Articles – Page 314 – Religion Online

Covenant as a Subversive Paradigm

It is a bit ironic that increased attention is being paid to the biblical theme of covenant just at a time when biblical scholarship is moving on to other constructs for interpretation. Clearly, "covenant" is not the single overarching theme of the Bible as previously claimed. Nonetheless, it has important potential for the church in our situation. The central affirmations of covenant stand against and subvert the dominant forms, patterns and presuppositions of our culture and of cultural Christianity. The subversion (which means undermining and exposure to dismantling) is directed against a theology that knows too much, a God who is too strong, a church that is too allied with triumphalist culture, and a ministry that moves too much from strength.

Against all of these, the covenant theme offers an alternative perception of how things are in heaven and how they could be on earth. Covenant as a recharacterization of God, church and world is not simply a restatement of conventional Western assumptions; it requires drastically new affirmations. Attention to the theme exposes the failure of a remote God who has not triumphed, a church that has not known so much, and a culture that has not kept its promises.

A God Who Embraces

Everything depends on our confession of God. The covenanting God of the Bible is not to be understood according to the general category "god." Making a theoretical case that this God is unique is not necessary; it is enough to note that in the Bible this God makes a break with all cultural definitions and expectations. The God of the Bible distances himself from the other gods who are preoccupied with their rule, their majesty, their well-being in the plush silence of heaven. This is nowhere more vividly stated than in Psalm 82, in which the general self-serving notion of godhood is harshly rejected. The temptation of the church is to force this God back into conventional modes. But the stories of Israel and the church’s memories will not have it so. That deep resistance to general categories is most important to those who care for the stories and memories of the church.

In the tradition of Moses, and from then on, this God breaks with the other gods, finding their company boring and their preoccupations inane. The heaven occupied by the other gods is no place for covenanting. Those gods. offer no model for faithful interrelatedness, for steadfast solidarity, but only for occasional, self-serving alliances. The primal disclosure of the Bible is that this God in heaven makes a move toward earth to identify a faithful covenant partner, responding to the groans of oppressed people (Exod. 2:24-25). We say it is an irreversible move. And the partner now embraced is identified as the "rabble" of slaves which no other god thought "worthy" (Exod. 12:38, Num. 11:4, cf. Luke 7:22-23, I Pet. 2:9-10).

This move is decisive not only for earth, but for heaven; not only for the slaves embraced, but for the God who embraces. It is central to covenant that this One cannot embrace without being transformed by the ones who are embraced. There is no immunity for God here; embracing a partner is not an after- thought, but is definitional for God. And the evidence of Scripture is that Israel and the church continued to battle for this discernment of God, always against the temptation to drive God back to heaven, to squeeze God back into the safety, serenity and irrelevance of the other gods. And that is still the decisive battle in the church.

A New Beginning

The break that God makes is to leave the self-sufficient world of the gods for the sake of groaning humanity. It is the key disclosure to Moses, without which there would be no Exodus. Israel is invited to break with Pharaoh’s "sacred canopy" of oppression precisely because this God has made a break with the boredom of the canopy of heaven. And while that disclosure moves through the long memory of Israel and the church, none has understood it in greater depth than Hosea. It is he who penetrates to the heart of God, who understands that God struggles against conventional godhood (Hos. 11:8), and who finally decides not to operate by conventions, either of heaven or of earth (11:9).

These verses show Hosea in deep conflict with the model of a God who strikes back when offended for the sake of God’s own majestic self-definition. But this God does not and will not. And the upshot of the anguish of this God in Hosea is that covenant is possible, not because of a suitable partner, but because this God has broken with conventions to new kinds of solidarity:

I will allure her to the wilderness [and begin again]

I will speak to her heart [and start over] ...

I will betroth you to me in righteousness. in justice,

in loyalty,

in mercy,

in faithfulness,

and you shall know me [Hos. 2:14. 19-20].

This anguished poet affirms that there is a new beginning possible on earth. It is possible because God in heaven has committed all his godhood to the wayward partner. God has no other claim to make, no special exemptions for himself, but stays with the sorry partner; in the process, both are changed. Hosea has understood as well as anyone that God’s committed grief for the partner is the only ground for newness on earth. That is the ground now to be confessed, proclaimed and practiced among us.

What a God!

He was despised and rejected by men and women,

acquainted with grief,

as one from whom they hide their faces,

He was despised and we esteemed him not [Isa. 53:3].

This God bears none of the marks of a god. This God has given up power in the certainty that real saving power is found in uncompromising faithfulness, the very posture the other gods in heaven could not countenance.

Everything Is at Stake

Perhaps that is too familiar to us, so familiar we miss how subversive it is. To test its subversive impact, one need only teach it and preach it. For it represents a break with conventional theology. It calls into question the self-sufficiency of God, the entire catechetical tradition of a God without solidarity with earthly partners whom he values and makes valuable. The conventional God of the catechisms makes all his caring moves after everything is settled and there is nothing at stake for the Strong One. But here it is affirmed that not everything is settled in advance. Very much is at stake for God; his godhood is recharacterized and redecided in company with and in the presence of the mixed multitude.

That is the deep issue in covenant. Does one (God or human) come to the covenantal relationship with everything settled? Or does one come with everything to be redecided? Both postures are offered in the Bible, but it is this radical posture of Moses and Hosea that has the possibility of subverting the death systems around us.

Everything is at stake in this question. Covenant requires a radical break not only with uncritical, scholastic notions of God, but also with contemporary views that vote for detachment. Our current consumer culture has need of an irrelevant God for whom nothing is at issue, a kind of indifferent, immune guarantor. Such a God is challenged and destroyed in the claim of covenant. The alternative God of the Bible is impinged upon and exposed. There is no immune quarter, no answer in the back of the book, no safe conduct.

Everything is at stake because how we judge it to be in heaven is the way we imagine it to be on earth. If our mistaken notion leads us to an impassive, self-sufficient God in heaven, then the model for humanity, for Western culture, for ourselves, is that we should also be self-sufficient, impassive, beyond need, not to be imposed on. Willy-nilly, we will be made in the image of some God. The one for whose image we have settled is a sure, triumphant God who runs no risks, makes no commitments, embraces no pain that is definitional. Against that, the covenanting God of the Bible protests and invites us to protest.

Let none among us imagine that the right discernment of God does not matter. On that point, everything is at issue in a culture now in deep failure. The question is whether there is an alternative affirmation to make that can let us recharacterize how it is in heaven and how it might be on earth. Hosea stands as an assertion that only in this alternative God is there ground for hope, possibility for passion, and energy to keep on. It is no different in the New Testament: "This man receives sinners and eats with them" -- i.e., makes covenant with them (Luke 15:2). This God prefers covenant partners with whom things are yet to be decided, rejecting a situation -- in heaven or on earth -- where nothing is in question. In such contexts, it is impossible to be genuinely human -- or faithfully divine.

A Community on Earth

Along the way we can redecide our notion of church. The covenant construct permits us and requires us to think afresh about the character and business of the church. That is, the move God has made in heaven opens up for us a new agenda: What is possible on earth? God’s move to solidarity is a hint that solidarity on earth is possible. And that covenantal theme permits a new ecclesiology. The church is the community attentive to the dangers and possibilities of solidarity in a culture which thrives on and celebrates our divisions and isolations.

Said another way, there, will be no new community on earth until there is a fresh articulation of who God is. What the church can be depends on that. There will be no community on earth so long as we rally round old God-claims of self-sufficiency and omnipotence. And the reason is that self-sufficient, omnipotent, isolated, impassive people (reflective of such false gods) are incapable of being in community or embracing any solidarity.

The promise of the new community on earth is made especially by Jeremiah: "Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah" (31:31). It is important that Jeremiah, most anguished of the prophets, speaks this hope, for only one in anguish could hope so deeply. It is equally important that he speaks this anticipation precisely at a time of historical brokenness when there seems no ground for hope. The new community he anticipates is not to be derived from the old shattered one. It depends only and singularly on a new move from God, a response to groans. It is this move that makes possible what was not possible before the groans were received and embraced.

That, of course, is not very realistic sociology. But new community is proclaimed in the Bible on the basis of the new move from God, just at the time when the best possibilities of sociology are exhausted. We are in such a time now, when there is no sociological possibility about which to speak. So we are pressed to speak to each other about this most unlikely thing, a move of solidarity made by God, a move which makes all things new on earth -- even human covenanting.

Large Human Questions

The new community now to be proclaimed and called into being bears at least three marks, according to Jeremiah.

1. It is a community of God’s Torah: "I will put my torah in their midst" (31:33, the translation "within them" is excessive personalizing). The new covenant anticipated here is one whose content is torah (which we do a disservice to render "law"). Torah that marks the new community is not a practice of law to clobber people, not a censure to expel and scold people, not a picky legalism. It is rather a release from small moralisms to see things through the eyes of God’s passion and anguish. The torah is a reminder that God’s will focuses on large human questions and that we also may focus on weighty matters of justice, mercy and righteousness.

There are seeds here for genuine reform within the community, a reform of communities of indifference which do not care much about anything except their own well-being. Torah turns the community from self to the neighbor. And there is a call here away from communities of triviality which imagine too much is at stake too soon and too often in every question that comes up. The Torah of the biblical God is not written in fine print or with footnotes. It is there in its rich, broad claims for holiness and justice. Foundational torah calls this community away from its self-serving fascinations.

2. The new community of covenant is in solidarity about the knowledge of God: "They shall all know me, from the least of these to the greatest" (Jer. 31:34). "Knowing God" is crucial for covenanting. Since this God has made a move to earth, there is no knowledge of God that can focus on the things of heaven to the disregard of the affairs of earth. And, conversely, there is no preoccupation with the things of earth without awareness that disruptive covenanting has caused a break in heaven.

Knowledge of God calls this community away from its many other knowledges which betray and divide. Jose Miranda (Marx and the Bible) has made clear that "knowledge of God" is attentiveness to the needs of brothers and sisters (Jer. 22:13-17). He does not mean that this derives from or comes after knowledge of God; rather, the two are synonymous. One could scarcely imagine a more radical and subversive theological claim. And the matter is the same in the new community of the New Testament. Love of God is intimately and inextricably linked to loving brother and sister (I John 4:20-21).

The new "knowledge of God" envisioned here does two things. First, it minimizes the importance of much of our knowledge, our expertise and professional skills (I Cor. 13:2). A different kind of knowing is what is needed. Second, the new knowledge now entrusted to this community (the very antithesis of gnostic secrets) is radically democratized. The least as well as the greatest shall know. The strong and the weak know together (cf. Rom. 14:1-23). The credentialed and the uncredentialed share the gift. The word to the strong in the community is that the weak ones know some very important dimensions of the news, to which we must all attend. The word to us all is that within the church there are no monopolies on this knowledge, not by wealth or longevity or gender or anything else. Democratizing knowledge in the community is a threat to all of us who preside over the establishment, for we have long known that knowledge, even in the church, is power.

But the knowledge now broadly entrusted is not just "personal experience," not a subjective inclination about this or that. It is a discernment of the "news," of the gospel, of the move God has made to earth where the torah is given. In New Testament categories, the knowledge commonly entrusted to us is knowledge of the cross, a sense about how the empty cross bestows life. That is a knowledge which is deeply subversive and now definitional for covenant.

The Practice of Forgiveness

3.The third mark of the community envisioned is that it knows about, experiences and practices forgiveness: "I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more" (Jer. 31:34). It is not Lutheran reductionism to say that the single crucial sign of the church is the practice of forgiveness. And that means at least two things. First, the past should be past. Our posture toward each other should not be a grudging, careful management of old hurts, but rather a genuine yielding of the past for a hope.

Second, forgiveness is not simply a "spiritual" notion but includes a genuine redistribution of power. Our communities are often organized by bad memories, configurations of mistakes, and seasoned fears. The community of forgiveness means a redress of power in which the weak and the strong, the least and the greatest, really derive their life from each other (cf. Mark 10:42-44).

Of course, these marks of the covenant community are not new among us. But they characterize a subversive ecclesiology in deep conflict with our conventions. It is important to see how extensively our usual notions of community are refuted here -- notions which are either of communities of fate (into which we are locked without choice) or of convenience (in which we have no serious or abiding stake). Against both of those, we are to have a called community -- not a voluntary association, but a people addressed and bound in a concrete and abiding loyalty.

Covenant for the World

Finally, we may rearticulate our covenantal hope for the world. So long as this subversive paradigm is kept to God and church, we are safe enough. Its character of surprise and threat becomes clear when the covenant is related to the world beyond the believing community. The covenantal paradigm affirms that the world which we serve, and for which we care, is a world yet to be liberated. A theology of covenanting is not worth the effort unless it leads to energy and courage for mission.

So we are pressed to ask: What might be expected yet for the world? The response is that the world is intended by God to be a community that covenants, that distributes its produce equally, that values all its members, and that brings the strong and the weak together in common work and common joy. Though it is not yet that kind of community, we are assured that soon or late it will be (cf. Rev. 11:15). And the mission of the believing community is to articulate, anticipate and practice that transformation which is sure to come.

In the tradition of Hosea and Jeremiah, here we may appeal especially to Isaiah of the exile. One might have expected a poet to exiles to be preoccupied with that little community dealing with its own identity and survival. But this poet has a large vision indeed. And so his words serve to extend and urge the vision of Israel away from itself to the world in which it is placed. The word spoken here begins with a statement about God’s move. "I am the Lord," and goes on to call to Israel, who is given for others. But finally, as Israel looks beyond itself, the covenant passes to the world of need, darkness and prison (Isa. 42:6.7 and 49:6).

The poet will not permit Israel to think too long about itself. And so he uses the word "covenant" precisely to speak about mission to others. The crucial phrase is enigmatic, "a covenant to the people." How is this people to be linked to the other people? In covenant? As covenant? It suggests, perhaps, that Israel is a mediator toward the others, so that through Israel the other peoples receive the blessings of God. Or perhaps the call is to act as the partner, to be in solidarity with those others who are still alienated.

To Know, to Hope, to Expect

What is in any case clear is that covenanting becomes a way to think about the nations and kingdoms of the earth, a way requiring risk, emotion and solidarity. Covenanting, it is believed and affirmed in this poetry, is the way all of society is intended to be with its markings of justice, freedom, abundance and compassion. And the people addressed by the poet are to work toward that transformation and not give up on the world.

That is, the faithful community knows something about the world, hopes something for the world, and expects something of the world. What it knows and hopes and expects is that the world is to be trans. formed. That is in itself no mean ministry: to know, to hope and to expect. And that, perhaps, is the most important and most subversive thing the church can now do: to refuse to give up on the world and its promised transformation. Those who are victimized by the world in its present order need most of all voices of assurance that what now exists is not the way of the future. Such a voice is always subversive because it goes against our usual presuppositions and against the way the present order wants us to think. We have grown so accustomed to the disorders and inequalities which beset us that we do not expect it to be otherwise. And that is because we believe the world to be autonomous, set an its own course, with no possibility of transformation or intervention. We act as though the world gets to vote on its long-term future.

We have grown accustomed to the ways in which institutions are self-serving, in which every institution serves primarily its functionaries in order to preserve jobs and enhance personal well-being. This is true of government, court, school, hospital, church. Because the forms of public life are so complex, we despair of change. We expect ourselves and certainly others to be exploited. And we do not imagine that it can be otherwise.

But against all that, this poet of the exile, who knew about the pathos of Hosea and the promise of Jeremiah, flings his dangerous words. He conjures life alternatively as a genuine homecoming. He asserts that a condition of alienation and displacement is not our final destiny; there will be a homecoming of transformation. And the company and followers of this poet (which means us) keep the dream alive. Surely he had to speak of things he did not understand. But he clearly believes

• that the world is not closed, fixed or settled;

• that institutions can be changed and transformed;

• that communities of people can be practitioners of other ways of living.

The entire poetry of Isaiah of the exile has a tilt toward freedom and liberation and justice. Those are the ingredients of a covenanted homecoming. His lyrical envisioning of a new possibility is given in the presence of and in argument against the Babylonian gods, Babylonian kings and Babylonian definitions of reality (see chapters 46 and 47). This subversive poetry has an unavoidable political realism to it. It knows that the yearned-for liberation will not happen until there is a dismantling of imperial definitions of reality. That is where the missional activity of Israel is called to be -- defiantly and buoyantly against every imperial definition of reality. And so he speaks with nerve and authority, believing that his speech is not idle or futile, but that it plays a part in the dismantling.

We live in a time of domesticated hopes, weary voices and co-opted imaginations. Now is not a good time to join issue with the enslaving structures of the day (cf. Amos 5:13). And those who have worked at such a calling lately have good reason to stop in futility. But the poet knows better. The poet knows that, even in a world like ours, songs must be sung, dreams must be kept, visions must be practiced. And none of it yields to the despairing cynicism which the Babylonians want so much to encourage.

There is in this poetry no large or sustained strategy. We may note two simple features that likely are decisive. First, in the familiar words of 52:13-53:12, the world is to be transformed precisely by one who is deformed (53:2-3). And his deforming is for the "many" who lie beyond the immediate community (cf. 53:11-12). Thus we must be asking about deformity. Second, in the derivative song of 61:1-4 (cf. Luke 4:18-19), it is by the action of the spirit that the dream is mounted and practiced. And where, the spirit is quenched, there the mission is domesticated.

The New Covenant

The three belong closely together: a God who makes covenant by making a move toward the partner (Hos. 2:14, 18-20); a community which practices covenant by the new forms of Torah, knowledge and forgiveness (Jer. 31:31-34); and a world yet to be transformed to covenanting, by the dismantling of imperial reality (Isa. 42:6-7, 49:6).

That is how the battle is joined. These alternatives given us in the prophets are subversive. They mean to controvert conventional, noncovenantal loyalties. These three elements belong together and are inseparable. And they are entrusted to our ministry. These affirmations were a fragile minority report in ancient Israel by this line of prophets who had so little power in their time. The likes of Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah in exile mattered little. These affirmations are a fragile minority report when they come to embodiment in Jesus of Nazareth who had so little power. And they also are no less a minority report in the fragility of our common ministry.

What we have claimed for these three poets is not new. But that makes it no less urgent. And the question presents itself: How do we stay at it? How do we not yield these radical convictions? I submit that it is in this: these subversive alternatives of God/church/world must be kept close to the eucharistic table where we eat and drink in covenant. The cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood (Luke 22:20); This cup is the new covenant in my blood (I Cor. 11:25). Whenever we eat this bread and drink this wine, we engage in a. subversive minority report. Precisely because of being broken and poured out, this bread and wine will never be fully accommodated to the interests of the old age. The world wants the bread unbroken and the wine still filling the cup. The world yearns for unrisking gods and transformed humanity. But in our eating and drinking at this table we know better. We will not have these subversive alternatives rendered void.

Undoubtedly covenantal discernments will become more dangerous in time to come as resources shrink, as we grow more fearful, as our public world continues to disintegrate. And therefore it is very important that we do not lose heart. Everything is at stake.

Listening to the Text

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of I and 2 Samuel, by Robert Alter, Norton. 410 pp. $30.00

Robert Alter's contribution to current scripture studies has been immense and defining. Alter, who is professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, possesses a rare combination of interpretive gifts. He has both a sensitive ability to work with Hebrew and an artistic sensibility that allows him to grasp the aesthetic workings of a text without excessive or premature theological judgment. Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981) and The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985) have had a vital influence on the methods and perspectives of the "literary study" of the Bible -- an approach that has opened ways of reading and interpreting scripture unavailable to the dominant methods of historical criticism.

Alter's translation of' Samuel 1 and 2 in The David Story allows him to return to and use the insights and suggestions of The Art of Biblical Narrative. In his extended introduction, he invites a fresh consideration of the way we may hear and receive this text and gives something of a charter for a literary approach to it. While the writer may have been doing history, it is "an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with his historical figures and events in his historical plays." The author's attention to detail and dialogue cannot be reportage; it is inescapably construction. "The author approaches the David story as an imaginative writer, giving play to that dialectical fullness of conception that leads the greatest writers (Shakespeare, Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, to name a few apposite instances) to transcend the limitations of their own ideological points of departure," Alter states.

His point is exceedingly important and cunningly stated. To transcend one's "own ideological points of departure" means, in a theological context, to be carried artistically beyond one's own take on the ethical and the theological -- a transcendence authorized by the text but much resisted by the church. The outcome of applying such an emancipated imagination to Samuel, Alter says, is "a will and testament worthy of a Mafia chief," "the wisdom of a Tallyrand," "the first full-length portrait of a Machiavellian prince in Western literature."

Alter's artistic sense requires and permits him to reject two staples of conventional criticism: the Deuteronomic hypothesis that has never been easy to sustain in regard to Samuel and that constricts the power of the narrative; and the breaking of a unified and coherent narrative into sources, a long-established method of historical criticism. Alter wants the fullness of narrative to have its own say.

As one would expect, Alter's translation is imaginative and sensitive to nuance. But though subtle and suggestive, it is not a wholesale departure from traditional renderings. He has a generous appreciation for the King James Version:

What is clearer to me now is that the precedent of the King James Version has played a decisive and constructive role in directing readers of English to a rather literal experience of the Bible, and that this precedent can be ignored only at considerable cost, as nearly all the English versions of the Bible done in recent decades show. The men responsible for the 1611 version authorized by King James, following the great model of William Tyndale a century earlier, produced an English Bible that often, though by no means invariably, evinced a striking fidelity to many of the literary articulations of the Hebrew text. This success of course reflected their remarkable sense of English style (nothing traduces the power of the original more egregiously than the nonstyle cultivated by the sundry modern versions), but it was also a consequence of their literalism. The literalism was dictated by their firm conviction as Christians that every word of the biblical text was literally inspired by God. That belief led them to replicate significant verbal repetition in the original, avoiding elegant synonymity, and to reproduce in English many of the telling word choices of the biblical writers.

Alter's commentary on Samuel consists of isolated notes on specific matters. This section of the book offered less than I had expected. Alter's literary sensibilities produce shrewd notes; one can learn a great deal from them. But the format does not permit him to say as much as he could or as we might hope he would concerning the text's literary patterns and movements.

That Alter, so able and versatile, would invest himself in the demanding, meticulous work of translation suggests that attentiveness to nuance and detail is well worth the effort. Clinical pastoral education and its dread "verbatims" has taught many of

us that how something is said matters enormously. It has taught us the difficult skill and freedom of attending to nuance. Ironically, many of us who have learned to listen well nevertheless run roughshod over the biblical text, unwilling to let its nuance subvert either social ideology or passion for certitude.

Alter's book is important because it shows a keen listener in the act of listening. It demonstrates how one who already knows a great deal about the text is again surprised and led elsewhere by its detail. Alter invites his readers to listen with him, to hear more and other than already has been heard. Listening is a countercultural activity, an activity that leads to freedom, as Alter demonstrates.

A Biblical Perspective on the Problem of Hunger

What are the causes of world hunger? What must be done to overcome world hunger? Obviously, the Bible does not supply any direct answers to these deep questions. We may not look here for clear proposals or concrete strategies. The Bible (in this as in many matters) offers only impressionistic hints subject to varying configurations and interpretations. The role of the Bible in these questions is not to displace hard technical analysis or sober economic reasoning. But it may shake our ways of thinking and perhaps define things afresh for us in terms of human, historical, covenantal reality.

I want to divide the issues into two rather obvious parts. There are at least two matters which may concern us: (1) There is not enough bread to go around, and (2) the bread we have is not equitably shared. That is, insufficient production and inequitable distribution. (To these a third area could be added concerning consumption, but I will not pursue that here.) Let me try to comment on these two matters in reverse order, to take the easier one first.

Bread in the Wilderness

The first reason for world hunger is inequitable distribution. In the Bible the dominant model for distribution is the feeding by manna in the wilderness, in Exodus 6. This narrative may stand as a paradigm for us in thinking about all hunger problems. The story is well known and needs little comment from us. These points may be instructive:

1. The bread given is a gift and is not produced by any human effort (cf. I Cor. 4:7).

2. It is given only in the wilderness, to people utterly without resources and, we may note, on the edge of being without faith.

3. It is given in the face of an eager yearning to return to the fleshpots of Egypt -- i.e., it is recognized as alternative bread which carries with it the radical notion of disengagement from the empire and its characteristic food.

4. It is given not by any of the gods of the empire, but only by the God whose glory is precisely in the wilderness among marginal people. Not only is the sociology of this bread radical, but equally radical is its theology.

And all of that leads to the formula for distribution: “They gathered, some more, some less. But when they measured it . . . he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack” (Exod. 16: 17-18). The hunger problem had been overcome! It was an act of transcendent mercy in which the limits of conventional possibility were overcome by the resourceless God dealing with his desperate people. And the miracle (for that is what equitable distribution is) worked only so long as they took it a day at a time -- that is, so long as they prayed daily for bread. But when they tried to hoard it, to take control of the supply, they lost the bread.

One other observation about this text: this way of distributing the bread allowed for the Sabbath. The people of Israel were not permitted to store ahead for the next day, except on the sixth day, when they could work ahead for the seventh. Preparation for honest Sabbath is not hoarding. Sabbath is the public recognition that life is a gift. Bread is received, perceived and consumed differently when life is a gift. But in another kind of society -- one oriented to success, competence, security and coercion -- Sabbath disappears (cf. Amos 8:4-6). And when Sabbath disappears, there is no longer equitable distribution, because now there is covetous self-securing. And that covetous self-securing is not personal selfishness but public policy.

Royal Bread

Equitable distribution is a miracle that depends on gift bread. And gift bread is precarious and beyond our control. So, of course, such gift bread is not normative. I suggest that at the first opportunity, Israel eliminated gift bread and opted for royal bread -- bread baked in the ovens owned and managed by the king. The king announced that the hunger issue was under new management. It is the business of the king to provide secure bread. And then, of course, people need no more pray daily for bread. Now it is our bread. It is clear enough that when it is our bread and we need no longer pray daily for gift bread, it will be inequitably distributed and there will be hunger.

In Israel it was the movement and regime of Solomon that decisively shifted the foundations of Israel’s life. The Solomonic arrangement, the quintessence of royal bread, is based on three interdependent factors: an economics of affluence (I Kings 4:20), a politics of oppression (I Kings 5:13 ff., 9:15 ff.), and a religion of immanence (I Kings 8:12-13).

These economic, political and religious practices go together and reinforce one another. Such remarkable affluence was possible only because of such remarkable politics. Lewis Mumford has shown that the great concentration of power in the hands of the kings depended on persons living for that “sacred” order which made affluence possible. This affluence is based on a changed formula of distribution, no longer “some gathered, some more, some less, and all had enough.” Now people gathered what they could and ate all they had with no thought of the neighbor. This is not an idyllic tale about a capricious king. Rather, it announces the shift of the life-world of Israel -- a shift away from the radicalness of Moses and toward the pattern of the surrounding great empires. In the empires bread is distributed by a very different pattern of value.

And both the new economics and the new politics depend upon the new religion (new for Israel) and upon a God who lives in his splendid isolation and satiation in the temple, patron of the king and guarantor of the regime: This God has become fat and uncaring, insulated from the groans of marginal people, so contained by the king that he is denied his freedom. And where God is not free from the regime, there is no independent agent to whom appeal can be made. There is no criticism possible, and questions of freedom and justice can never surface. That is, no question about equitable distribution can be raised, because distribution is now sanctioned according to the needs and wishes of the all-encompassing king.

Now the issues of justice and freedom must always yield to the pressing concerns of order and maintenance. God now is, in fact, the unresponsive guarantor of a system of inequitable distribution through which some eat while others work hard and pay much. Likely the Solomonic phenomenon is responsible biblical way to get inside our own context, a context in which the miracle of gift bread is not thinkable because we are so fascinated with royal bread. And royal bread with all the bakeries “pertaining thereto” is perfect for those who manage the place where the royal God now sits to sanction the process.

What to do? Well, obviously, dismantle this royal configuration, break the neat linkage between the politics, economics and religion, break this pattern which guarantees and makes possible inequitable distribution in the name of sacral order. Hosea understood that there will be no serious covenantal eating until there is a situation of wilderness:

I will allure [seduce] her [Israel],

and bring her into the wilderness,

and speak tenderly to her [Hos. 2:14].

The distribution problem depends on our being vulnerable enough to pray daily, because praying daily binds neighbors together, even as coveting daily drives people apart. And it is a serious question among us, I believe, if the only serious covenanting is done in the wilderness. Or conversely, can fat people do any covenanting? That question remains unanswered among us in our affluence.

Called to Repentance

The repentance to which hunger calls us is a repentance in all three dimensions: (a) repentance of our economics of affluence, which holds that total satiation is possible; (b) repentance of our politics of oppression in which the neighbor is scarcely visible; and (c) repentance of our religion of immanence in which God is so domesticated that no appeal can be addressed to him.

That analysis is not, of course, a new one. But let us stress the third element. My impression is that most of us who think of ourselves as liberal are inclined to give primary attention to economics and politics, and perhaps that is correct. But I want to urge that the religious question of God is a crucial one without which the other two criticisms are not possible. It is the frozenness of our discernment of God which lies underneath it all. And as long as we believe in a God who is immovable, omnipotent and omniscient, then the human analogy comes dangerously close to being satiation. We are most like God (in his image) when we are satiated.

But that, perchance, is not the biblical God. Rather, we have to do with a God who is free -- free to rage against, free to abandon, even our favorite Zion, free to care and to grieve and to groan. Then, in his image, a paradigm of humanness may emerge. It could well be that humanness does not consist in competence and security and, especially, satiation, but rather in fidelity. What a marvel if fidelity and not satiation is the meaning of life, especially if fidelity is best practiced in our leanness. That is a hard issue, but it makes quite clear that the question of the freedom of God is an urgent one for serious theological thought about hunger.

In dealing with a hard faculty issue, one colleague said recently that our problem is that “we believe we are all supposed to be happy all the time.” And that may be the ultimate deduction, to substitute happiness for faithfulness. It is, in the context of the gospel, an urging to have a gospel without a cross.

The Bible has one other discernment that may be useful to us at this point. It knows that royal bread can only satiate us. It can satiate, but it can never energize: “. . . you shall eat, and not be satisfied” (Lev. 26:26). “They shall eat, but not be satisfied” (Hos. 4:10).

The distribution question is a very hard one because distribution follows the power arrangements and value scheme of the regnant culture. It is likely our case, as that of Solomon, that the power arrangements and the value scheme among us are committed to and dependent upon inequitable distribution.

Fertility and Justice

The second problem is more difficult. There is insufficient production. If it is true that there is not enough bread, then even careful redistribution is not finally helpful. My comment on this subject are not those of an economist or an agronomist. I appeal not to technical data but to the strangeness of biblical faith. When we come to the production question, we are driven by the Bible in the direction of a faithful obscurantism -- driven to say things which sound like nonsense and which require a considerable break with the dominant reason of the academy.

The Bible declares, in its main thrust, that productive creation is not an independent, self-perpetuating, closed system. The “nature” questions of fertility and productivity are closely linked to the “history” questions of justice. And that, I believe, is the deepest and most difficult issue for us. This linkage urged by the Bible between fertility and justice is not simply a ploy to urge the practice of justice but a serious statement that means what it says; namely, that the doing of justice causes the earth to bring forth more generously. There is a deep assumption about a real interconnectedness. It is a gift of the Enlightenment and of scientific positivism to separate these, as though natural processes were value-free and therefore at the whim of human knowledge and human manipulation. This may strike you as inordinately obscurantist (as it surely does me), but the Bible suggests that productivity is dependent not upon human knowledge, ingenuity and manipulation, but upon human covenanting and fidelity. That scandal, I submit, is not a problem in that those who embrace the gospel must try to persuade the others. The problem for us is to affirm that core claim for ourselves.

Psalm 72 (interestingly enough, a royal Psalm), reflecting on the character of kingship, articulates that troublesome connection. It presents a curious but not accidental juxtaposing of these issues, moving back and forth between justice concerns and fertility agendas:

Give the king thy justice, O God,

and thy righteousness to the royal son!

May he judge thy people with righteousness,

and thy poor with justice!

Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people,

and the hills, in righteousness!

May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,

give deliverance to the needy,

and crush the oppressor! . . .

May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass,

like showers that water the earth! [Ps. 72:1-6].

In the person of the king (surely not Solomon but the anticipated real king), the practice of justice and the possibility of fertility belong together.

And so in the covenant recital, drought, famine and crop failure are understood not independently or scientifically but covenantally, not by the capriciousness of the season, but according to the faithfulness/fickleness of covenant. It may well be that such a linkage can no longer be dismissed as prescientific primitivism but as an alternative perception which has not yet been “disproven.” Thus, the danger for covenant-breaking is that

if. . . you will not hearken to me . . . I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like brass; and your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit [Lev. 26:18-20]:

Fidelity and Creation

The same connection is made on a grand scale in Hosea 4. Verse 2 contains an indictment echoing the entire decalogue:

there is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and

committing adultery;

they break all bounds and murder follows murder.

And then the predictable consequences with the causative “therefore”:

Therefore the land mourns [in drought],

and all who dwell in it languish,

and also the beasts of the field,

and the birds of the air;

and even the fish of the sea are taken away.

Creation disappears! The fertility cycle fails. The productive processes do not function. Surely that can be explained in other ways. But after all the other ways are listed, the Bible believers are driven back to the most elemental connection: when the Torah is violated, creation is dysfunctional. We shall have to decide if we believe that or if such an obscurantism is even speakable among us. In its most authentic form, this word will not be explained away by saying that if we keep Torah we will feel better about Torah. Maybe that is so. But the affirmation is that when Torah is practiced, when issues of human freedom and justice are addressed, creation functions more fully and brings forth.

Hosea 2 presents the argument with power: in verse 9, worship of the Baalim leads to loss of produce. The Baalim are the embodiments of technical-can-do which substituted for covenantal commitment as a way of self-securing. And they lead to loss. “And in that day, says the Lord, you will call me ‘My husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My baal’” (Hos. 2:16). The first thing is to get God’s name right and quit treating him as a referent for can-do self-securing.

“And I will make for you a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the ground” (Hos. 2:18). The entire creation is rendered covenantal, no more an object to be used, no more sources to be exploited. Now it is redefined in terms of mutual commitment.

“I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety” (Hos. 2: 18b). Who knows what disarmament has to do with the earth bringing forth? Disarmament is about the end of coveting, fearful self-securing.

“And I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy . . . in faithfulness; and you shall know the Lord” (Hos. 2: 19-20). The radical turn envisioned in this text is that these categories -- righteousness, justice, mercy, loyalty, steadfast love -- shall be the controlling, decisive, defining ones for our reality. To “know” means to acknowledge that we can and will live in this life-world of covenantal loyalty and, conversely, to eschew the alternatives of control and manipulation. (On “know” as the decisive word for a biblical life-world, see the important book by José Miranda, Marx and the Bible.)

Now it is curious that critical scholarship almost unanimously ends the poem here. But given our theme, consider what happens if the poem is continued, or if, at least, the poems are placed in intentional juxtaposition. It continues:

“And in that day, says the Lord,

I will answer the heavens,

and they shall answer the earth;

and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and

the oil . . .” [Hos. 2:21-22].

In that day -- that is, the day of serious covenanting, the day of radically dismantling anticovenant forms of life. The poem concludes with the resolution of covenant: I will be your God and you will be my people (v. 23). The conclusion is covenantal, but set in its very center is the announcement of well-being in fertile creation which is also covenantal. It is fidelity which makes creation bring forth. Hans Wolff notes that the poem presents a sound ecological sense of how the facets of creation are linked to and dependent on each other. We may observe both (a) that the poem holds the Torah-keeping covenant together with fertility and (b) that critical scholarship, by the way it has discerned the literature, has programmatically separated them. Our critical scholarship has been in the service of our value-free notion of “nature.”

Hosea has earlier observed that covenantal fickleness causes loss of grain, wine and oil (2:9), and now covenantal fidelity lets them be given again in abundance. Many Protestant scholars characteristically have discussed the God-people covenant “in history” as though it happened in a vacuum. More recent ecological interest has talked about creation as an ecosystem in covenant with God. But Hosea will have neither of these. He affirms a three-way covenant of God-people-earth. The three are bound together. The concreteness of that binding is that a Torah-keeping, covenant-abiding people permit the earth to bring forth.

A Conflict with Scientific Reason

Let me mention two other prophetic texts related to our theme. Positively Amos 9:13-15 looks to renewal of creation and increased production. He has just announced the restoration of the Davidic reality. -- i.e., a political entity -- and then he speaks of fertile creation:

“Behold, the days are coming” [the days of God’s

reign], says the Lord,

“When the plowman shall over-take the reaper,

and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed;

the mountains shall drip sweet wine,

and all the hills shall flow with it . . .”

The best soil erosion thinkable! Perhaps the renewal of production in creation is linked to the restoration of a viable political order. The promises cannot be separated.

Negatively, Isaiah 24:4-7 makes the same connection:

The earth mourns and withers,

  the world languishes and withers;

    the heavens languish together with the earth

                          [all a description of drought]

the earth lies polluted tinder its inhabitants;

for they have transgressed the laws,

    violated the statutes,

    broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore a curse devours the earth,

    and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;

therefore the inhabitants of the earth are

    scorched,

and few men are left.

The wine mourns,

    the vine languishes,

    all the merry-hearted sigh.

The poem is a nearly perfectly constructed prophetic statement: (a) a description of disaster, (b) the reason for it, (c) announcement of the curse action. In the ongoing poem (v. 14-15) there is hope, but the hope is by way of covenant.

The obvious need not be labored: (a) real shortage happens because of Torah violations and disregard of justice; (b) there will be more food when the people repent, returning to covenant and to Torah. Clearly, if this line of reasoning is valid, it brings the church into fundamental conflict with the scientific reason of the day. It says that more fertilizer and all our mechanizations will not produce more food. Only the facing of the human, historical questions of justice and freedom will do that.

So on the two points we have considered, our conclusions are clear:

1. On distribution, the problem is a combination in royal management of an economics of affluence, a politics of oppression and a religion of immanence. The remedy is repentance as the disengagement from and the dismantling of this apparatus of coveting inequity.

2. On production, the problem is viewing fertile creation as a value-free independent system to be managed without reference to the human questions of justice and freedom. The remedy is repentance, which requires a radical break with scientific positivism and its epistemology and the embrace of the scandalous notion that production is subordinate to and governed by our faithful handling of human issues.

Hunger, as concerns both distribution and production, requires facing human questions. And unless these are seriously faced, we will have to imagine that we can do something on our own about hunger. But that approach yields only more royal bread, the bread of coveting which never satisfies, the bread of affliction which never humanizes.

Hardness of Heart

Now let me conclude with a comment on the feeding work of Jesus. In Mark 8:1-10, the narrative is presented. Jesus is moved with compassion. The disciples respond in grudging doubt. But it happens! And what happens is not simply better distribution that can be explained on rational or clever grounds. There is a strange happening of production. Clearly the story means to say that where Jesus is visible, where there is embrace of the new kingdom, the hunger issues are faced differently and there is bread.

Jesus is the perfect teacher who never misses a teachable moment. So in verses 14-21, he offers a little catechetical session. It begins in irony; the disciples forget the bread. Jesus responds with a warning: beware of eating the bread of Herod and the Pharisees. If you eat establishment bread long enough, you will be taken in. It matters what the church eats and who gets to feed it. It matters who defines reality and sets priorities and authorizes perceptions.

And then having announced the principle, Jesus asks hard questions of his learners: “Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?” There is no answer. They not only don’t know the answer -- they don’t understand the question.

So like a good teacher, Jesus adjusts the lesson plan, because he is dealing with obviously concrete-operational types: “When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” Answer: 12. “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” Answer: seven.

They do very well on such concreteness. And then he ends the session abruptly: “Do you not yet understand?” And there he leaves his church, wondering what it means to have a source of bread among us which is a threat to all other suppliers of bread and which will not be explained on our conventional terms.

Two other texts may be mentioned: In Mark 6:52, there is an odd verse quite unrelated to its context. It just hangs there alone: “for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.” “Hardness of heart” is a recurring theme in Mark. It speaks of those resistant to newness, which calls present things into question. What an irony that perhaps our hardness of heart may be the real problem in dealing with hunger! And until that fundamental human resistance is faced, we will not address the bread problem. The gospel is that there is bread. But we cannot discern or receive it.

Public Covenanting

Finally, we should not miss the song of the

Virgin:

He has shown strength with his arm,

he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their

hearts,

he has put down the mighty from their thrones,

and exalted those of low degree;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich he has sent empty away [Luke 1:51-53].

The struggle in the believing community over the Virgin birth is not about biology or dogma. It is about a perception of reality which we cannot contain. The testimony of the text strains to say there is something going on here, but it will not be discerned until repentance is radical -- repentance that strikes both at our perception and epistemology and at our economic/political practice. Surely the hunger problem requires immediate acts for brothers and sisters. But it also requires of us a long-term nurture away from the leaven of Herod and the Pharisees.

The church has no special competence in areas of economics. It has a peculiar competence in urging that the hunger question must be discerned in the field of public covenanting, and that public covenanting means the shaping of perceptions and institutions in the presence of the hungry ones. Royal coveting denies such public covenanting with the hungry ones, and so there can be no serious distribution. Because human questions are linked to production, serious production is blocked until Torah is kept. Creation will not conic forth for an unjust community. Jesus feeds freely and enough, but that bread will not be understood in our present categories.

Counterscript

I have been thinking about the ways in which the Bible is a critical alternative to the enmeshments in which we find ourselves in the church and in society. I have not, of course, escaped these enmeshments myself, but in any case I offer a series of 19 theses about the Bible in the church.

1. Everybody has a script. People live their lives by a script that is sometimes explicit but often implicit. That script may be one of the great meta-narratives created by Karl Marx or Adam Smith or it may be an unrecognized tribal mantra like, "My dad always said . . . ." The practice of the script evokes a self, yields a sense of purpose and provides security. When one engages in psychotherapy, the therapy often has to do with reexamining the script -- or completely scuttling the script in favor of a new one, a process that we call conversion.

As the self is organized by a script, so are communities. And leaders of a community are skilled in appealing to that script.

2. We are scripted by a process of nurture, formation and socialization that might go under the rubric of liturgy. Some of the liturgy is intentional work, much of it is incidental; but all of it, especially for the young and especially for the family, involves modeling the way the world "really is." The script is inhaled along with eveiy utterance and every gesture, because the script-bestowing community is engaged in the social construction of a distinct reality. A case in point is the observation of Mark Douglas that regular table prayers of thanksgiving are a primal way in which to challenge the market view of the supply and movement of valuable goods (see his book Confessing Christ in the 21st Century).

3. The dominant script of both selves and communities in our society, for both liberals and conservatives, is the script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life.

• I use the term therapeutic to refer to the assumption that there is a product or a treatment or a process to counteract every ache and pain and discomfort and trouble, so that life may be lived without inconvenience.

• I use the term technological, following Jacques Ellul, to refer to the assumption that everything can be fixed and made right through human ingenuity; there is no issue so complex or so remote that it cannot he solved.

• I say consumerist, because we live in a culture that believes that the whole world and all its resources are available to us without regard to the neighbor, that assumes more is better and that "if you want it, you need it." Thus there is now an advertisement that says: "It is not something you don’t need; it is just that you haven’t thought of it."

The militarism that pervades our society exists to protect and maintain the system and to deliver and guarantee all that is needed for therapeutic technological consumerism. This militarism occupies much of the church, much of the national budget and much of the research program of universities.

It is difficult to imagine life in our society outside the reach of this script; it is everywhere reiterated and legitimated.

4. This script -- enacted through advertising, propaganda and ideology, especially in the several liturgies of television -- promises to make us safe and happy. Therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism pervades our public life and promises us security and immunity from every threat. And if we shall be safe, then we shall be happy, for who could watch the ads for cars and beers and deodorants and give thought to such matters as the trade deficit or homelessness or the residue of anger and insanity left by the war or by destruction of the environment? This script, with its illusion of safety and happiness, invites life in a bubble that is absent of critical reflection.

5. That script has failed. I know this is not the conclusion that all would draw. It is, however, a lesson that is learned by the nations over and over again. It is clear to all but the right-wing radio talk people and the sponsoring neoconservatives that the reach of the American military in global ambition has served only to destabilize and to produce new and deep threats to our society. The charade of a national security state has left us completely vulnerable to the whim of the very enemies that our security posture has itself evoked. A by-product of such attempts at security, moreover, has served in astonishing ways to evoke acrimony in the body politic that makes our democratic decision-making processes nearly unworkable.

We are not safe, and we are not happy. The script is guaranteed to produce new depths of insecurity and new waves of unhappiness. And in response to new depths of insecurity and new waves of unhappiness, a greater resolve arises to close the deal according to the script, which produces ever new waves and new depths.

6. Health depends, for society and for its members, on disengaging from and relinquishing the failed script. This is a truth that is exceedingly difficult to utter, and even more difficult to imagine acting upon across the sociopolitical spectrum. And besides that, we are ambivalent about disengaging and relinquishing, because we are indeed well-off, comfortable, and by any standards better off than most of the world can imagine.

7. It is the task of the church and its ministry to detach us from that powerful script. This has been the work of the biblical tradition since Moses and the subsequent work of the Deuteronomists, the prophets and the scribes. Moses had to make the case that the pharaonic arrangement of brickyard quotas was not the true destiny of the Israelite community. In the text we can see that such a descripting was a risky calling, entailing repeated challenges to his leadership and recurring proposals for a return to that exploitative Egyptian arrangement (Exod. 16:3; Num. 11:4-6). Later the Jerusalem establishment was caught in its own illusion of security; the prophets repeatedly urged Israel to give up its illusion of entitlement and to face the reality of covenantal requirements. And of course Jesus delineated a regime change in Mark 1:14-15 that was nothing less than a call to descript from Rome and from what had become an exploitative religious system.

8. The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is undertaken through the steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we testify will indeed make us safe and joyous.

We have become so jaded in the church -- most particularly in the liberal church -- that we have forgotten what has been entrusted to us. We have forgotten that the script entrusted to us is really all alternative and not an echo. Liberals tend to get so engaged in the issues of the day, urgent and important as those issues are, that we forget that behind such issues is a meta-narrative that is not about our particular social passion but about the world beyond our control. The claim of that alternative script is that there is at work among us a Truth that makes us safe, that makes us free, that makes us joyous in a way that the comfort and ease of the consumer economy cannot even imagine. It would make a difference if the church were candid in its acknowledgment that that is the work to which it is called.

9. The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and enacted through the tradition of the church. Many of us have become embarrassed about that ancient script because of our awareness of the ideological failures that are present in it, We are too ready to hand it over to the waiting arms of the dominant ideology; we have given up on the hard work of hearing and speaking the alternative message in what Karl Barth termed "the strange new world within the Bible." Barth understood that we cannot find in the Bible many of the things for which we look. But what we find there is an alternative world, an alternative network of symbols and signs that stitched together yield a coherence that subverts dominant scripts, a world in which newness keeps welling up.

10. The defining factor of the alternative script is the God of the Bible, who, fleshed in Jesus, is variously Lord and Savior of Israel and Creator of heaven and Earth, and whom we name as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The alternative script is about God, about a particular God whose name we know, whose story we tell. The historians of Israelite religion have traced all of the borrowings and appropriations from ancient Near Eastern culture and religion. They have in general concluded that for all the borrowings and appropriations there is something inexplicable and underived, something originary, in the God of Israel who blew over waters of disorder, who summoned Abraham and Sarah abruptly, and who came in a burning bush to give Moses an unbearable assignment.

All of us, of course, have been through and still live in the crisis of the Enlightenment; we find God to be an embarrassment whom we siphon off into intimate family life because we cannot imagine that God might be present in the public domain. We fear to be frontal because we do not want to sound like silly supernaturalists; we hedge and duck and then wonder why on Easter the assertion of the resurrection is without context, and so our Easter assertion is more awkward than grace-filled.

The script entrusted to us knows all about such awkwardness. Paul, even among his "enlightened" colleagues, refused awkwardness, voiced the script and emptied prisons. Thus while we guard against silly supernaturalism, we may from this script join issue with the ideology of the day. For of course the dominant script of therapeutic technological consumerist militarism is not godless or atheistic. Rather, it offers us a god who has no power to save.

11. The script of this God of power and life is not monolithic, one-dimensional or seamless, and we should not pretend that we have such an easy case to make in telling about this God. The script is flawed in many ways of which we are now aware. It is flawed in its approach to violence, race, gender and even class. But the primary reason that the text is not monolithic, one-dimensional or seamless is not because of such flaws but because the key character is elusive. God is, as Job found, irascible in freedom and pathos-filled in sovereignty, one who traffics in hiddenness and violence. This God does not fit much of our theological preference and certainly does not conform to any of our bourgeois reductionism. This God is the one who keeps life ragged and open, who refuses domestication but who will not let our lives be domesticated either.

In Job 38-41, for example, God seems to know nothing about pastoral sensitivity, for after Job relates in great detail his anguish and pain and bewilderment, Yahweh responds, "Let me tell you about my crocodile." Any pastoral supervisor evaluating this act of ministry would say to Yahweh, "You couldn’t stand the pain and you changed the subject."

On the other hand, in Isaiah 41:14, when Israel has complained about feeling like a worm, Yahweh shows acute pastoral sensitivity and says to self-deprecating Israel, "Fear not, worm." Yahweh stays with the subject and does not try to talk Israel out of its diminished seif-percephon. But we never know for sure.

12. The ragged, disjunctive quality of the counterscript to which we testify cannot be smoothed out. Historical-critical study and doctrinal reductionism have tried to smooth out the text, but that effort betrays the key character. When the script is smoothed out, it becomes flattened, domesticated and uninteresting. More than that, it too easily becomes a neat, weak echo of the dominant script. The way to co-opt the biblical script for any dominant ideology is to flatten and domesticate it so that the key character is made into a patron of conventional truth.

The script to which we are so much inured is all about certitude, privilege and entitlement. But the script of the church and its ministry is not about certitude, privilege or entitlement.

13. The ragged, disputatious character of the counterscript to which we testify is so disputed and polyvalent that its adherents are always tempted to quarrel among themselves. Polyvalence, the fact that in the Bible God speaks in different voices, invites us to choose the part we happen to like. Thus we quibble about whether Jesus said "poor" or "poor in spirit." We solemnly vote about whether we stand with Leviticus, wherein holiness has to do with sexual regulation, or with Deuteronomy, wherein holiness has to do with concern for justice for widows, orphans and immigrants. This God has spoken differently at different times in a dynamic process. As a consequence there is always something for everyone, and every position we take is readily countered with some other part of the script.

The quarrels we undertake are not only vicious; they are also convenient because they detract us from the main claims of the text, and so undermine the force of the text. Of course it matters what the church decides about sexuality, but in the long run that skirmish or a dozen like it are as nothing before the truth that the therapeutic, technological, military consumerism cannot deliver or keep its promises. All of us -- conservatives who are attentive to what the Bible says about sexuality and indifferent to what it says about economics, and liberals who mumble about what the Bible says on sex but emphasize economics -- all of us stand under the awareness that the primary commitments of our society amount to a choice of a path of death.

The quarrels we undertake must be kept in perspective, because none of those quarrels concerns this holy character unduly. What counts is that we were not there at the outset of creation and will not be there at the curfew; our life between the outset and the curfew is the gift of the One who calls us not to assault neighbor but to be on our way in wonder, love and praise.

14. The entry point into the counterscript is baptism. From which it follows that the church must recover the generative power of baptism. Baptism, a bold counteract, means entry into a stream of promise that is free but not cheap. In the ancient liturgy we say, "Do you renounce Satan and all his works?" We do not explicate that phrase but let everyone imagine it as they will. No doubt "Satan and all his works" is taken by some to be Muslims and by some to be homosexuals. At least we leave open the thought that Satan acts subtly and by indirection, perhaps by including us in a dominant narrative that makes promises about security and happiness that cannot be kept.

And so we ask, by inference, "Do you renounce the dominant script?" The issue cannot be put directly; it is, however, latent in this thick moment of holy vows as we watch the splash of the holy water and hear the uncompromising name of the irascible Maker of promises. Baptism creates an alternative context for praise and preaching and for mission.

15. The nurture, formation and socialization into the counterscript with this elusive, irascible God at its center constitute the work of ministry. All those called in the Bible were inducted into this task, and it is not different now. I say this because I think I know many ministers who are filled with despair, who are exhausted from too many tasks, who are riding it out in cynicism, or who work ad hoc without much focus on coherence. Ministry is at best acutely difficult and problematic; it becomes unbearable when there is no large, comprehensive sense of purpose.

We may specialize in and develop various skills and arts in ministry, each of which is urgently important. Thus we value and require skills in preaching, liturgy, education, social action, counseling, administration, stewardship, evangelism and all the rest. These, however, are not ends in themselves. They are instruments in nurture, formation and socialization into an alternative scripting of reality. Nurture is aimed at the embrace of the new script and the relinquishment of the old script. Formation is aimed at receiving and living into an alternative reality and disengaging from the old. Socialization is entering into another world that comes by "switching stories." Each practice of ministry is to "improve our baptism," wherein we live with increasing singularity in this alternative script.

16. Ministry is conducted in the awareness that most of’ us are deeply ambivalent about the alternative script. We do not want to choose decisively between the dominant script of therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism and the counterscript of the elusive, irascible God. We are characteristically double-minded, standing between two scripts the way Elijah found Israel standing between Baal and Yahweh. And of course we know what happens in our double-mindedness; "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth" (Matt. 6:24). We are filled with anxiety: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" (Matt. 6:25).

The anxiety about our double-mindedness makes us fearful, strident and adversarial. This anxiety causes us to enlist as red or blue ministers in red or blue churches. It is our anxiety that precludes the ease of sabbath, the dalliance of birds, the leisure time of lilies; "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" (Matt. 6:26).

There is, of course, an antidote, even if it is given in patriarchal form: " For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things" (Matt. 6:32). And we are left, postanxiety, with only God’s realm and God’s righteousness.

17. The good news is that our ambivalence as we stand between scripts is precisely the primal venue for the work of God’s Spirit. God’s Spirit will work where it will and accomplish its purposes (John 3:8). But humanly speaking, it is in our ambivalence that the Spirit in us can be stirred and we can be opened to new possibilities. When we cover over and deny our ambivalence, our faith grows hard and we find ourselves committed with ideological passion and without the grace to rethink.

Surely one of the crucial tasks of ministry is to name the deep ambiguity that besets us, and to create a venue for waiting for God’s newness among us. This work is not to put people in crisis. The work is to name the crisis that people are already in, the crisis that evokes resistance and hostility when it is brought to the surface and named.

• God may yet lead us anew where liberals and conservatives can disrupt the shrillness long enough to admit that variously we are frightened by alternative patterns of sexuality. We do not want to kill all gays as the book of Leviticus teaches, but we are in fact uneasy about changes that seem so large.

• God may yet lead us anew when conservatives and liberals can interrupt our passion for consumer goods and lower taxes long enough to admit that we believe neighbors should be cared for, even with taxes. We have a passion for social programs but are nonetheless aware of being taxed excessively, and it causes us alarm.

• God may yet lead us so that liberals and conservatives can stop the loudness to know that the divestment that costs us nothing is too easy, whether directed at Israel or the Palestinians; the core divestment to which we are first called comes closer to our own entitlements. The Spirit has always been. for the church and beyond the church, "a way out of no way"

The church and its pastors await the gift of newness from the Spirit. One of the ways in which the church and its pastors do that is that they consistently give voice and visibility to our common ambivalence whereby we are given a chance for rechoosing. The Spirit is wind and not wall. It is possibility and not coercion. It is opportunity and not threat. Ministry is for truth telling about the shape we are in. And that truth telling makes us free.

18. Ministry and mission entail managing that in-escapable ambivalence that is the human predicament in faithful, generative ways. Managing ambivalence is not manipulating it toward preferred ends. It is management for truth telling, waiting and receiving newness. The work is the slow, steady work of ministry so that we, personally and communally, are able to renounce old scripts of death and enter new scripts of life. The hallmark of the church is not certitude~ it is openness to the Spirit. In the book of Acts, after the apostles preached the gospel of Jesus Christ with all the certitude they could muster, there was still a waiting and a big leap beyond themselves.

Moving beyond ourselves is made possible only by the Spirit. We do not go beyond ourselves when we adhere to the dominant script. And the movement beyond ourselves in the church is not possible if the church’s script only imitates the dominant script.

19. The work of ministry is indispensable. The point of ministry is not that the church may prosper but that that the world may live (and not die) and rejoice (and not cower). Only the church in its better days -- and the synagogue and the mosque on their better days -- is able to mediate irascible holiness, evoke consequent ambivalence, manage that ambivalence toward newness, and then wait.

The Power of Dreams in the Bible

We children of the Enlightenment do not regularly linger over such elusive experiences as dreams. We seek to ‘enlighten" what is before us and to overcome the inscrutable and the eerie in order to make the world a better, more manageable place. We do well in our management while we are awake, and we keep the light, power and control on 24/7.

Except, of course, that we must sleep. We require seasons of rest and, therefore, of vulnerability. Our control flags. We become open to stirrings that we do not initiate. Such stirrings come to us in the night unbidden. Dreams address us. They invite us beyond our initiative-taking management.

The ancient world and the biblical tradition knew about dreams. The ancients understood that the unbidden communication in the night opens sleepers to a world different from the one they manage during the day. The ancients dared to imagine, moreover, that this unbidden communication is one venue in which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might be, come to us. They knew too that this communication is not obvious. It requires interpretation.

Here are four familiar examples from the Bible in which the Holy Other addresses people in the vulnerability of the night:

The first occurs after Jacob has duped his older brother and is fleeing for his life (Gen. 28:10-22). He is alone, running to his mother’s relatives. But he must stop to sleep. In this condition, he is a good candidate for an intrusion from beyond. He dreams of angels coming and going, messengers and promise-makers. He hears God’s voice of promise. The God rooted in his family promises land. This odd holy voice of the night also promises to be with this fugitive and to bring him safely home.

The dream requires a total redescription of Jacob’s life defined by God’s promise. The place of his sleep is converted, by vision and by utterance, into a place of promissory companionship.

That disclosure requires a response. Jacob pledges to be allied with the God of promise, a pledge that entails accepting himself’ as a carrier of the promise. Quite concretely, Jacob promises to tithe (v. 22). When he awal’es, the world is different because of this holy voice in the night.

A dream also invades the troubled sleep of the mighty Pharaoh (Gen. 41:14-24). Who would have thought that this manager of the daytime world would be so vulnerable? His dream involves a confusing scenario featuring cows and shocks of grain. He has no clue to the meaning of the dream. After Pharaoh’s magicians and wise men, his "intelligence community," fail him, he summons an outsider, an Israelite, someone uncredentialed. Joseph tells Pharaoh the meaning of his dream: there will soon come a time when the empire will be destabilized. Truth in the night is spoken to the one who has power in the daylight. This dream, so the narrative reports, will cause settled power to become more aggressively acquisitive.

In this reading of the nighttime reality, Pharaoh is invited into an alternative world of need, trouble and deprivation. This reality, which comes to dominate the larger narrative about Joseph, was not even on the horizon of Pharaoh with all of his technical apparatus, his economic and military power and his intelligence community.

Too bad that Joseph ceases to be an interpreter and becomes a manager for Pharaoh! By his "Egyptianization," he signs on to the task of stabilizing the regime that the dream had worked to destabilize (Gen. 47:13-26).

Paralleling the story of Joseph at the be-ginning of the Old Testament is the story of Daniel at the end of the Old Testament (Dan. 4:19-37). It concerns a dream that assails power. Like Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar represents a settled life of exploitative power that expects not to be disrupted. Dreams are dangerous for such a ruler. They come in the night and declare God’s intentions. The dream dispatches the king to a condition he did not intend -- into a grass-eating beast.

The dream and the narrative about the dream deconstruct the Idug in his power. He had come to think of himself as autonomous and did not acknowledge that sovereignty belongs to whomever God may give it (Dan. 4:25). The dream asserts that Nebuchadnezzar had misunderstood his status in the world by disregarding the ultimacy of the holy God.

Daniel, the gifted Jewish dream interpreter -- gifted, surely, because of his rootage in faith -- counsels Nebuchadnezzar to practice mercy and justice (4:27). The dream is given because of Nebuchadnezzar’s "insanity." The narrative goes beyond the dream to tell of a return to sanity: Nebuchadnezzar offers a doxology to the most high God and accepts his own penultimacy in the world of power (4:34-37).

Perhaps the best-known biblical dream appears at the conclusion of the visit by the Magi: "And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road" (Matt. 2:12). The Christ child is threatened by power (see v. 16; Exod. 1:16). In order to secure a future for the child, the voice of the holy intervenes in the night when the royal menace is at rest.

In all four cases, the course of public history, with its determined configurations of power, is disrupted by a hidden truth designed to create new possibilities. In the cases of Jacob and the wise men, the dream opens a way of wellbeing. In the cases of Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar, the functions of royal power are decisively shaped -- in Pharaoh’s case by a resultant program of acquisitiveness, in Nebuchadnezzar’s case by madness that results from the absolute practice of power.

In the post-Enlightenment world, reason has sought to overcome all that is primitive, sacred and lacking in manageable credibility. The aim and outcome has been to control the "darkness" from which might arise disruptive or destructive voices.

This commitment to maintaining control through reasonableness did not eliminate the hidden otherness, however, but only drove it underground. It remained for Sigmund Freud to attend to that hidden holiness in both its demonic and angelic forms. Freud treated dreams as "the royal road to the unconscious," a thesis that served his general conviction that consciousness, the reasoned control of life, constitutes only the surface part of the energies that propel or immobilize persons. This "master of suspicion" understood the unconscious as an urgent dissenter from the "enlightened" nature of humanity.

Freud, of course, did not link dreams to the holy, which he regarded as an illusion. He worked to put dream interpretation on a scientific footing, transposing the religious dimension of dreams into a psychological reality. Dreams were taken to be disclosure of the denied part of the self particularly the self’s repressed desires.

Though he transposed dreams from religious to psychological realities, Freud nonetheless utilized a rabbinic-midrashic interpretive method, which involved a patient probing of multi-layered meanings and the inscrutable, enigmatic dimensions of life. Dreams, like ancient texts, require imaginative interpretation in order for us to receive what they disclose.

For all the modernity of Freud’s approach, it has important points of continuity with the perspective of the ancient texts. Dreams are recognized as disclosures of otherness, an otherness that may indeed open us to authentic reality and to a truth that lies beyond reason. For Freud, as with Joseph and Daniel, everything depends upon the blessed gift of interpretation. Dreamers like Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar often lack the imaginative powers needed for receiving disclosures about the hidden self and its repressed desires.

Freud invites us to the work of "archaeology,’ of uncovering the origins of the self in the unconscious, But Freud’s interpretation of dreams is also, as Paul Ricoeur understood, a practice of "teleology," of anticipating what the self may become. The teleological or, perhaps better, the eschatological dimension of a dream may lead to wise choices, like that of’ the wise men in Matthew, or to the choosing of an alternative future, as in the case of Jacob.

Another kind of dreamer, perhaps the greatest dreamer of the mid-2Oth century, is Martin Luther King Jr. His "I Have a Dream" speech of August 1963 represented a defiant political stance couched in religious rhetoric. It is important that the address was presented as a dream:

I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! . . . I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

Surely there is something in this speech that cannot be captured by political pragmatism or dismissed as a political stratagem. King’s dream was a gift of imagination from beyond the realm of political realism. And if we say "from beyond," then clearly it is something like a dream that carries a message from the holy. The substance of the dream is a world other than the one near at hand. There is indeed an otherness to the dream, for King is able to imagine a world that is radically discontinuous with the one we see around us. It is this imagined otherness to which the vulnerable and the oppressed appeal, an otherness to which the rulers of this age have no access and which they characteristically seek to critique or censor.

King’s dream was the product of study, of suffering and of long-term nurture in the black church. But perhaps it came to him in a moment in the night, like his kitchen experience as described by Taylor Branch:

King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table. He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength. Then he said as much out loud. He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, "I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone." As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away. He became intensely aware of what he called an "inner voice" telling him to do what he thought was right. Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything. It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life. . . . For King, the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience -- something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.

(Parting the Waters, 1988)

King’s dream, like every dream, is not simply the sign of a wish or projection but is the intrusion of God into a settled world. It has a holy intensity that reaches back into generations of suffering; it is a holy intrusion that reaches forward in sanity, continuing to generate a restless uneasiness with the way things are until the dream comes to fruition and a new world is enacted. The dream connects political possibility and religious authority in such a way as to be beyond critical argument or political control. That dream continues to reverberate and be generative among us because its cadences are not those of reasoned discourse but of an elusive piety, perhaps the favorite dialect of the biblical God.

Dream interpretation, so Jewish in its imaginative attentiveness, pertains to psychological matters and the reality of repression. But it is not limited to those concerns. Dreams concern larger realities and possible futures. There are many voices in the night, not all of them noble. Among them, however, is the voice of the holy God, who "plucks up and tears down" what we have trusted, who "plants and builds" what we cannot even imagine.

We do not forgo the use of reason; but we know in our own troubled context that our best reason has around it -- in, with and under it -- gifts of the "otherness" that make for newness. Our technological achievements require and permit us to learn again what the community of faith has known -- and trusted -- from the outset: there is something outside our controlled management of reality which must be heeded. Sometimes that something turns out to be a miracle of new life.

A Disaster of ‘Biblical’ Proportions?

Commentators in the media have often invoked the term biblical to describe the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, which has gone beyond our imagination and our explanatory categories. The term has not been used with any precision -- it seems to mean simply vast or awe-inspiring.

What would it mean to view the catastrophe in genuinely biblical terms? Four biblical themes inform my own pondering.

1. The prophetic tradition relentlessly insists that creation, governed by God, has a moral dimension. For that reason liberals and conservatives can variously identify moral failures that could be taken as commensurate with the disaster. The biblical prophets do not flinch from such a calculus. The text that most directly connects natural disaster and moral failure is in Jeremiah 4:22-26, in which the poet imagines a step-by-step dismantling of creation that correlates in detail with the step-by-step creation described in Genesis 1. The poet invites us to watch creation as it is assaulted by God; the social context of Jeremiah provides ample motivation for the debilitating rage of Yahweh.

Such a moral calculus is in the text and is thinkable in our present circumstance. Most of us with any pastoral imagination, however, would not pursue this line of interpretation, if for no other reason than that the victims are not the perpetrators that one might identify. Such a view reflects a more crass supernaturalism than we readily entertain.

2. A second more compelling prophetic option entertains the notion that Yahweh the Creator is at work in the world, but has not yet fully defeated the primordial powers of chaos that are still at work in and against creation. This biblical view works against an easy assertion of divine omnipotence. The text, along with lived reality, makes it credible to see that chaos is on the loose, pushing against the boundaries of creation. The storm, in this view exhibits Yahweh’s mysterious impotence (neglect?) that is not unlike the impotence of God before deathly powers on that one Friday afternoon.

This view, not greatly developed in scripture, is evident in Isaiah 51:9-11. The poet, on behalf of Israel, summons God to be at work against "the dragon," who in this text is experienced as debilitating dislocation (exile). The imagery is not remote from present dislocation of body and heart in the current onslaught of cosmic negation. One can see in the storm the power of the negation of life that God, in this instant, is unable to restrain.

3. But the Bible will not for long ponder Yahweh’s impotence. The Bible prefers to claim that God’s power is beyond our normal calculus, so explanation is a futile enterprise. That surely is the claim of the speeches of God in the whirlwind in the book of Job. The human poser of theological questions has, in the end, no standing whereby God may be queried (Job 38:16-17, 25-27). Job, like every pondering theologian, is reduced to silence.

That mystery of God, moreover, is designed to exhibit the fiercer, unfettered power of God. Thus Psalm 29 can articulate the sweep of a divine storm that is without explanation on and certainly without moral dimension (vv. 7-9a). Those who watched the storm can only join in doxology: "How great thou art!" The storm and the subsequent song have the effect of situating human wonderment and human imagining before a mystery that may be purposeful but in human horizon is so raw as to defy purposeful explanation.

4. Our inclination, however, is to move beyond any prophetic moral dimension, beyond the naming of chaos and beyond doxology to a more pastoral affirmation. Here again we may turn to a psalm, in this case Psalm 104, which voices the wonder of creation in a more benign, life-giving mode. The psalm also ponders the untamed sea (chaos) but now asserts that Yahweh has indeed tamed it. Yahweh has not only tamed it, but has reduced it to a plaything; chaos is now a source of enjoyment for Yahweh and constitutes no threat to creator or creation (w. 25-26).

The very next verses of the psalm, moreover, go on to assert that Yahweh has made creation a reliable food-supplying system for all creatures (vv. 27-28). Thus creation is now completely protected from the threat of chaos and is able to fulfill its mandate of "fruitfulness." The end of the storm by the rule of God is an assurance of food and sustenance in an ordered world. Israel is unafraid and not under threat! But by verse 35, the psalm returns to Israel’s inescapable moral dimension, thus echoing the injunction and warning of Jeremiah. Creation is, even when made safe, joyous and fruitful by Yahweh, a domain of righteous, caring, covenantal behavior.

There is no one teaching on this subject in the Bible. Taking a biblical view of a natural disaster means:

• attending to a dimension of moral judgment.

• noticing where the power of chaos continues untamed,

• accepting that such a wave of destruction may be an exhibit of God’s greatness, and

• trusting that God prevails over chaos in order to sustain life and keep it safe.

When we have such texts in hand, the remainder of the work is imaginative, faithful interpretation.

Conversations Among Exiles

Our society is marked by a deep dislocation that touches every aspect of our lives. The old certitudes seem less certain; the old privileges are under powerful challenge; the old dominations are increasingly ineffective and fragile; the established governmental, educational, judicial and medical institutions seem less and less able to deliver what we need and have come to expect; the old social fabrics are fraying under the assault of selfishness, fear, anger and greed.

There seems no going back to our former world, since the circumstances making that world sustainable have changed. Because the church has been intimately connected with the old patterns of certitude, privilege and domination, it shares a common jeopardy with other old institutions. Church members are confused about authority, bewildered about mission, worried about finances, contentious about norms and ethics, and anxious about the church’s survival.

Our numbed and bewildered society lacks ways of thinking and speaking that can help us find remedies—that can enable us to go deep into the crisis and so avoid denial, and to imagine a better future and so avoid despair. But when the church is faithful to its own past life with God, it has ways of speaking, knowing and imagining that can successfully address our cultural malaise. When it remembers its ancient miracles, has the courage to speak in its own cadences, and re-engages old seasons of hurt, the church possesses the rhetorical and testimonial antidotes to denial and despair.

When thinking about dislocation, an Old Testament teacher moves by "dynamic analogy" to the exile, the determining and defining event of the Hebrew scriptures. By its stubbornness, its refusal to heed the purposes of Yahweh and its resolve to act against neighborliness, Israel brought upon itself the great crisis of 587 B.C.E. In that year Jerusalem was burned and its temple destroyed, the king was exiled, the leading citizens were deported and public life ended. For ancient Israel, it was the end of privilege, certitude, domination, viable public institutions and a sustaining social fabric. It was the end of life with God, which Israel had taken for granted. In that wrenching time, ancient Israel faced the temptation of denial—the pretense that there had been no loss—and it faced the temptation of despair—the inability to see any way out.

The Old Testament stories of exile might be a resource, perhaps the only resource, to move us from denial and despair to possibility. Ancient Israel understood that unless loss is examined and understood, newness will not come. The traditions of exile suggest four ways of speech and of faithful imagination that the church can practice and offer as antidotes to denial and despair.

The ancient community of exiles learned, first of all, to express sadness, rage, anger and loss honestly. The Israelites lost nearly everything when they lost Jerusalem. Similarly, the current loss of old patterns of hegemony that gave privilege to whites and males and their various entourages seems immense. The enormous rage that accompanies such a loss shows up in family abuse, in absurd armament programs and budgets, in abusive prison policies, in a passion for capital punishment and in assaults upon the poor in the name of "reform."

From Israel the church can learn a better way to deal with grief and rage. It can learn to address these emotions to God, for it is God who is terminating our unjust privilege and deceptive certitude. Ancient Israel broke the pattern of denial by engaging in speeches of complaint and lamentation that dared to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety, how deep the consequent fear. Lamentations expresses the sadness of this experience by describing a bereft Jerusalem: "She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her" (1:2).

Psalm 137 expresses the rage generated by loss: "Happy shall they be who take your little ones / and dash them against hate rocks!" Psalm 79 gives voice to an indignation that tilts toward a desire for vengeance: "We have become a taunt to our neighbors, / mocked and derided by those around us.... / Return sevenfold into the bosom of our neighbors / the taunts with which they taunt us."

The poet dares to echo ancient Lamech with his unrestrained thirst for vengeance, 70 times seven. The bitterness directed in our society against humanists, Muslims, homosexuals, communists and so forth is in the Old Testament addressed to the God from whom no secret can be kept. Such cathartic utterances are also an honest and courageous practice of prayer. They offer an opportunity for turning brutalizing loss into an act of faith that may in turn issue into positive energy. These speech practices give us a way to vent our rage at loss without letting it escalate into actions that will hurt our neighbors.

Ancient Israel also models for us the disciplines of order and holiness. At the time of the exile, some people believed that life in Jerusalem had been trivialized and emptied of meaning. All parts of life, including God, self and neighbor, had been reduced to managed "things." The sacramental voice of the priests (identified in scholarship as "the priestly tradition")—a kind of language markedly absent in our shrill moralisms—insists that when old patterns of meaning are destroyed, one may find refuge in liturgic construals of ordered holiness. People like us shy away from holiness, worried about ostentatiousness or self-righteous punctiliousness. But in that urgent situation, the priests did not flinch. Without embarrassment, they proclaimed God’s call: "I am the Lord your God; sanctify yourselves therefore and be holy. You shall not defile yourselves. ... You shall be holy for I am holy" (Lev. 11:44-45).

In response to the crisis of displacement, the Book of Leviticus advocates stringent notions of holiness. We would not wish to follow all these concrete instructions about how to maintain purity and shun defilement. But what is important is that these displaced people for whom almost everything was out of control set out to reorder and recover life through an intentional resolve about communion with God. They understood that life in faith is not happenstance or accident. It does not come about automatically. It requires attentiveness. Leviticus urges concrete bodily ways of intentionally directing life toward the holiness of God, a holiness that comforts even as it demands. This holiness—without which we cannot live—is not available upon request but arises in and through practices that invite God to come dwell among us. Indeed, according to the priestly tradition, the community must prepare a suitable habitat for God’s presence.

In times of dislocation the temptation is to become self-preoccupied and self-indulgent. But the priestly sacramental tradition knows that even deep dislocation cannot empty life of the mystery of God, a mystery that requires us to engage in concrete action and sustained thought. The reduction of life to having and possessing and to trivial entertainment is a sign and measure of our deathly alternative to holiness. Indeed, the prophet Amos warns that such indulgences will eventually drive Israel from the land and drive Yahweh from Israel.

The book of Leviticus pursues the theme of disciplined holiness as it pertains to daily life. The creation poem of Genesis l:1-2:4a presents the same theme on a larger scale. This exilic liturgy affirms the goodness of an ordered world under God’s governing blessing. Indeed, it is a counterliturgy, because it affirms a kind of life remote from the reality of these displaced people. In their worship, the Israelites would not give in to their circumstances. Their characterization of the world as God’s creation is marked by the reiterated verdict, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." And it affirms that "God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all work."

The beginning point for the holiness that recovers and reorders life is indeed sabbath. This holy time should be marked neither by legalism and "blue laws" nor by frantic, feverish, self-indulgent entertainment. The priests envision a restfulness that makes neighborly communication possible. Sacramentalism is a cogent alternative to despair, an awareness that even here and now we are in God’s demanding and assuring presence.

From Israel we can also learn the importance of striving to establish a sense of community. The Book of Deuteronomy, a primary document for exiles, became pivotal for the formation of Judaism. Dislocation carries with it a temptation to be preoccupied with self, to flee the hard task of community formation for the sake of private well-being. This is all too evident in our own society, where public responsibility is on the wane and the most privileged desperately work to improve their private estate. We can see this self-preoccupied individualism in the greed that our society calls "opportunity," in the demise of public health care because it is "too costly," and in the decay of public institutions regarded as too expensive to maintain, as though taxation were a penalty rather than a necessary neighborly act.

The Deuteronomic tradition presents society as a neighborhood and enjoins attitudes and policies that enhance neighborliness. Deuteronomy insists that economic life must be organized to ensure the well-being of widows, orphans and immigrants. This response to dislocation insists that maintaining a public economy of compassion and justice is a way to move beyond despair. "You shall not deprive a resident alien or an orphan of justice. You shall not take a widow’s garment in pledge. Remember you were a slave in Egypt ...," Deuteronomy commands. A society that cannot be generous to those in need will not be blessed. The book instructs, "Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts.... Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You shall rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be."

This is perhaps the most astonishing command in the Bible. It was the practice in that ancient world, as it is now, that anyone who owed money to another had to work it off. The more owed, the more work required. And if one owed enough, one might eventually belong to the "company store." But ancient Israel set a limit to such debt-related work, in order to prevent the formation of a permanent underclass. No matter how great the debt, it was to be worked off for six years and no longer. Then whatever debt remained was canceled. Deuteronomy makes clear that economic practice is a form of neighborliness and that economic provision must be adjusted to sustain community.

Times of dislocation are particularly apt to foster a permanent underclass. Nervous and anxious people may be tempted to gouge their economically vulnerable neighbors. But the Bible presents dislocation as a motivation for building a more just society. The laws of public life might be very different if all remained aware of their own vulnerability.

Finally, we can learn from the Old Testament to proclaim the God who creates new social possibilities beyond the shrunken horizons of defeat and submissive docility. The exiles in Babylon faced an empire that seemed to circumscribe and dictate everything, just as the military-industrial complex seems to circumscribe our lives. Ancient Israel came within a whisker of being able to imagine its future only in the terms permitted and sanctioned by Babylon. Into this scene stepped the prophet Isaiah, the most vigorous, daring and imaginative of all the voices of faith during the exile.

In the midst of the suffering and despair of his people, Isaiah offered a radical new possibility. He dared to say defiantly, in the face of imperial power, "Your God reigns." The God who is here proclaimed anew announces comfort and asserts that the time of suffering is ending. Isaiah invites his community to return home: "Depart, depart.. . go out from the midst of it" (52:11) You shall go out in joy, /you shall be led back in peace" (55:12).

The return from exile may indeed be geographical. But first the movement is emotional, liturgical and imaginative; it requires forming a vision of the future free of the fearful dreams of entrenched power. It demands that we imaginatively free ourselves from the powers that have kept us in thrall, perhaps to a complacent orthodoxy, perhaps to excessive self-protection and self-assurance, perhaps to the fraudulent comforts of imperial finance and weaponry. One can almost sense in Isaiah’s daring poetry the dancing lightness of a small child, countering the weary soberness of jaded adults who have held the world too long in one position. The return from exile begins with an emotional act of civil disobedience.

Frederick Buechner, in his recent book Longing for Home, writes: "We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home that beckons us." But, he adds, "woe to us if we forget the homeless ones who have no vote, no power, nobody to lobby for them, who might as well have no faces. Woe to us if we forget our own homelessness. To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intrinsically interwoven that there can be no peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us." It is the same message Isaiah eloquently proclaimed in the sixth century when he invited the exiles home.

Most refused the offer. Most stayed with the empire which seemed to have all the goodies. A few took the chance. They are the ones who have kept faith and the possibility of a new future alive for us.

In our time of dislocation the church can offer ways of speaking and acting that the dominant society regards as subversive, but without which we cannot for long stay human. It can express sadness, rage and loss as an alternative to the denial that inevitably breeds brutality. It can be a voice of holiness that counters the trivial commodity-centered world by the practice of disciplines that make communion possible. It can be a voice of imaginative, neighborly transformation, focused on those in need. And it can express new social possibilities, rooted in the truth of God’s good news. Before us is the choice between succumbing to a fearful self-preoccupation that shrivels the spirit or heeding God’s call to re-enter the pain of the world and the possibility of renewal and salvation.

Truth-Telling and Peacemaking: A Reflection on Ezekiel

The government in ancient Jerusalem was busy doing the things governments do: deploying ambassadors, developing new weapons systems, designing new technologies, dealing with cost overruns, securing more funding, levying taxes and holding press conferences. It was busy pursuing the things that would bring security (or the impression of it): power, money, technology. But the more it worked on security and defense, the more precarious public life became. The government held press conferences to give assurances. It engaged in maneuvers and war games. It showed the flag and reiterated the slogans, and received innocent applause. All of these activities, however, had an increasingly empty ring.

While its leaders made the war effort, ancient Jerusalem staggered toward death, invaded by the empire, occupied by armies and eventually leveled, spent in self-deception and self-destruction. All the technology, power, money and deployment had not brought safety and peace. Most of the people in Jerusalem had not noticed the gathering dark-ness, the ominous violence, the fearful emptiness, the growing brutality that prepared the way for death.

Some, however, had noticed-a very few. They were regarded as cranks. There was Jeremiah, who reprimanded and spoke out of his dismay. There was Ezekiel, who had fantasies and hallucinations. Call them prophets. They were hostile and abrasive. Their speeches were unwelcome. But they noticed what no one else noticed. That is their significance. That is why we preserve their words - they were the only ones who saw death coming.

Ezekiel, the one who hallucinated, did not challenge the common notion that you need technology, muscle and power for security. He never even commented on that assumption. He did not think efforts at defense and security were important, but he did not argue about it. When he saw death coming, he interrupted the planning and deployment with a different agenda. You cannot have peace if you lie to each other, he said. You cannot have well-being if you do not speak the truth to each other. All the weapons in the world will not save you from your lies.

Ezekiel did not blame the king, the government, the military or the war planners for this terrible death to come. He blamed the religious community, the clergy, the prophets: "My hands will be against the prophets who see delusive visions and give lying messages" (13:9). Ezekiel blamed the religious community because that community is responsible for truth-telling.

But the prophets had failed; instead of telling the truth, they deceived and distorted: "When the people build a wall" (the wall of the city; Wall Street; walls of finance, defense, security and privilege; walls that divide and protect; walls that include and exclude; walls of policy which are highly doubtful in their social implications and in their theological presuppositions), "the prophets paint those walls with whitewash. " They cover over the reality with high-sounding and soothing phrases, so that social experience looks good even though it is a wall of brutality, exploitation and abuse. They mislead the people, saying "peace" when there is no peace (v. 10). They call war "peace," and self-interest 6 generosity, " and greed "opportunity," and brutality "national interest," and exploitation "the free-market. "

It is no wonder that the government and the corporate leadership have lost their way. They have lost their way into the madness because the religious community has engaged in a terrible whitewash of deception-romantic whitewash among liberals, legalistic whitewash among conservatives.

Such lies, said Ezekiel, will lead to death. There will be a deluge of rain and hail and wind (v. 11). It will break the wall of policy, deception, brutality, indifference and cynicism. There will be a great destruction, and the cowardly religionists must answer for their failure.

This is the scene in Jerusalem. The political leadership is focused on power and. technology. The religious community-priests, prophets, laypeople - lives in the midst of the power and technology and wealth - which is where the religious community always must live, because it is precisely this community in the midst of power that knows that truth-telling is the condition for peace. Without truth, no peace. Without truthtelling, no peacemaking.

We also know that truth-telling is dangerous and costly. We do not like to hear or speak the truth, so we tone it down and cover it over. We mouth pleasant slogans which please and seduce and deny. We say, "God loves us,""World without end," "Saved by grace." All the while, however, we know about truth and peace. We know we are the ones who must speak. And when we speak the truth, the whole civil community, even with its enormous power, has a possibility of peace.

What would we say if we spoke the truth that gives peace and makes freedom? For us the truth is not advice on foreign policy, not strategy for how to prevail in Nicaragua, not arguments about taxes, all of which are important issues. Rather, what is needed in Indianapolis and Atlanta and everywhere today, like what was needed in ancient Jerusalem, lies deep underneath such issues: the truth about human hurt and human hope.

A conversation on these topics is lost in our society, lost because hurt is so repugnant that we would rather not notice it. The conversation is lost because hope is so unlikely, so unsettling and so embarrassing that we would rather not risk it. But when we do not notice and do not risk, we lose the chance for peace. Ezekiel warned about lies which prevent peace. Our lies which block peace are about hurt, which is real, and about hope, which we find too demanding.

The church is a conversation about human hurt: "Your hurt is incurable, and your wound is grievous. There is...no medicine for your wound, no healing for you" (Jer. 30:12-13). The deep hurt in the body politic and in our bodies, the wounds of not caring and not being cared for, of not belonging, of being unrelated and unconnected, are wounds endemic to our social situation. We cover up the alienation we all feel and the angry fear that is strong among us. The circle of concealed hurt grows wider. It touches our young, so fearfully driven to success and security, so tempted to disengagement. When we reach out to the hurt we touch homelessness as well as unopened homes, unshared food and hard, tired hearts. Those hearts authorize policies of cynicism all around us. We countenance cries of vengeance, policies of brutality, thirst for capital punishment, police terror, and slogans to justify our advantage. We prattle about "standard of living," and we fail to notice the deep links between cynical policies, extravagant living, and failed human lives.

Of course, our continued self-deception is a whitewash. The homeless are like us, the brutalized are children, the bayonets kill parents. We translate acts into great public jargon so as to ignore the torn flesh, violated bodies and enraged spirits of real humans. There is, we know in our sanity, an anguished connection between our vacuous homes and homelessness, between our fearful craving for repression and the violence so close to policy. We whitewash so that we need not notice the savaged minds, hearts and bodies, treasured only by God. As the truthtelling stops, we become more brutal. The conversation stops because we dare not speak. We do not know what to say. It is all too unutterable.

Alternatively, the church is a conversation of human hope:

For a brief moment I forsook you but with great compassion I will gather you. In overwhelming wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you... For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. (Is. 54:7-101).

We have grown sober and grim. We believe with the beer commercial that "it doesn't get any better. " We suspect that there are no new gifts because we do not believe in a God who can override the ways things are. The problems that beset us are almost all insoluble. The world is full of scarcity and we must scramble to get and hold onto our share. We become fearful and defensive, and if need be brutal. There is little talk among us about the lame walking, the hungry fed, the lepers cleansed, the dead raised. There is no caring embrace of resurrection or new life, no remembrance that God can act beyond our imagining for the sake of human well-being. Our ears are empty of the daring cadence of "I have a dream," for we have only nightmares. We have so little hope in a God who promises, and who walks in the ruins to raise a new world-such talk sounds too awkward or has been captured by a religious cheapness-that we grow silent.

The news is that the lies of the whitewash need not continue. It is not true that human hurt must be endless and that brutality must continue forever in our silence. It is not true that human hope must be stifled and suffocated by our frustrated cynicism. These are not truths but old habits, rooted in unfaith. We lie because we have forgotten how to believe.

The truth is that hurt hurts badly, and all our hurts are held in community. When one member suffers, all suffer together. The truth is that hope is open and the world is not closed. The world is indeed fatigued waiting for governments and armies to devise peace. The truth is, peace cannot be devised. it can only be permitted where the truth is told about hurt and hope.

What would happen if all of us in the church resolved to undertake truth-telling about the fabric of human caring authorized by God, caring which undercuts and overrides all our usual postures? What would happen if we were to speak of the possibility of homes and food and access to health care, and of valued elders, and cherished children come home? Of orphans claimed, barriers removed, land reformed, and mortgages canceled and slaves liberated? Of rivers cleansed, and mountains dancing and trees hushed in wonder? Of acts of risky generosity, of people giving extravagantly, keeping only what is necessary - and of watching God’s newness well up from this human gesture?

The world need not stay as it has become. The change we wish for depends on truth-telling of a quite local kind which becomes as contagious as it is subversive.

Ezekiel watched over Jerusalem. He watched as his people slowly, painfully began to notice. He watched the lying stop and then he saw the hating, the killing and the fearing stop. That old brutal world was finally overcome. Then the prophet noticed a new reality from God, made possible because the lying stopped. He heard God say what God had refused to say for the long season of lying: I will make with them a covenant of peace ... I will send down the showers in their season. . . . The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase, and they shall be secure in the land; they shall know that I am the Lord when I break the bars of their yoke, and deliver them from the hand of those who enslaved them. They shall no more be a prey to the nations, nor shall the beasts of the land devour them; they shall dwell securely, and none shall make them afraid. And I will provide for them prosperous plantations so that they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land. . . . They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they ... are my people, says the Lord God 134:25-30].

God promises peacemaking. That peacemaking by God only happens, however, when there is truth-telling - costly, urgent and subversive. That is the work of the church. The issue, since Ezekiel, is clear: When we lie, we die. When we speak truthfully about human reality, God sends us peace.

Wellhausen Goes to Yale

Who, or what, is this Jahwist? Out of what bottle was he released, by whom and for what purpose? Why has he left the arid climes of historical readings of the Bible--a different kind of bottle--to emerge into fuller prominence as a Kafka-cool "J"? What sorts of wishes has he granted in the past, and what does he–or she–now promise?

These questions receive a fresh and provocative answer in The Book of J, by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, and David Rosenberg. By arguing that the Bible's first "author" was a woman, Bloom has breathed a kind of new life into the dusty old Yahwist, that hybrid creation of rationalism, historicism and romanticism usually associated with the name of Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).

Because historical analysis of the Bible now possesses its own venerable history, one must speak of the History of the Jahwist (or Jehovist, Yahwist, "J" or other such neologisms of modernity). That history is rich and variegated, even as it is probably obscure to the general reader.

For the 17th-century Roman Catholic Richard Simon, the Jahwist was simply proof of the Bible's inner inconsistency; because he existed along with other "authors," disagreeing and diverging superintending hand of church tradition was vindicated. For Spinoza and emerging critical Protestants, the Jahwist was one of several successive phases of better–or worse–history writing to be detected below the surface of the biblical narrative. In this critical view, J's contribution was vastly overshadowed by the Priestly writer (called the Elohist because of his preference for the generic term for God, "Elohim"), whose foundational document preceded the Jehovist's by centuries and provided the scaffolding on which the intriguing but minor contribution of J was hung. It was the further division of this Priestly source into an early and late Elohist, together with mounting evidence for the late date of the legislative core of P, that brought about a shift in the controlling critical consensus.

The major beneficiary of this shift was the Yahwist. Freed from the stifling "anxiety of influence" (a Bloomian concept) of his parent P (as well as the Deuteronomist, source "D"), the Yahwist suddenly burst into prominence as the first original, not a second or third derivative source. In step with the rich themes of Genesis itself, the younger brother swiped the blessing intended for the older and proceeded to show forth his superiority in a manner that would have made even the young Joseph wince.

In Wellhausen's reconstruction, the venerable old Elohist turned out to be a dolt: repetitious, obsessed with genealogy and legal minutia, lacking narrative "voice," and worst of all for Protestants, a priest. His usefulness as an historical source (the governing concern of the period) was judged to be nonexistent; worse still was his studied disingenuousness as a writer of history. Wellhausen, who is rightly credited with recognizing in the Yahwist a budding historical ingenue, spoke of the Priestly writer as a deceiver, as one who sought to disguise his true historical distance from the matters he was reporting in order to trick his leaders into thinking they had before them accurate historical records. On this score the Yahwist is more honest, and it is just such honesty that demonstrates the true originality and naive genius of the first "uninfluenced" source.

Where Wellhausen left off, Bloom has picked up–only dismissively sensitive to the fact that a century of scholarship has passed since Wellhausen did his work, picking and choosing from the intervening period as he sees fit. Bloom acknowledges himself as a lineal descendant at one juncture. He is able on the one hand to condemn Wellhausianism as anti-Semitic Hegelian idealism, while confidently asserting on the other his finesse at skimming off the true Yahwist from all the anti-Semitic underpinning. The result is, not surprisingly, a curious form of 20th-century American idealism, but with a chic twist: now we have a cultured, urbane Yahwist, Master of Irony, secularist sophisticate (one is reminded of Albert Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus–the Yahwist lives in New Haven!). And to top it off, the Yahwist is a woman. Wellhausen rediviva.

Whether Bloom's project finally escapes the charge of anti-Semitism is difficult to judge, and is probably not for a Christian reviewer to say. It does remind me of a public lecture in which Harvard biblical scholar Jon Levenson, who is Jewish, once defined anti-Semitism as "hating Jews more than is necessary", obviously the kind of remark whose success as comedy turns on the context in which it is spoken and the one who speaks it. Many defended Wellhausen against charges of anti-Semitism by correctly pointing out that he was evenhanded in his negative judgments: his hostility was directed at all forms of orthodoxy, as he defined these. Thus he followed up his penetrating analysis of Judaism and the Old Testament with similar studies of Christianity and Islam, the New Testament and the Koran. By this logic Bloom would also have to be judged innocent of charges of anti-Semitism because of the evenhanded character of his assault on orthodoxy and piety, whether Jewish, Christian or otherwise.

Yet this is a very new form of hostility, modern and quite sophisticated. It had become a commonplace, in the spirit of German idealism, to give privileged status to the reconstructed "original" and to view later developments as diversions from the pure, the objective, the reportially close, the historical. Hence the higher regard for J than for P.

One clear sign of progress in the study of the Pentateuch since Wellhausen's time is the refusal to follow this sort of idealistic logic, with all its attendant reductionism. Later "sources" began to be appreciated for what they were, in no small part because it was seen that the Yahwist was not an author in the modern sense of the term, but one "under the influence" of traditions handed down to him. Form criticism cut its teeth on just this kind of observation. Even Gerhard von Rad, who held the Yahwist in highest esteem, still regarded his genius as having to do with providing a conceptual framework into which diverse, pre-existent traditions could be placed, once these had been loosed from their prior social settings. The Yahwist was not the composer of the material with which he worked, and what skill he possessed as an author it could be said the Priestly writer and the Deuteronomist possessed as well. These creative endowments came as a result of historical and social factors, unique theological insight and literary and editorial skill. In the past two decades of biblical studies, whether in the work of Samuel Sandmel, Brevard Childs, Robert Alter, Rolf Rendtorff, Earhard Blum or even John Van Seters–and these are only a handful among many others–the interest has shifted away from discrete, historically unfolding "sources" toward an appreciation of the internal relationships of diverse traditions in their final canonical (received) form.

With Bloom's "J" we are whisked backwards a full century and with an intensity that would have taken Wellhausen's breath away. Even the format of the book is straight out of the 19th century. We have a preface where the "facts" and matters of terminology are set forth. This is followed by a Chronology Chart where all the proper dates are set out: J, the E revision, the notorious P text, the Redactor, Canonization, and so forth. In the preface we learn that the "Christian Bible" is a "very severe revision" of the "Bible of the Jews"; that the New Testament regards the Old Covenant as "superseded"; that the proper term for the New Testament is the Belated Testament (since what is earlier is Best, the Hebrew Scriptures are the Original Testament); that Jesus was confessed as Messiah by Christians (were Jesus and the Twelve not Jews?), and other matters of theological significance we need to be straightened out about–all before Bloom introduces a secular Yahwist and insists that he himself is not interested in theological matters. We also learn in this preface that verse divisions in the Bible are "purely arbitrary" and "do not reflect the intentions of the original authors" (whoever they are) and that scholars agree that the "Book of J" is "the oldest strand in the Pentateuch." It reminds me of a famous boxing trainer who introduced his remarks to the press by saying, "I don't want to tell you any half-truths unless they are completely accurate."

The disturbing superficiality of the discussion here and at other points gives the book a kind of "sound-bite" quality, like a half-hour TV program on how to perform brain surgery. Popularizations often have this effect, but Bloom is a major figure and a serious literary critic (jacket-cover blurbs rightly identify him as "America's pre-eminent literary critic" and "the critic of our time"), so in trying to comprehend the level of the argument I found myself opting at times for disingenuousness, bombast or simple ignorance of the field of biblical studies. Biblical scholars have been and will continue to be chided for taking issue with Bloom about this book, both by him and by those who read negative remarks as scholarly jealousy. But for the first time I understood why the psychoanalytical guild was so upset by Jeffrey Mason's

tweaking of them several years ago. He knew just enough to expose certain weaknesses, but not enough to convey honestly the true level of complexity that surrounds issues of psychoanalytical discussion. Bloom has taken a concept used by biblical scholars and popularized it. He may very well regard this as a despoiling of the Egyptians, but the Egyptians have every right to wish him banished and to question what kind of new golden calf is being made out of their jewelry.

The heart of the book is Bloom's introduction and commentary notes, which precede and follow an innovative translation of "The Book of J"; there one sees how devoted Bloom is to the notion of Original and Belated. Running sotto voce throughout his exposition is the cry: they have mishandled and misunderstood the uninfluenced Yahwist, Master of Irony, secular creator of a secular Yahweh. When it comes to judging the weak efforts of all who follow the great J, Wellhausen's diatribe cannot compare with that of Bloom, who speaks of "the long, sad enterprise of revising, censoring, and mutilating J"; where Alter, talks of "composite artistry" in describing the juxtaposition of J and P in the opening chapters of Genesis, Bloom sees deliberate replacement, correction and supersession due to the "revisionary labors" of pious morons. "Exuberant varnish" frequently "discolors" the victimized Yahwist. No wonder feminists have been reluctant to feel rewarded by Bloom's designation of J as a woman (such as it is: "my personal fiction"–no sooner is the ink dry on her Book of J than she is attacked and mutilated by every soul drawing a pious or orthodox breath. The final assault comes from the Redactor (better, the Terminator) who is "a formidable fellow" and "the villain of this link."

It is not just that J has been insufficiently appreciated for her literary talents or even her femininity. Since the publication of J, Bloom has stated that he wished less attention would be paid to J's gender and more to her skills as a secularist. This is what all the "exuberant varnish" of the Bible hides: that "J did not think in terms of sacred texts"; that "J is not a religious writer"; that "Yahweh of the Yahwist has very little to do with the God of Ezra or the God of Akiba"; that "J neither loved nor feared Yahweh"; and that "Yahweh is less mature and sophisticated than the aristocratic ironist J." Not surprisingly, this kind of thinking would have proven difficult for those who actually believed not only that YHWH was their God but that YHWH was God, and not a trope, "the work of men's [sic] hands."

The idea is so outrageous that one wonders if Bloom is serious. It may be that he is too busy clothing J in his dress of many colors to have asked the obvious question: was it really possible to write secular literature about God in antiquity? Is this in any way a meaningful genre? That "secular" literature might have meant something to someone in Solomon's court has been argued from time to time about certain proverbs and wisdom texts, but not about texts where God is the main actor in the story–and certainly not in the manner of Bloom, where J suddenly sounds like a skeptical college professor who is much more "mature and sophisticated" than the believers in his midst and their God.

Certain very basic historical and sociological questions come to mind: Who was Israel worshiping in temple and shrine before YHWH was conceived in the mind of J? Why would later pious souls have bothered to preserve this "rather annoying if colorful remnant of weird anecdotes" or see the portrait of YHWH as a faithful rendering of their God? These sorts of questions are the stock and trade of critical method–or they were before 1950–but because Bloom plays so loose with biblical scholarship it is not surprising that this deja vu experience is lost on him.

But to take him on his own terms, what would it have meant–politically, religiously, morally–for any Israelite to "neither love nor fear YHWH and to write a book where this is the main theme? We are apparently to feel that Bloom has done J a high honor by comparing her literary skills to those of Shakespeare (a cursory reading of the translation hardly bears this judgment out). But this is an odd sort of praise since it comes at the cost of dismissing the very thing which gives this "literature" its heart, something even Wellhausen did not fail to recognize: its serious portrayal of a God who stands over and goes before its "author." In praising the unique skills of its secular author, Bloom has demoted the author's chief subject matter to the lowliest estate, "less mature and sophisticated than the aristocratic ironist J." It is an odd day when the Bible is commended as a readable classic–on par with Shakespeare!–yet its depiction of God, hidden under pious varnish, is reduced to "extravagant strangeness" and "a raging Yahweh out of control even by himself."

So thorough is Bloom's draining of any religious sentiment in J that one might rightly call this book a manifesto. One summary statement among many serves as representative:

To read the Book of J, we need to begin by scrubbing away the varnish that keeps us from seeing that the Redactor and previous revisionists could not obliterate the original work of the J writer. That varnish is called by many names: belief, scholarship, history, literary criticism, what have you. If these names move or describe you, why read the Iliad, or the Commedia, or Macbeth, or Paradise Lost? The difference is that those works have not been revised into creeds and churches, with a palimpsestic overlay of orthodox texts obscuring what was there to be revised. Recovering J will not throw new light on Torah or on the Hebrew Bible or on the Bible of Christianity. I do not think that appreciating J will help us love God or arrive at the spiritual or historical truth of whatever Bible. I want the varnish off because it conceals a writer of the eminence of Shakespeare or Dante, and such a writer is worth more than many creeds, many churches, many scholarly certainties.

This is Wellhausianism with a vengeance. It escapes the charge of anti-Semitism or anti-Christianity only by dint of being thoroughly modern and consistent with the view that religious beliefs are not constitutive of, but only negotiable bits and pieces of, community identity. One is apparently to regard the lavish praise of the author J as an acceptable substitute for praise of God, without bothering to consider what the fictional "J writer" might have thought of such a distinction. Or how would Shakespeare have reacted to the commendation that the Bible–though only parts of it–is as good as himself? My guess is he would have regarded it as blasphemous, but then again the term is largely without content in the modern intellectual West, and would be altogether nonsensical for anyone who speculates that "J did not think in terms of sacred texts."

It would be difficult to take up the details of Bloom's historical and sociological reconstruction of the J writer, such as it is, and evaluate it according to some recognized canon of historiography. Just about the time one gets ready to seize upon an interesting detail, for good or ill, Bloom makes reference to the detail as "my fiction." It is not clear to me what genre of writing this is. On other occasions Bloom has spoken of "misreading"; perhaps this is "miswriting." One takes historical stands (J is a woman; she is of the royal house and not a scribe of Rehoboam; she makes this or that wordplay) but then describes these as personal fictions and states with conviction, "I am not a biblical scholar."

One thing is clear, this sort of subtlety is not the stuff of marketing and advertising; even if Bloom would not have it so, the big selling feature of this book is that the Yahwist is a woman, not that a female J writer is Bloom's personal fiction (again one could raise a feminist objection to this sort of proprietary remark). Robert Coote recently wrote a book on the Yahwist, whom he regards as the Bible's First Historian. Perhaps he should have spoken of the Yahwist as a woman as well as the First Historian, if only as a "personal fiction." But then this reveals the difference between Bloom's approach and a more strictly historical sort that is amenable to review and evaluation.

It is also not clear how one is to evaluate the translation of David Rosenberg. My second-year Hebrew class was often just puzzled, as was I, in comparing portions of the translation with the Hebrew text. It is an interesting translation, unlike anything I have read in Hebrew or English, Yahweh says, "It is no good the man be alone," and I struggle to hear foreshadowings of Shakespeare, though Tarzan does come to mind. But the chief problem is that we are not told how Rosenberg is proceeding; there is no annotation or discussion of specific renderings into English. I would have appreciated an explanation of his translation at numerous points, but instead we have only a brief appendix where terms like "tonal nuance" and "near-rhyming texture of sound" are used. A separate review would have to be devoted to Rosenberg's English text. For the actual reconstruction of J–a problem under hot dispute today–Rosenberg relied on "the standard authorities in the field, as refined most recently by Martin Noth and superseded by the insights of Harold Bloom." So much for the dangers of supersession. I'm glad the "standard authorities" in the field finally agree on something, though this comes as news to me.

Biblical studies stand at a crucial juncture. Many feel the inclusion of new critical tools from literature departments represents a healthy enrichment of traditional historical method, if not a suitable replacement for such method. One sees in Bloom's The Book of J that discrimination is required, just as it was required in historical analysis, if the Bible is not to lose its theological voice in the name of secular worship of an author or an aesthetic ideal. Bloom's concern for "imagining an author" is important, however, in a day when the Bible seems ransomed to this or that reconstruction of primary and secondary levels of the text, to be understood and heard only in this or that historical context. In the pre-Enlightenment period, a notion like "Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch" did not function so much to invite inquiry into the mind, circumstances and psychology of Moses as it did to unite the literature under a single coordinating point of view, urging the reader to see a synthetic purpose within even the most heterogeneous and diverse collection of traditions.

One might ask in the modern period how the Pentateuch, in contrast to the Prophets, is able to function without an authorial fiction, and yet as a fivefold collection. What does it mean that the "titles" of these books are simply the first lines with which they begin ("In the beginning"; "These are the names")? What did a reader in antiquity expect from "literature" with respect to authorship? What does it mean for certain circles to call Moses the author and yet at the same time regard God as the true author of the material? How does one preserve an interest in authorial intention and purpose, as does Bloom, and yet do justice to the complexity of the literature in its final stabilized form? Is there any sense in which the final editor of the Pentateuch (Bloom's villainous Redactor) is also the first reader, not of a repristinated "Book of J" but of a rich combination of literary sources and traditions whose unity and coherence, while elusive, is also theologically profound?

These questions are not treated by Bloom, and there is no evidence he would find them intriguing. For they operate under the assumption that, if nothing else, the Bible in its developmental as well as its received form is a sacred book. This was once regarded as a truism. Now we see that in the hands of a skilled literary critic even this minimal expectation can–must, in Bloom's estimation–be called into question. Bloom did not initiate this line of interpretation, but he has certainly raised it to new heights, far surpassing the judgments of Wellhausen. We live in a curious age when the way the Bible gains fresh currency is by casting some new ironic light on its anthropological dimension, in this case with an ironist woman who possesses the literary skills of Shakespeare and the theological vision of Nietszche.

When all is said and done one is entitled to ask: have we really learned something about the Yahwist and the Bible or only something about the personal fictions of Harold Bloom? What puzzles me is whether such a question would finally matter to Bloom. When the anthropological dimension of the Bible becomes the end-all-be-all, is it any surprise that the interpreter is the only true object of interest? Of the J writer Rosenberg states, "I confronted her age, found her with enough experience of life and history to be just over forty, with a still vital appetite for life," and then he confesses, "I realized I was only identifying myself." While Bloom and Rosenberg may not mind this sort of self-referentiality, I find it boring. But then I go to the Bible to learn something about God, naive though that may be, not something about biblical interpreters who claim that the Bible is about themselves. The Bible's human dimension is undeniable. It may even be a cause for celebration. But not when it comes at the cost of slaying both Moses and God in order to exalt a Yahwist who turns out to be nothing more than the mirror image of two clever 20th-century readers. No misreading is that good.

The Changing Face of Old Testament Studies

Reading Gabe Fackre's essay "What Theology Professors Are Teaching" in these pages last year evoked in me a great deal of envy. In a day of diversity and hypercontextualization, he was able to spot areas of common concern in the teaching of systematic theology. And he supported his claim with empirical fact: a survey of 115 syllabi.

I have no access to anything like empirical fact, but I hazard the guess that the teaching of Old Testament is not so unified. To begin with, the term "Old Testament" itself is suspect in some quarters in a way that even "systematic theology" is not. Terms like "Hebrew Scriptures," "Hebrew Bible," "Tanak," "First Testament," and even "Older" or "Former Testament" have been proposed. I was confronted by a prominent ethicist the other day who wasted no time in asking, "Is the Old Testament Christian scripture or not?" with something of the same gravity associated with old doctrinal inquiry. Terminology matters. What one calls the field says a lot about what one believes about it.

Proper terminology is not just a matter of Jewish versus Christian sensibilities. It has to do with the wide variety of institutional contexts in which biblical study takes place. The contrast with systematic theology is striking. The fact that the Old Testament may be an object of investigation in 1) church seminaries and divinity schools; 2) undergraduate departments of religion; 3) Near Eastern language and civilization programs; 4) archaeological institutes; 5) comparative literature studies; 6) English classes; or 7) anthropology departments makes for a considerably diverse angle of vision on the subject. A specific discipline for the theological study of the Old Testament is asked to meet the special challenge of defining itself and the terms under which it operates— challenged, ironically, by the very disciplines it has spawned.

The ability to narrow the field of inquiry is, in my view, an enviable thing, given the very wide range of service into which an introductory course in Old Testament is now being pressed. A comparison with the European setting—where so much of Old Testament method was developed—is revealing. In German universities the "introduction" is but one limited segment of Old Testament study. It is distinguished by being (frequently) the most tedious and least interesting course, but also the most indispensable for studying other areas such as "the history of Israel," "the theology of the Old Testament" and "the history of interpretation." In our system "Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures" is generally expected to cover all these things: literary introduction, exegesis, history, theology, and history of interpretation.

There are other constraints on adequately "introducing" the Old Testament, constraints that cannot be remedied by being sure other electives will later be offered. The two semester basic course can no longer do all it is asked to do because students simply don't have the sort of general familiarity with the content of the Bible they once had. This leads to a further complication. Most critical method was predicated on students possessing a working knowledge of—if not a confessional commitment to—the Bible in its present form, a form that was then deconstructed by means of historical tools. The goal was to recast the Bible's narrative into new and different bins involving hypothetical authors, editors and communities. This made for a challenging, sometimes threatening, always critically imaginative two-semester journey through the Old Testament, beginning with the rudimentary antecedents of the Jahwist and continuing through to portions of Daniel and the last chapters of Zechariah.

But if one takes away a working knowledge of the present form of the text, a different effect is achieved. One gets all the critical conclusions, but the genuine push-pull of movement from confessed text to historical reconstruction is differently transmitted and received. If one tries to move from the present text to a historical-critical reconstruction and then to a "postmodern" or "second naïve" reading, the results may be even more mixed. Why are we doing this at all? Students lack a command of the general content of the Bible, and yet at the same time they are restless with gaining familiarity with this basic content for its own sake. They are also restless with critical method or with newer literary alternatives—unless, of course, they are accessible and directly relevant to modern issues. Fackre spoke of the commendable concern to link systematics to modem issues; my sense of biblical studies is that the greatest danger is the opposite: not appreciating the simple foreignness of the Bible and its world. I don't mean its historical distance or its cultural distinctiveness only, but its theological edge—what Barth meant when he once referred to the "strange world" of the Bible.

Older critical method, for all its deficiencies, raised the stakes in proper biblical interpretation in ways that were threatening and immediately felt by most students. I'm not sure that's true any more. For many the Old Testament is simply old, and therefore "out of touch." Older critical attempts to illustrate the relevance of the past by means of historical analogy require too much recasting of the narrative and simple speculation, and may presume too great a curiosity about these matters to begin with. One senses that today readers are confronting the world of the Old Testament (that is, the world presented by the text in its present form) for the first time and not being altogether sure they like what they see; or, if they like what they see, not being sure what all the historical-critical commotion is about to begin with. In short, today's readership is very different from the one teachers confronted at midcentury. Looking back at Brevard Childs's 1970 essay on biblical theology (Biblical Theology in Crisis), one finds it hard to comprehend how powerful the Biblical Theology Movement was in the 1940s and '50s—and how one could have spoken of a crisis of truly momentous importance, one that concentrated so much energy and debate. What we now have is a more mundane affair: a crisis in approach and method of the most basic sort. Its effects are more immediate in terms of curriculum, institutional context, and the teaching of Old Testament.

In a recent essay Phyllis Trible suggested that Childs's end point in his survey of the Biblical Theology Movement (a date she pinpoints as 1963) was not fortuitous. "The timing is uncanny," she says. "That same year Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique" ('Five Loaves and Two Fishes: Feminist Hermeneutics and Biblical Theology," Theological Studies [1989]). It's undoubtably true that cultural factors led to the demise of the Biblical Theology Movement and, more generally, a certain historical-critical way of reading the Old Testament. One thinks not just of feminism but also of the Vietnam war, changes in sexual values, and the decline of mainstream Protestantism and the strong pulpit associated with it. Childs had already mentioned many of these cultural factors and the role they played in what he called the "cracking of the walls" of the Biblical Theology Movement in the U.S. Childs, of course, described both the movement and its decline in order to pave the way for his own proposal: a biblical theology tied to canon.

One of the chief problems with Childs's approach—not usually discussed by scholars—is pedagogical and has to do with the present climate of Old Testament teaching. Childs's 1979 Introduction to the Old Testament demands that the student participate fully in the older historical-critical discussion. Ideally, the student should move from a basic grasp of the contents and narrative of the Bible, into a critical mode informed by source, form and redaction criticism, and then come to see the limitations of this movement so as finally to appreciate the insights of Childs's canonical approach. The movement is from precritical to critical to a canonical reading that is neither of these forebears, but demands a sensitivity to them both. And yet what is lacking among most students is any deep-seated, long-nurtured, instinctive, prerational commitment to the Old Testament in its present form. What happened to Sunday school, Bible reading at home or knowing a thing by heart? Episodes of 'Mash" or "Cheers" are much better known—and loved—in their synchronic order than is the Old Testament. Without a thorough knowledge of the biblical text, OT introductions threaten to become, as James Barr once said in another context, OT conclusions.

In the waning years of the Biblical Theology Movement, the walls with the most stress-cracks were those involving historical inquiry. The stated end point of Childs's survey of that movement was associated with the work of Langdon Gilkey (not Betty Friedan) and specifically with essays written by Gilkey in 1965-66. Gilkey's famous 1961 savaging of revelation in history delivered one of the more damaging tremors ("Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language," Journal of Religion). The Biblical Theology Movement had sought to retrieve, in stripped-down form, a dimension of the old cohesion between natural world and biblical world by positing points of contact between the crafted narrative and the real world of cause and effect: the Mighty Acts of God. Gilkey rightly saw both that these Mighty Acts of God were in fact not so mighty (a strong east wind parting the Red Sea) and that if they were, a dilemma was created for modern men and women who were left to wonder how God was acting in their lives in a way at all comparable to the way God was active in the Old Testament—where people witnessed hills of foreskins, the sun standing still, meals with angels, the parting of the Red Sea and the like. Not so mighty and not so able to produce the wanted cohesion, the acts upon which the Biblical Theology Movement were built vanished, taking with them the Biblical Theology Movement itself.

I wonder if Old Testament study ever fully recovered from Gilkey's essay. If one is not searching for the core historical events that triggered the growth of tradition, then why should one engage in the source/form/redaction criticism meant to uncover these matters? Childs used critical approaches in order to gain a purchase on the final form of the text and the theological complexity it represents as the consummation of all previous interpretive efforts. His canonical approach was not simply a new form of redaction criticism. It now appears clear, however, that the distance that separates Childs from his historical-critical forebears is not so great as that which separates him from more recent readings of the OT, whether literary, neomidrashic, formalist, artifactual, New Critical or deconstructionist. This is because Childs never abandoned one matter close to the heart of historical-critical inquiry: the intentionality of the text, the notion that this is a deliberately crafted narrative.

It is the lack of a clear and persuasive understanding of the role of "the author" and of intentionality in texts that most troubles Old Testament study at present. The notion of authorial intention was not abandoned with the rise of historical-critical method. Rather, the concept was enriched, multiplied and extended as a host of anonymous authors and editors, ranging far and wide in terms of circumstance, setting and purpose, began to populate the biblical landscape. The difficulty was with overcoming authorial diversity and a complex picture of historical change. Childs has sought to make a claim for the stability of the final form of the text that respects the critical insight into authorial diversity, yet presses beyond this toward an appreciation of the normative claims of the text in its received form. In his subtle formulation, there is an intentionality that derives from critically reconstructed authors, editors and prior receivers of revelation. This intentionality as reflected in the final text also has its own special integrity as it participates in but also brings to consummation earlier levels of intentionality.

Whatever else might be said about Childs's approach, he clearly has an enlarged and sophisticated notion of authorial intention. He depends upon a view of revelation in history that begins with events and their immediate interpretation but also looks to the divine word as received by the community of faith, reheard and reshaped, continuing to call forth new theological insight, obedience, and a life of faith congruent with the divine will.

But we can now list alternatives to Childs's subtle version of authorial intention: 1) The text has an intentionality that transcends and is not strictly derivative of any authorial intention; such intentionality is supple and pluriform (New Criticism). 2) The various intentionalities revealed by critical method must not be correlated in such a way as to give undue priority to the final form of the text, which is only one of many, either enriching or distorting, points of view (redaction criticism). 3) The search for intentionality is a deception—readers alone supply intentionality, not texts (deconstruction). 4) What intentionality we can discover in the Old Testament is culturally bound and must therefore be run through a critical sieve to determine its political usefulness; to do otherwise would be to distort the Bible's essentially political and materialist handling of God and reality (various forms of materialist demythologizing).

We have come full circle. The reason for such wide diversity in Old Testament studies has to do with basic disagreements over the genre of the material in the first place and the divided convictions of interpretive communities. An older generation believed that if it simply described the genre of the Old Testament—more in its parts than as a whole—readers would conform themselves to the genres discovered. Interpretation would be "actualization," "re-presentation." To a degree, this is what took place. What was true and could be discovered about the Bible as a historical document would also be true of an interpretive community seeking to model itself after the Bible and its world. But with the widespread failure of the field to come to any agreement about the Bible's own categories of discourse, its special modes of literary expression and intentionality, and especially those social and religious factors that handed the Old Testament over to us, we have simply been thrown back on ourselves and the deeply felt convictions with which we began the process of interpretation. The focus has shifted from the text and its background to the reader and the community that interprets.

Yet even on these terms it should remain possible for an interpretive community to make a conscious decision to hear the Bible as scripture, to believe in the coercive and constraining force of the Bible's own unique literary construction, and to regard itself as trying to live out the demands of a word and a God that stand over it, in continuity with communities of faith within the Bible and in the church's ongoing history of interpretation. Such a community can also argue that in so doing it is seeking to hear a word truly external to itself, is straining to hear intended acts of communication, and is involved in a process of faithful reception—one in which accurate and inaccurate hearings both happen and matter theologically. Let the debate rage over whether a particular reception is right or appropriately critical. But let there be no delusion about the willful decisions of all interpreters and the prior commitments they bring to the reading process.

Yet a final question remains: Does one willful decision to read the Bible better conform to the intentions of the literature than another? That is, what of the genre of the Bible as a whole, and of the Old Testament within it? No matter how much the golfer with a sand wedge and cleated shoes wants to play squash, the squash court expects something else: rubber-soled shoes, a squash racket and a player who's come to play squash. Does the Bible also expect a certain sort of reader? Is the OT both an open book for all to read, and in some sense a closed book, with a distinct readership in mind? Does the Old Testament conform to a genre that has been externally imposed by coercive readers and hard misreadings, or is its genre a reflection of the will of communities that produced it, assented to its ongoing word of address and handed it over to new communities of faith of which we are one? One answer that has been given makes a strong case for the genre, canon" or "scripture." Do we need more precision here? Are other alternatives more convincing? It is to this sort of form-critical question that the field must now turn if it is to understand both its curricular obligations and the constraints that shape and define its various institutional situations.

What is a theological handling of the Old Testament? In what sort of context—curricular and institutional—will it exist and thrive? Is the proper legacy of the historical-critical method a continued concern for intentionality in biblical texts not so much in precanonical but rather in final scriptural form? These three questions have been my concern here. In the passage from Michael Malone's Foolscap quoted above1, Theo is right to worry that a text's intentions may be regarded as irrelevant and the concept of an author "absolutely a goner." More troubling perhaps was his association of these two matters with the death of God in the modern world. But that is a topic for another day.