsettled restlessness that characteristically “makes ancient good uncouth,” including ancient interpretation that is rendered “uncouth.” When we ask why the text requires and generates an ongoing interpretive tradition, we may first answer with David Tracy that it is in the character of a “classic” to be a durable source for new disclosures (Tracy 1981). While not from my perspective adequate, Tracy’s formulation of “classic” is immensely important and helpful, for it recognizes that the Bible participates in the properties of great literature that defies any single explanatory reading that is eventually exhausted.

Beyond the claims of “classic,” the faith claim of the church is that the Bible as the church Scripture is without parallel, for it is God-given — given to be sure through the quixotic work of human beings — as originary testimony to the truth of God’s presence in and governance of all creation. Because it is God-given, given as God characteristically gives through the hidden workings of ordinary life, the book endlessly summons, requires, demands, and surprises with fresh reading. The only way to turn the book into a fixed idol is to imagine that the final interpretation has been given, an act of imagination that is a deep act of disobedience to the lively God who indwells this text. The only way to avoid such idolatry is to know that the lively God of the text has not given any final interpretation of the book that remains resistant to our explanatory inclinations.

The traditioning process, when it is faithful, must be disciplined, critical, and informed by the best intelligence of the day. But it must be continued — and is continued — each time we meet in synagogue or church for telling and sharing, for reading and study, each time we present ourselves for new disclosure “fresh from the Word.” There are two postures that characteristically want to terminate the daring process of traditioning. On the one hand, there is a mood in the church—sometimes linked to what is called a “canonical” perspective — that judges that the “true” interpretation has already been given, and all we need to do is reiterate. On the other hand, Schleiermacher’s “Cultured Despisers of Religion” who live at the edge of the church often fail to recognize the “thickness” of the traditioning process, and take the biblical offer at surface meaning, run the matter through the prism of modern rationality, and so dismiss the tradition as inadequate. Either way — by confessional closure or by rationalistic impatience — one misses the world “strange and new” that is generously, with recurring surprise, given in the Scriptures.