A thought-inspiring quote in some Brueggemann I was reading:
"As the Western world has been perennially hostile to the claims of Jewish faith, so the emerging contemporary world of commodity grows more signally hostile to the claims of Christian faith as well. As has not been the case in the long Christian hegemony of the West, now the church is having to think and act to maintain a distinct identity for faith in an alien cultural environment. While the church will characteristically attend to the New Testament in such an emergency, a study of Torah already alerts us to the resources for this crisis that are older and deeper than in the New Testament. The Jews in exile reported themselves dismayed about singing of songs of Zion in a strange land (Ps 137:1-3). And now Christians face that same issue. The liberal Christian temptation is to accommodate dominant culture until faith despairs. The conservative Christian temptation is to fashion an absoluteness that stand disconnected from dominant culture. Neither of these strategies, however, is likely to sustain the church in its mission. More likely, we may learn from and with Jews the sustaining power of imaginative remembering, the ongoing, lively process of traditioning that is sure to be marked by ideological interest that, in the midst of such distinctiveness, may find fresh closures of reality not 'conformed to this world.' The preaching, teaching, and study of Torah is in order to 'set one's heart' differently, to trust and fear differently, to align oneself with an alternative account of the world (Little 1983)."
- Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), p. 27.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
4 comments:
gotta love Brueggemann!
Absolutely! Can't get enough!
That's a fascinating quote, Pat. Do you think Brueggemann is contributing towards/ reacting to the emergent conversation and the valid challenge it puts forward to the church in regard to understanding culture and epistemology?
Hey, Saj,
I'm not overly familiar with the "emergent conversation," if it is the particular phenomenon associated with the "emergent church."
I don't consider Brueggemann to be overly steeped in philosophy or epistemology, but he is definitely a student of culture and history. In this quote, I think he is partly urging Christians to consider the OT contribution (not just the NT) to the contemplation of contemporary societal hostility toward the Church. Of course, this means a number of things, including:
(1) recognizing and "living into" the story of God's chosen people,
(2) learning from that story,
(3) not being afraid to do some "creative imagining"--a concept he will use throughout this volume of his--when it comes to living out our theological understandings in everyday life, and
(4) being encouraged by the responses of faith by God's people, but more so by the enduring faithfulness and love of God, himself.
What do you think? How do you see epistemology in there? What is the contribution of the "emergent conversation"?
Hope you are well,
P
Post a Comment