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The psalms aren’t what you think they are

The Psalms aren’t what you think they are.

I set for my task to read all the psalms. I came close, but instead of writing about as many psalms as possible, I’ve chosen a few that seem especially important or challenging.

Some generalizations about the psalms

At first, I decided that there was a modal psalm, an average psalm that said something like this. “Oh, Lord, I am being tormented and mocked by my enemies. Slay them, and I will be thankful and worship you forever.” Not every psalm is a lament and call for retribution, but it is the most common type. Some psalms simply praise the Lord, such as psalm 8. Songs of thanksgiving (for example, psalm 136) and wisdom psalms (for example, psalms 1, 14) are other common types of psalms.

The psalms are diverse, but it’s possible to find a question common to many of them. Do I live for myself and my pleasures, or do I follow the path of God? Psalm 1, which in so many ways sets the scene for the psalms that follow, states the issue clearly.

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked . . . but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.

This is called Torah piety. Torah piety is more than just rule following. It is trust in and loyalty to one’s covenant partner, God.

Covenant or commodity

Every psalm expresses or assumes a covenant between God and humans. Humans agree to worship and obey God, and God agrees to protect and foster humans. Covenantal faith teaches that communion with God, and consequently solidarity with one’s neighbor, who is made in God’s image, constitutes the true goal of human existence. The alternative to communion with God is the endless pursuit of commodities–things that promise to make us safe and happy (Brueggemann, p 319).

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Reinhold Niebuhr and Providential history

Reinhold Niebuhr and Providential history. I’ve changed my mind about Reinhold Niebuhr. He tries but fails to connect Christian realism with Providential history. In other words, he fails to connect Christ’s love commandment (“love your neighbor”) with God’s role in history. So that God might be relevant, Niebuhr draws him into history; but not too close lest God get some of the blame. * It’s a tough balancing act that doesn’t quite work.

History as God

Modern history, says Niebuhr, history since the Enlightenment (eighteenth-century), is not so much about confidence in history as faith in history. Until, that is, history ran into the twentieth-century. Faith in history meant faith in historical progress. God would not redeem us, but history would. Reason would make God unnecessary, as humans became more rational and less nationalistic. Peace and progress would follow.

With the twentieth-century the belief that history is the story of humanity’s increasing reason and freedom came to an abrupt end. World War One, World War Two, the genocide of the Jews and Roma, the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all involved countries most committed to the hopes of the Enlightenment. If we look at history today, can we honestly say that the period from World-War One through the Holocaust was a mere pause in historical progress? The United Nations Genocide Convention counts twenty-three genocides since the Holocaust.

God and justice

History cannot provide an answer to the meaning of life. But amidst the turmoil of history, God can be found, and his meaning discerned, says Niebuhr.

God makes Himself known. His sovereignty over history is disclosed in specific events and acts which are revelatory of the meaning of the whole process. (loc 793)

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My obsession with Reinhold Niebuhr

My obsession with Reinhold Niebuhr. Sorry dear reader, I just can’t figure out my favorite theologian, so I just keep trying. Eight thoughts, none original:

Pride

Reinhold Niebuhr is a theorist of original sin. Not the Adam and Eve variety, but the sin that comes from human willfulness, what Niebuhr calls pride. Pride is humanity’s refusal to admit its limits, refusing to recognize that the individual is not the source of all value, the ultimate answer to every question. Humans usurp the place of God by raising their contingent existence and achievements to unconditioned significance. Pride stems from our anxiety at being at the mercy of the caprice of the world. Pride is Niebuhr’s version of original sin, what he calls the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith (N&D, 167-177, 186-207).

Sensuality. There’s another type of pride, important to Niebuhr, but to which he pays less attention. He calls it “sensuality,” an odd choice of word. In addition to pride, humans often seek to escape their limits and vulnerability by retreating from themselves into sensation. It is an escape from freedom, and ultimately from the self. In practice sensuality is the absence of responsibility, and absorption in the self and its little pleasures. Pride is the attempt to deny human limits. Sensuality is opposite, the denial of transcendence (N&D, pp 179, 232).

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The Price of a Peaceable Kingdom

The Peaceable Kingdom is a book by Stanley Hauerwas. In 2001 Time Magazine named him “America’s best theologian.” It’s been a few years, but it’s surprising how few people not involved in theological ethics know anything about his work.

Hauerwas is from Texas, the son of a bricklayer, and a bricklayer himself when he was young. He makes a point of that in his memoir, Hannah’s Child. The idea is that he’s down to earth, not like all these fancy theologians from Germany.

To be the church

“The first social task of the church is to be the church.” (Peaceable, loc 236) One of his best-known sayings, I’ve never been quite clear what it means. I think it means that the church should care for the souls of its congregation first. Church members should practice non-violence, because they themselves are not pure. Christians should exemplify “cells of joy” in a world that barely knows the meaning of the word. More on this later.

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What I’ve learned from posting 110 posts on my godblog*

1. I’ve come to think about the Bible as symbolically dense stories about what it means to be one small, vulnerable human on this earth for a little while. It means that I am part of a larger story about what it is to live out the promise of the crucifixion and the cross. The promise is that one day the world will end, and we, and with it all our suffering and loss, will be redeemed (parousia). Trouble is, I’m not always sure what these words mean.

Albert Camus says that the absurd is born of the confrontation between human need and the “unreasonable silence of the world.” I would say that Christianity (indeed all religion) is a conversation to fill that silence, still our angst, and so create meaning for our lives. That we make the meaning we subsequently discover is fine, as long as we don’t think that it explains more than it does. It doesn’t explain the mystery and wonder that is every human life.

2. The ethics of Jesus Christ are the right ethics: love, humility, care for the widow, orphan, and stranger. These represent the downtrodden of today, such as the mother who can’t pay her rent and feed her children at the same time.

For forty years I taught ancient political theory, particularly Plato and Aristotle. I learned a lot, but I learned almost nothing about the ethics of love and care, the Judeo-Christian ethic. Love and care were simply not Greek and Roman virtues, though friendship was. Without the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western civilization would be bereft.

Jefferson’s Bible abstracts the ethical teachings of Jesus from its religious context. Trouble is, that leaves open the question of “why?”, as in “why should I care about anybody but myself and my family?” People don’t often say it so bluntly, but many people act as if this is what they believe. Christianity has a good answer. In loving others, we rehearse the love of God, who sacrificed his son so that we might live.

3. God is essential so that we do not become idolaters. It’s really that simple. The only alternative to God is idolatry: of money, sex, power, self, the great leader, or whatever. Václav Havel had it just right.

The relativization of all moral norms, the crisis of authority, the reduction of life to the pursuit of immediate material gain without regard for its general consequences . . . do not originate in democracy but in that which modern man has lost: his transcendental anchor, and along with it the only genuine source of his responsibility and self-respect . . . . Given its fatal incorrigibility, humanity probably will have to go through many more Rwandas and Chernobyls before it understands how unbelievably shortsighted a human being can be who has forgotten that he is not God.

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How God becomes real

How God becomes real.

People don’t worship because they believe in God. They believe in God because they worship. So claims Tanya Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back, the subject of my previous post. In the current post I discuss her anthropology of religion—all religion, not just Christianity.* Ideally, these two posts should be read together.

One reason practice precedes belief is that because on the face of it belief in God is preposterous.

The idea that there is an invisible other who takes an active, loving interest in your life is in many ways preposterous and takes effort to maintain, even in a community that has never been secular. (2020, p 17)

For humans to sustain their belief in invisible entities who care about us requires that God must be made real again and again in the face of a stubborn world that rarely cooperates. It takes groups of people to do that.

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A God who talks back?

In When God Talks Back, Tanya Luhrmann writes about the Vineyard movement, a relatively small denomination of evangelicals, sometimes called neo-charismatic, which means that it shares a number of beliefs and practices with Pentecostalism. Pentecostal-lite is my impression, but individual churches vary.

The problem, for Luhrmann, is how to make sense of a church which is not so much Bible-based as it is based on personal experiences of God. She concludes that it survives in the modern world because it caters to the needs of individuals for a personal relationship with God, one in which God cares about what I wear and who I date.

Vineyard churches seem remarkably unconcerned with religious issues that have troubled other denominations, such as the justice of God: why do the good suffer and the bad prosper? Neither is it concerned with charity for others. It is almost wholly concerned with supporting its members in their search for a personal relationship with God, one in which God responds in words and signs.

How in this rationalized day and age can Christians know that God is there? Because he speaks to them about everyday things.

These churches that treat God like a cozy confidant and call a near-tangible Holy Spirit into their presence on Sunday morning exist in great numbers in the United States. (p 15)

I find this almost impossible to comprehend. There’s nothing cozy about God. It trivializes God; it removes the awe and mystery when God becomes a buddy. But like most groups, not every member buys into all its beliefs. One told Luhrmann how to fake glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Just repeat “She bought a Honda” over and over again, faster and faster (p 25). He was joking, while making a serious point. The group exerts subtle pressure on its members to have exotic experiences of God.

An American God

The goal seems to be to make God a big brother, a best friend. He is

a deeply human, even vulnerable God who loves us unconditionally and wants nothing more than to be our friend, our best friend, as loving and personal and responsive as a best friend in America should be. (p 35)

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On two plagues: Bishop N. T. Wright & Albert Camus

On two plagues: Bishop N. T. Wright and Albert Camus.

Bishop N. T. Wright has written a challenging book about Covid, titled God and the Pandemic. It’s challenging because it requires us to rethink God. We tend to think of God, if we think of him at all, as all powerful, able to fix Covid in a moment if he wished, as Jesus healed the sick and the lame. So why doesn’t he?

Wright’s answer, though it takes a while to figure it out, is similar to that finally arrived at in several places in the Bible. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). Job comes to a similar conclusion. The best way to understand God in the face of Covid is to accept that we shall never understand.

Wright does not stop here, however. He says that God’s non-answer is really an answer. God is a God of suffering and lamentation. Until we understand that God is not a mighty warrior who exists to vanquish our enemies, we shall be lost. Consider what Jesus first did when he learned of the death of Lazarus. “Jesus wept,” the shortest sentence in the Bible (John 11:35). Consider Jesus hanging on the cross, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

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