[todaysdate]
By Thomas Schmidt
Having gone to Texas Christian University and closely associating with Brite Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas, it is hard for me to say anything good can come out of the Baylor Baptists, yet their press has published a book I would place on the top of 2014’s must read list.
Walter Brueggemann has finally realized he has a limited time left on earth and, from that secure position of elder, has finally let loose with a radical statement of his realizations accumulated in his productive history of being a preeminent Old Testament scholar and a towering minister of a local church. Here is the prophetic Brueggemann commenting on the state of biblical scholarship, ministerial practice, and our failure to follow Jesus into the wilderness of criticizing the ethically warped culture of over consumerism, which he sees as destroying the world and our own belief systems that we have been taught to repeat so long as they don’t upset those who benefit from them.
The book, “Ice Axes for Frozen Seas: A Biblical Theology of Provocation” is introduced by Davis Hankins, who presents a defense of Brueggemann’s use of God language. Being very aware of the product of Enlightenment reasoning, we can say there is no empirical truth to the statement that “God exists.” However, we continue to find “god talk” as extremely valuable. After a brief review of phenomenology and linguistic analysis, Hankins points out that the truth of god talk lies in the meaning of the images we are expressing about the values represented and actualized by that talk, thus doing away with the old and stale discussions about how alive God is. Real or not doesn’t matter; meaning does. And Brueggemann finds a whole lot of meaning there. Like any good preacher, he bases his argument on biblical texts, here the Exodus story of the escape from the slavery imposed by Pharaoh, who seeks accumulation of power and wealth. He draws us through the messages of the Jews, who rapidly miss the stewpots of their captivity, the blessings of manna (literally, “what is it?”), and the giving of the law at Sinai. Brueggemann supplements this universal story with discussions of the second presentation of the Exodus in Deuteronomy, with reference to other prophets, specifically Jeremiah, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah. He does not limit himself to a few, but ranges all over the Old and New Testaments finding statements of the prophetic tradition that even today holds us responsible for the sinfulness of our acquisitive culture. He backs up his use of the scriptures in this way with excellent translation and background scholarship that can be very lacking in much of the Spot quoting done by readers who pay attention to the literal meaning to them, rather than the meaning to the writer in context.
But what makes his work exciting is his almost one to one parallel between the time of Pharaoh and our current time, a time in which our armies are used to wield the power to control the resources that allow us to accumulate, at other’s expense. The Bible stories, not lists on how to curry God’s favor, but stories about our suffering, and the suffering we impose on both ourselves and others, and how to escape this seeming endless cycle. On the horizon is, of course, Assyria. What must we do to escape exile? Should we? Don’t we need to feel the despair brought on by our participation in the military consumerism (his term) enforced by Pharaoh and his armies? Without that despair, where is the grief that leads into calling out to God, who gives us not personal salvation so much as hope? That has to be a hope not for ourselves so much as a hope for our neighbor. The “I can’t breathe!” becomes a firm “Don’t shoot!”
The one drawback this book has is its $70.00 + cost. Get a used copy, ask the library for it, borrow it from your church’s library. See that your minister reads it. Here-in is a year’s worth of sermons, and a lifetime’s worth of meditations. Go for it, then back to the Big Muddy and Pharaoh’s drowning army.
