Red Letter Revolution

Psalms of Orientation

These psalms express a confident, serene settlement of faith issues. Life is settled and pleasant, and there is an overwhelming sense of security and freedom from anxiety. God is reliable and trustworthy. “They are statements that describe a happy, blessed state in which the speakers are grateful for and confident in the abiding, reliable gifts of life [.] Life…is not troubled or threatened, but is seen as the well-ordered world intended by God.” These Psalms are dominated by a notion of creation faith that views the world as God has made it and with a confidence that it will continue to be good. Brueggeman argues that these psalms serve two functions. Theologically, they serve to praise God and give him glory for the world he has made and the power he possesses. Socially, they serve to provide a “sacred canopy” by asserting righteousness to being alive for the sake of being Yahweh’s creation rather than viewing life simply as a task. Brueggemann asserts that these psalms were probably set down by the well-to do, the economically sound, and the politically significant. He also argues that they serve as a form of social control that indoctrinate the youth into a system of obedience and reward. These few fleeting paragraphs are the only place in the whole book that after reading one might feel motivated to pelt Brueggemann with tomatoes. It is apparently impossible for him to envision a poor person in ancient Israel penning a Psalm about how neat and ordered the world is because of the goodness of Yahweh. This is probably a result of Brueggemann’s obsession with social justice and finding ways he can insert it into the Old Testament. He is probably right many times when he does identify this thread, but it seems almost as if his identification with the downtrodden leads him to be suspicious of psalms with a positive message. He should be careful attributing motivations like social control to the text. One could just as easily paint the cross with that broad brush.
Under each of the main categories of psalms are a number of subcategories the first for Psalms of Orientation being Songs of Creation. The most common experience of orientation is the experience of life’s regularities which are good and are derived from God’s goodness. Since the world is a blessing bestowed onto us by God, then we should respond with gratitude. Brueggemann uses Psalm 33 as an example of a song of creation. This psalm is about the new world which Yahweh is presently creating, a world in which God’s justice is the point by which all things are fixed. It is a world of rightness. The first five verses announce the theme and provide a typical example of Israel’s hymnic expression which is followed by a reflection on first the power of the word of Yahweh and second on the character of Yahweh as the absolute power in the universe. The last verses restate the theme from the beginning. Brueggemann views these psalms as a summons to the upright and cautious because they are the ones who read songs of creation.
The second subcategory is called Songs of Torah. These flow out of songs of creation because creation emphasizes the goodness of life through the sovereign ordering of the world and Torah reflects the will/purpose of this sovereign God. According to Brueggemann, Torah songs acknowledge the role and value of Israel’s efforts in upholding their part of the covenant. This conclusion can be troubling if it becomes a challenge to the sovereignty of God, because it could make the certainty of an ordered creation dependent on the will of human beings. At that point, Torah does not flow from Creation but seems to contradict it. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that the Psalms are often exhortative in nature and to capture this was probably Brueggemann’s intention. He uses Psalm 1 as an example, and argues that its placement serves as a prologue for the entire hymnic collection. The primary agenda for worship life is obedience. This hymn creates a distinction between righteous and wicked, innocent and guilty. The action of living and the quality of that action determines where you fit into that spectrum of holy and profane. There is no neutral ground. Brueggemann considers this to also be a part of the social control aspect of these psalms.
Brueggeman also sets aside two subcategories that he does not elaborate on very much. Wisdom psalms reflect the well-ordered nature of the world and should probably not be their own category, but rather be lumped with creation psalms. Songs of Retribution speak of a world ruled by God in moral symmetry. Brueggemann acknowledges that they might best be placed with Torah psalms, but decides to separate them out anyway. There does not appear to be enough difference to warrant separating these out.
The last subcategory that will be discussed here are the Occasions of Well-Being Psalms. These reflect the reliability of God through everyday life experiences where God’s presence is implied more than stated. These are significant life events like birth, marriage, family, and death. In the interest of brevity we will skip examples for this category, but it is important to note that Brueggemann is probably right to separate out these psalms from the songs of creation. The themes are very similar, but God’s placement in them is different in a nuanced way.

Brueggemann seeks in this writing to use a post-critical approach to the Psalms that incorporates both the popular devotional use of the psalms and the intellectual critical understanding of the Psalms. He gives three reasons for this approach. 1. There is already a well established interpretation of the Psalms in service of the Gospel that focuses on the nice psalms and often looks at them through a romanticized tint. 2. The Psalms are taken as a resource of faith, especially during the Reformation. This tradition is continued in the present-day Protestant church. It is characterized by the notion that “The Psalms articulate the whole Gospel of God in a nutshell.” 3. We are also critical people. The scholarly emphasis cannot and should not be ignored. For example, Gunkel’s Form-Critical approach has led to a greater understanding of the limited recurring patterns of the psalms, and Westermann’s interesting conclusion that lament is the most basic form of the psalm from which all others derive. Using these ideas, Brueggemann constructs a structure of the psalms in three parts: Psalms of Orientation, Psalms of Disorientation, and Psalms of New Orientation. He argues that these categories correspond with both the critical understanding of the Psalms and the human experience of joy, suffering, and renewal. Brueggemann may claim that he is incorporating the devotional aspect with this method, but in truth he simply segregates all the devotionally used psalms to one category in a way that is slightly condescending to their popular usage. Nonetheless, he views the psalms as focusing on two kinds of movement from one state to the other. The first move is from orientation to disorientation. That is a move from security to harm, from safety to trouble. The second move is from disorientation to new orientation. That is from the place of despair to the new hope. The whole of the Psalms is in Brueggemann’s view a description of the points along these movements and the movement itself.

Obviously this is a much simplified rendering of the argument, but I think for the most part that Brueggemann is on to something good here with the idea of these movements. It is always difficult to construct a framework that can contain the Psalms, but I think that Brueggemann’s approach might actually come close. If this goes as planned, we’ll look at the three categories of psalms in part 2, 3, and 4, and then my final thoughts in part 5.

Imagine that you are sitting in church one Sunday and you hear someone praying in a small quiet voice. You strain your ears to hear the fervent and rapid words riding on a raspy exhalation. The words you hear shock you.

“God, you are a cold being. You don’t give a crap about me or my family. You have no concern for my suffering. You delight in the salt on my face. You are petty and you are without mercy. You have made it so that when people hear my name it fills them with scorn. You are a brute. You are cruel. And yet your love endures forever.”

You are shocked at what you hear. You wonder if the man is insane or merely an apostate. Surely such speech is blasphemy! How can someone declare the cruelty and love of God at the same time?!?!? Welcome to the world of the Psalms and Lamentations. Every idea in this imaginary prayer is contained in the Psalms and Lamentations and often with harsher language. How is it then that the Bible came to contain such language? Isn’t God offended by such “prayer”?

This semester I am in John Goldingay’s class on the Writings of the Hebrew Scriptures, which is incidentally my favorite class. Lately we have been discussing the Lament Psalms and Lamentations. We were encouraged for an assignment to write a Psalm of Lament. I didn’t take the assignment seriously, and just submitted the poem found elsewhere on the blog titled “A Poem/Prayer of Repentance.”

However, last night I attended a student-led worship service and in the midst of thought and reflection on the Psalms I tried on my lamenters tongue. At first I was timid, life is generally awesome out here. I started with frustrations about myself and the development of my life. It was not long before I discovered in myself an old wound I thought had long since healed. It seems instead that I just pretended it didn’t exist for so long that I almost forgot about. Yet, it has been there for some time. It lurks beneath the surface. It is an annoying scab which coos at the cool words of atheist intellectuals who mockingly decry God as a mean kid on an anthill and whispers in my ear ‘hypocrite’ when I speak of the goodness and love of God. Greater than my shock at discovering just how much that nearly decade-old wound hurt, was how incredible an experience it was to admit that wound to God.

Like a child feebly beating upon the chest of his father in rage, I let fly. I gave God both barrels and threw the gun at him too. I drained my heart of all venom and when it was over there was nothing left but the love for God which I had all along. I do not pretend that I am done with this wound, but now I have a weapon against. When your God can take a punch, then Doubt cannot have any hold over you. Furthermore, it isn’t as if God doesn’t know that in the deepest parts of myself I am angry at him over this wound. If anything Lament is nothing more than being honest to God. Should we fear that a steadfast God will become unreliable in light of that honesty. No, Doubt cannot bear to look in the face of such honesty, and so, last night I found myself drawn closer to God by calling him every name in the book.

I saw this over at Targuman and had to repost it.

I was raised in the faith, attending the same non-denominational church from my birth to my eleventh year, at which point my Father, an elder, and my Mother left the church over its management. Finding no replacement that suited their tastes, we simply stopped attending church, and my participation in the Body became sporadic and rare. The situation was not rectified in any meaningful way for more than five years, until a friend invited me to a Bible study. Such a simple event would not likely have had any effect on me if I had not been first primed by the vagaries of tragedy that accompany life. Divorce and death took their toll, illness added its measure, but the depths of my distress were plumbed by a car accident on a small two-lane highway in humble Poth,Texas. Never in my life and faith have I ever experienced a turning point that matches looking down at the battered crippled form of my Mother. Never in my life had I encountered such a powerful reason to doubt the goodness of God, and never had I experienced such complete and total helplessness. It may sound strange that the most formative event in one’s faith is merely endeavoring to survive an intensely painful event, but it is in suffering that we most easily learn to rely on God. At the center is the example of Jesus, who, while being the most powerful being to ever walk this planet, endured such suffering that our own pales in comparison. In the suffering and triumph of Jesus we find all the hope that we could possibly need. That simple Bible study invitation brought me bit by bit back into the Body of Christ. I attended for a couple of years the church that sponsored the bible study, until moving to my current church home. I began my journey with Windsor Park when a professor told me he was going to pastor a church on the brink of collapse. I wanted to be of service to the mostly geriatric congregation, and so I signed up. Since joining, I have served in a number of different areas; I am the clerk, Secretary of Corporation, Chairman of the Property and Maintenance Committee, and I have served in a ministerial capacity by visiting the elderly. While I feel that an aspect of my calling is service to the needy and frail, I feel most called to the teaching and instruction of the church in an academic setting.  I desire greatly to lead others to a knowledge and understanding of the Bible that promotes a Christ-centered worldview.

This is my essay response to this question on a college application:

Reflect on your past Christian experience, including the most significant spiritual event/influence in your life, the role of Christ in your religious experience, the effect your faith has on your worldview, your involvement in Christian service, your perceived gifts/calling for ministry, and your reason(s) for attending your church.

The response was supposed to be approximately 300 words, but 435 was the best I could do.

Imagine that a child must go to a school, and at this school the child would study the works of William Shakespeare. The child opens his book, and, per the instructions of the teacher, begins counting the number of words in Romeo and Juliet. The child then counts the syllables, and from this data learns the meter of the work. The child presents this information in the most original way possible, and the teacher, satisfied with the work, deems the child understands the piece and checks Romeo and Juliet off the list. Never did the child see the play performed; indeed the fact that it was a play did not weigh very heavily in the child’s analysis. Though the child knew the poetic rhythm of the piece, having never heard it performed, he was totally unaware of the aural quality of the work. Sadly, there is a direct parallel in Biblical Studies today. Secular Religion departments have sought to examine the Bible in every “scientific way” imaginable, and Seminaries, perhaps looking for validation, have duplicated their methods. Often, the meaning of the text specifically as Revelation to the Church is ignored. There is no room in a field dictated solely by reason for the Supernatural nature of the scriptures. As the child who studied Romeo and Juliet but never saw it performed, as it was intended, has ignored the fundamental purpose of the text, so do scholars who ignore the relationship of the scriptures to the Church ignore their fundamental purpose. A reasoned approach to the scriptures is not bad, but to the exclusion of the examination of the scriptures as God’s guiding revelation to the Church is to miss a level of meaning in the text. There is then, an inherent shallowness in purely scientific examinations of the text, and such shallowness can be avoided by treating the scriptures as more than a specimen, as the very Word of God for his people.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a teacher and theologian who fundamentally understood this problem at a young age, and sought to correct it. In 1925, he created a minor disruption at Berlin University by turning in a paper that seemed to decry the rationalist treatment of the Bible as something merely to be disassembled.[1] His mentor, Reinhold Seeberg, was displeased with the effort, as he saw the influence of Karl Barth’s theology. Barth spoke in detail about the “Problem of Religion” demanding that theology must work within the concrete relationship of the Church to Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.[2] In 1925 Berlin, such ideas were viewed as un-academic. Bonhoeffer, however, did not seek to eradicate scientific modes of understanding the Bible, but rather sought balance between scientific and pastoral understandings of the Bible. It is easy for the work of the Holy Spirit to be overshadowed by scientific methods. It is not difficult to imagine an interpreter working away at a passage with historical criticism like a mechanic with a wrench. The passage is quickly stripped down into its many parts. Here we have an alternator (J), and here a spark plug (E), and here an oil filter (D). The engine, thus disassembled lacks the ability to create motion, and the text, thus dissected lacks the ability to instruct. The engine cannot run, and the Holy Spirit is ignored.

This work of the Holy Spirit is important because it is a work of guidance. The Scriptures tell us:

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1Co 2:14-16 ESV)

The natural, that is unregenerate, man cannot understand the things of God, and we can only by our relationship to Christ and the access to the Holy Spirit granted to us by that relationship. This work of guidance is achieved through two modes: the general guidance of the Church and the specific guidance of individuals. The general guidance of the Church is rooted in the Lordship of Christ over his Body. In the gathering together of a variety of individuals and in the unification of the vagaries of human beings, the Holy Spirit works towards the ends of Christ for his Body. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The Church of Christ is the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit.”[3] The Lordship of Christ over the Body is manifested through the power of the Holy Spirit, and by this power the Church becomes the representative of Christ. The elimination of the Holy Spirit from the examination of scripture can cause ignorance of God’s message for his Church. The specific guidance of individuals is rooted in meditation and prayer. As James says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”[4] In prayer, we are able to receive wisdom for the understanding of scripture. In meditation, we may examine a text and through the Holy Spirit come to understand what God is speak to us as individuals. In Life Together Bonhoeffer explains:

In our meditation we ponder the chosen text on the strength of the promise that it has something utterly personal to say to us for this day and for our Christian life, that it is not only God’s Word for the Church, but also God’s word for us individually.[5]

The elimination of the Holy Spirit from the examination of scripture can cause ignorance of God’s message for us as individuals.

At the heart of this conflict is an intellectual tug of war. Must the Scriptures justify themselves in the court of reason? Or, must the spirit of this age justify itself before the testimony of the Scriptures. In a lecture given to preachers of the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer notes that the root of Rationalism is the “emancipation of autonomous reason” and that any man who claims such autonomy and also claims Christ must “demand the justification of the Christian message before the forum of his autonomy”[6] Through reason man seeks to master the world, but such mastery when applied to the scriptures cannot work without the power of the Holy Spirit. To master the scriptures and comprehend them as Christ intended for his Church and intended for the reader, requires that the man first himself be mastered by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I have a confession to make: I have been effected too greatly by Greek philosophical ideas. Being a Westerner and tending to think of the world and even God from within a logical philosophical framework, I have inadvertently suppressed with disgusting regularity a foundational idea of the Hebrew Bible: God is personal. By this I am not referring to God revealing to us the nature of the three persons of the Trinity, but rather the nature of how God relates to us. God relates to us personally. He is present and available to us. This idea is often squashed beneath the view of God as (with booming voice) THE UNMOVABLE MOVER, and to the detriment of us who forget that God was a living God before such notions of him were formed. This concept of the Living and Present God is demonstrated in the Pentateuch repeatedly through God’s provisions for the sins of Israel and the establishment of the Priesthood, but it is also demonstrated through the comparison of Yahweh to the false deities as is done in Isaiah. There is a rather humorous section of Isaiah where the prophet offers devastating critique of the idols: If they are greater than Yahweh, why is it you must carve your gods from wood or stone or cast them in metal? Are they not powerful enough to do this themselves? Why must you also clothe and feed these “gods”? The fact is that these idols are simply pieces of rock and wood and metal. They have no life, and certainly no breath. They are utterly unlike Yahweh, who is not only living and has breath, but is in fact the life-breather of all things in existence. In essence, Yahweh is life, is existence itself. He is both the Creator and also the Sustainer. In every infinitesimal second, Yahweh is engaging in Cosmic CPR. If Yahweh were to cease to be, so would all that he had created. He is the linchpin of the universe, and one day, having taken human flesh, he died. That is the great joy of our faith, that God loves us so much, that he took flesh and the one who breathed life into this world, bowed his head and breathed his last. This is the great σκανδαλον of our faith, that the sustainer would die so that we might live.

As I plan for my academic future, I know I must eventually choose one (*ouch*) field of study to focus on. As a sort of theological Jack of all trades, I reluctantly have been flirting with a couple of ideas for specialization, and so, I have been thinking a lot lately about the Fathers and the development of our theology through history that is Historical Theology. This has necessitated a shift in thinking from the Synchronic methodology (I mean this in the Literary Critical sense) I have adopted in my study of the Pentateuch to the kind of Diachronic thinking that I have avoided since trudging through the ideas of Wellhausen and the like. I have been very much negligent in my examinations by shunning the Diachronic approach to Scripture and Theology. And So, I have been meditating a lot on the nature of Biblical Interpretation throughout history. I very much believe that we as the Church not only have the right, but the obligations to examine and interpret scripture for ourselves. I believe we should be able to do this free of traditional restraints. As I am a Baptist, this means approaching the discussion of the Priesthood of the Believer, for example, with a clean slate, that is without bringing with me the concepts of soul competency or even the sort of snide dismissal of the priestly system that is subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) present in Baptist thought into the reading of the text. Do not mistake me, I am not saying that it is necessary to ignore all doctrine when interpreting the scriptures, but rather that it is good to simply follow where they lead without fear of crossing (in my case) Baptist lines. In addition to this I have been developing an appreciation for Canonical Criticism and the ideas of Brevard S. Childs, and in a way that is fueling this thought process. I have been feeling the need to not only evaluate how we interpret scripture today, but also how it has been interpreted Diachronically. However, rather than going century by century I think it would be more profitable to 1) examine a point or two in history where I feel interpretation has gone awry and 2) the way we interpret since the Enlightenment.

First, let me choose an example that is obvious simply for the ease of communicating my point. A nice easy example of the kind of thing I am talking about are the Crusades. Now, I fully realize that there were a great deal of political and economic motivations for the Crusades, but the fact remains that it was at the very least under the guise of Christianity and at the most genuinely sanctioned by it. Regardless, the Scriptures were interpreted in such a manner as to give sanction to such actions. For a specific example here is an account of a speech given by Pope Urban II in response to the call for help from the Byzantine Empire: When now that time was at hand which the Lord Jesus daily points out to His faithful, especially in the Gospel, saying, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” a mighty agitation was carried on throughout all the region of Gaul. (Its tenor was) that if anyone desired to follow the Lord zealously, with a pure heart and mind, and wished faithfully to bear the cross after Him, he would no longer hesitate to take up the way to the Holy Sepulchre. (This is from the Gesta Version of his speech) Very clearly the Christian Duty of taking up ones cross is associated with the call to join the First Crusade. I can find nothing in the passage that would lend itself to such a usage other than the idea of dying for Christ. How is it then that one can see Christ’s fervent call to obedience and interpret it as a call to answer the war charge of the Byzantine Empire and a Pope? The simple answer: By living in Medieval Times. The concept of the Papacy and the Church Universal allows the substitution of Christendom as a whole in the place of Christ in that passage, and furthermore lends itself to a sort of Christian Nationalism. The passage then becomes a call to obey the needs of Christendom, and demands we take up our cross for its sake. So what am I saying? Medieval realities often dictated medieval interpretation in a way that is not simply contextualizing but rather eisegetical.

Now I’d like us to briefly look at the development of interpretive method since the Enlightenment, but rather than blathering on about it too much I will instead post some poignant Brueggemann quotes I came across while reading his Theology of the Old Testament and save us some time. Brueggy is discussing the rise of historical criticism and talks about the transition of a scientific rationalistic approach to the historic approach of the 19th century. “When we move into the nineteenth century and especially into the influence of Hegel, we witness the rise of history, which stands in some tension with the older reigning rationalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth and in some ways appeals to a kind of Lockean empiricism. In the nineteenth century “history” became a dominant mode of knowing, so that everything was understood to have a history, a developmental career.” As the popular modes of understanding shift, so does the manner in which we study and interpret the Bible. Brueggy sums it up nicely, “It is of great importance for a student of Old Testament theology to notice that in every period of the discipline, the questions, methods, and possibilities in which study is cast arise from the sociointellectual climate in which the work must be done.” In other words, your interpretation of the Word is directly and sometimes detrimentally dependent on your world view. Brueggemann is speaking specifically about OT Theology, but I feel it certainly applies to theology and interpretation in general.

How do we as Christians fulfill our duty to interpret the scriptures without first subjugating them to our doctrines or even our logical framework? I think one way is the way I mentioned before: coming to scripture without our specific doctrinal boundaries, or, in the terminology of Brueggemann, allowing for all “possibilities.” I challenge you to study a portion of text and ask yourself “How can I interpret this text so that it fits with my worldview?” then ask “How would such an interpretation sound to a first-century Jew?” and finally ask “Is there any theological convenience I have pandered too in choosing this interpretation over another?” Feel free to share your own solution to the problem.

I was reading Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament and came across an interesting sentence on how we should read the Bible. “The Bible is to be understood ‘as Scripture’ in the community that gathers in response to the claim that here God is decisively disclosed. Thus the Bible is a revelation, and Scripture study is an attempt to recieve, understand, and explicate this revelation in all its oddity, without reductionism, domestication, or encumbrance.” This wonderful array of words was predicated by the discussion of where the study of Old Testament Theology began. Brueggemann, as well as most others, places this genesis of theological inquiry at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and posits the Reformers with its begetting. The Reformation was not just about doctrine, it was not merely a war of competing theologies, but rather it was about how we glean our beliefs from the Scripture itself. They sought an unencumbered reading of the text, and what they found was at odds with the Roman establishment. I found this sentence especially impacting because I myself struggle with approaching the text over analytically. Often times, I sit down to read the New Testament as canon law, a theological and doctrinal manual and nothing more. It is obvious that this is a most backward way of reading the text, a hand-me-down from Western rationalist thought nay an abortion of revelation in favor of a pseudo-scientific reading of the text. I cannot help but think myself foolish for all the times I have read Romans as if it were some sort of long overly complicated legal document. Romans 3….let’s see, that’s Theology.Pauline.Depravity.1a. What a ridiculous sight must I have made to the hosts above! Even more so, what reeking offal must I have been in the nostrils of the Breather, to so shamelessly arithmetize what he had inspired. Instead, brothers and sisters, we are to look upon Scripture as God’s gift to the gathered. He left us writings not only to instruct the church, but to be our revelation of God himself. Tonight, I read the Sermon on the Mount and I heard God’s revelation. I heard his words stretch my mind, make me shake my head in wonder. If we approach the scriptures we should do so without being so weighted down by our theologies that we cannot fairly read the text. If we start always with the presumption that a certain theological distinction is true, then we will read it into the text, but if we let it speak freely, let it have its own theology, then we can and will be surprised by what we find in a text we have read a thousand times. Do not get me wrong, I am not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water, but rather I wish to warn of a purely scientific reading of the text. We must always remember that the Bible is God whispering in the ear of the church through all time. Theology is an important study, but after all it is nothing so wonderful as Revelation.