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November 7, 2008
Neither absolutist nor atheist be
Brueggemann says God’s covenant more complex than most believe
MINNEAPOLIS — Human attempts to define God as either judgmental or gracious fail to appreciate that God is both and is engaged in an internal dialogue that makes covenantal theology far more dynamic and complex than most Christians are willing to admit … and accept, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann told the Covenant Network of Presbyterians at the group’s 11th annual conference here today (Nov. 7).
Walter Brueggemann “A faithful articulation of who God is recognizes that God breaks into the world with both promise and summons,” Brueggemann told the group, which was created in 1997 to work for the full inclusion of all Presbyterians — particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered members — in the life of the church, including service as ordained officers.
“Biblical tradition is saturated with deep contradiction,” Brueggemann said. “Abraham is given a unilateral, unconditional covenant — ‘I will make of you a great nation’ — it’s all about God.
“But Moses is given a bilateral, conditional covenant,” he continued, “’If you really obey my commands, then you will be my people.’”
Ticking off example after example from scripture, Brueggemann advanced his thesis that “God possesses a rich internal life … that is always processing, adjudicating and reengaging God’s people in a covenant that is unsettled,” flashing back and forth between “punishment and pathos, judgment and mercy.”
This can be threatening to Christians, whose traditional view of God as omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent demands certitude. “We tend to choose up sides,” Brueggemann said. “In this way we are all selective fundamentalists. The problem is that God legitimates all of these covenantal transactions — the one God is unilateral in generosity and bilateral in requirement, accepting and reprimanding, patient and refusing.”
Those seeking greater certitude seek one of two “escape hatches,” he said.
“The first is flight to absolutism, the conservative alternative,” Brueggemann said. “Here, god is redescribed as an invulnerable absolute sovereign — oppressive, unforgiving, formulaic. This lust for absolutism results in idolatry.”
 Bread for the Journey, a gospel folk group, provided worship music for the Covenant Network of Presbyterians on Nov. 7. Photo by Jerry L. Van Marter “The other flight is to autonomy, the liberal temptation,” Brueggemann said. “This flight is typified in the phrase ‘spiritual but not religious.’ It enacts the self-contained self, unconnected to tradition or any other reality, unrestrained, uninformed, not related to anybody or accountable to anybody. It is, in fact, atheism.”
The outcome of absolutism and autonomy, he said, “is a common life filled with anxiety and always at the edge of violence and brutality.”
The alternative, Brueggemann said, “is to embrace a biblical faith and covenantal existence that is dialogical from the ground up, to embrace a God who is always reaching out to people and calling them to reach out to each other.”
For in the end, he said, life — both with God and with each other — is all about relationship. “Fidelity — love, compassion, truthfulness — is the hallmark of covenant with God. The biblical record is clear that God struggles with truth and grace, retribution and redemption. This attachment to us, personified in Jesus Christ, carries this God beyond punishment to a love that will not let go. This dialogic God says both ‘death’ and ‘new life.’”
In the end, covenantal existence lies “in congregations of conservative and liberal covenanters who are covenanters before any other label is attached to them, who are more ready to support than to judge,” he said, “because the relationships are more important than the rules and self-giving is more important than self-preserving." |
