May 23 2013
WHAT MOVES ME TO WRITE MY COLUMNS? (Part 1)
Last week I went back to one of my older books, a book our oldest son gave to me in 1987. It was Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.
I met this well-known professor of Old Testament on three occasions: the first time at an environmental conference in Madison, Wisconsin in late 1988, again at a debate between him and Stanley Hauerwas in a church in Durham N.C. when our youngest daughter lived in Raleigh, and the last time at an ICS –Institute for Christian Studies – gathering in Toronto.
On the very first page of The Prophetic Imagination he writes “The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act……true both of the church and also of us as persons.” That pretty well sets the tone of the book.
Brueggemann states that the task of prophetic ministry – the church and its members – is to create a climate of nurturing, nourishing, and evoking a state of mind, a consciousness, and a new understanding, an alternative to the consciousness and perception of the culture that surrounds us. He writes that we must live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give: the Kingdom to come in the new creation, in other words. But he also sees our culture as so tired that it is almost impossible for us to have sufficient energy to embrace the promises of renewal that God will bring.
Our basic problem is that we find ourselves in an economy of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed, that the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors. Brueggemann says that the religion we adhere to is one where God’s message to openly confront the world is completely neglected as we practise a religion of optimism which believes that God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living.
So what is the place of a prophet today?
During the German occupation of the Netherlands (1940-45) we had no radio – they were all confiscated. Possession posed prison, but we had one anyway to listen to the BBC’s Dutch broadcast. My main entertainment as a teenager was a church-sponsored young men society, where some 20 young men met each week for a couple of hours plus preparation time, and dealt with “The Bible and the Life of the Christian.” Each teenager in turn had to present an essay followed by discussions. There I got my initial training thinking critically about issues such as the Christian’s obligation to be ‘prophet, priest and king.’ How old-fashioned this all sounds 70 years later, yet it shaped my life.
What then is a prophet? A prophet is not a person with special gifts who can foretell the future. A prophet is a believer who with open mind and shorn off preconceived notions observes what’s happening in society and has the courage to squarely name the challenges that present themselves in our quickly changing society.
Observing what goes on today a prophet looks ahead to determine whether our children have a viable future, considering the present state of the economy and the universal environmental destruction.
Why do I write my blogs?
The reason I keep on writing my blog week in week out is that neither the church, Christian press nor the secular ones are prophetic: they fail to tell what really goes on in society: they are dutiful lackeys of the establishment whether that is ecclesiastical or secular. They depend on advertising and the support of conservative elements and must present a cheerful and optimistic outlook, even though there is little or nothing to be optimistic about. The religious journals, of whatever stripe, are a reflection of the churches, are captives of consumerism and very loath to allow pessimism to disturb their deadly tranquility, preferring instead to have sweet pietism carry the day.
On the day the Blue Jays became world champions I was driving from Toronto to Tweed, coming from a meeting, listening to the game on the radio. I picked up a hitchhiker who lived in Toronto, had never heard of the Blue Jays and was totally ignorant about any current happening. It seems to me that the majority of people, including most Christians have a self-induced ignorance of the plight of the planet, pushing the frightening reality from their minds because they feel too powerless to do anything about it.
Here is the Truth: we are hitting physical limits; we cannot expect to maintain contemporary levels of consumption that draw down the ecological capital of the planet at rates dramatically beyond replacement levels. It is unrealistic to imagine that we can go on treating the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
It’s long overdue for preachers, writers, teachers and all those who influence opinion to realize that multiple, cascading ecological crises must change preachers’ mission, Christian writers’ messages and teachers’ lesson plans in ever more dramatic fashion. We are living in apocalyptic times: it is high time for apocalyptic sermons and articles. Apocalypse means ‘revelation’ as in 2 Peter 3:10 which speaks of ‘laying things bare,’ of revealing what really goes on today. Every day brings new ‘revelations’, be that political, criminal, environmental or financial. That’s why I write my blog because neither the preachers nor the pundits nor the teachers seem to be getting the message.
Preachers must be willing to critique not only specific people – politicians especially and their policies – but also the systems out of which they emerge. Most people sense what goes on, but would welcome honest affirmation. That also means that the church must continuously explain what the Bible really teaches about the coming of the Kingdom, something that is not done now because we all are daily brainwashed by the media, especially by television which is funded through advertising by the large corporations and their bosses who really control the political process. Perhaps a good start is to throw out TV and give the money saved to Greenpeace.
Royal Journalism
(Some of the following I owe to Robert Jensen, a professor of Journalism at the University of Texas.)
Back to Brueggemann.
He uses the term “royal” not to describe a specific form of executive power but as a description of a system that really pulls the strings in society and marginalizes the needs of ordinary people. The term starts with Solomon. Brueggemann quotes George Mendenhall who wrote that the Solomon achievement is rightly characterised as ‘the paganization of Israel.” Walter Brueggemann points out that this royal consciousness took hold after ancient theocratic Israel chose a secular king. Solomon overturned Moses and replaced a God of liberation with one used to serve an empire, offering affluence for some and oppressive social policy for most, all under the cloak of static religion, the kind we have now. Brueggemann labels this a false consciousness: “The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death.” This royal tradition applied to ancient Israel, the Roman empire, European monarchs, and today to North America, where our societies have concentrated wealth and power in a few hands, and ignore the needs of the bulk of the population, situations where the wealthy and powerful offer platitudes about their well-intended purposes for the masses, while pursuing policies to enrich themselves.
It is plain to most of us that we in North America suffer under such a regime: economic inequality and the resulting suffering have dramatically deepened over the past four decades. Climate change denial has increased even as the evidence of the threat becomes undeniable. Brueggemann describes such a culture as one that is “competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.” I might add that our culture also knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Today almost all mainstream corporate-commercial journalism is royal journalism: journalism without the imagination needed to move outside the framework created by the dominant systems of power. CNN, MSNBC, CBC, CTV all practice royal journalism. The Globe and Mail, the New York Times both are ground zero for royal journalism. I read both papers every day. Christianity Today, the Christian Reformed Banner, the Presbyterian Record, to name the ones I am familiar with, and almost all other church periodicals are in that same category. Marking these institutions as royalist doesn’t mean that no good journalism ever emerges from them, or that they employ no writers or columnists who are capable of challenging royal arrangements. Instead, the term recognizes that these institutions lack the imagination necessary to step outside of the royal consciousness on a regular basis. Over time, they add to the numbness rather than jolt people out of it.
The royal consciousness I am talking about is completely intertwined with a high-energy/high-technology worldview, an intimate part of a hierarchical economy, run by an imperial nation-state. Fundamental to this faith in our technological, economic, and national basis is the belief that we can have anything we want without obligations to other peoples or other living things and creation in general, and that we deserve this. It presupposes that we are ‘a city upon the hill, God’s chosen people’ which warrants our prodigious pursuit of commodities in the name of freedom, at the expense of the neighbor. That is the lie we live. That’s why a different journalism is necessary.
Prophetic Journalism
Given the multiple crises that existing political, economic, and social systems have generated, the ideals of journalism call for a prophetic journalism. The first step in defending that claim is to reiterate what real prophets are not: they are not people who predict the future or demand that others follow in their footsteps. To act as a prophet requires only honesty and courage. To speak prophetically means to squarely face the fact that our world is structured by systems that create unjust and unsustainable conditions, and that we who live in the privileged parts of the world are implicated in those systems. We, in North America, with six percent of the world’s population, claim more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. Our responsibility for the world’s mess is in direct proportion to the pollution we generate.
Don’t think that my call to action is a new phenomenon. The Old Testament is full of instances of similar situations. Amos and Hosea, Jeremiah and Isaiah all rejected the pursuit of wealth or power and argued for the centrality of kindness and justice. Micah 6:8 comes to mind: “What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” In his analysis of these prophets, the scholar and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel concluded: “Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: few are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Brueggemann argues that the task of those speaking prophetically is to “penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught” and “penetrate despair so that new futures can be believed in and embraced by us.” There is an appalling lack of understanding in the Christian community of the future Christ has promised with the coming of the Kingdom. The imminent publication of The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming is extremely opportune. Both Walter Brueggemann and J. H. Bavinck encourage preachers to think of themselves as “handler[s] of the prophetic tradition,” a job description that also applies to other intellectual professions, including teaching and journalism.
Prophetic preaching names the crisis and causes a situation to emerge that is already clamoring for our attention almost every day. We can no longer hide behind platitudes. We have to put a label on the defining sins among us: the sins of environmental abuse, of neighborly disregard, of long-term racism, of self-indulgent consumerism, the very issues the prophets of old called to the attention of their contemporaries and our attention here and now.
Ecological Realties
Contrary to what Ecclesiastes writes, “There is something new under the sun,” and that something new is terribly frightening. People who live in tornado prone areas usually have a cellar where they can take refuge when the sirens sound. Today the sirens sound for the entire world and we have no safe haven anywhere: historical conditions have changed, and that means facing tough questions about ecological sustainability. On Climate Change the increase in concentration of CO2 has been dramatic. In 1958, it was 315 ppm (parts per million), and this rose to about 375ppm in 2000 before jumping to 400ppm now. At this rate, we are on track not for a 2 degree Celsius but for a 3 to 5 degree increase in temperature by the end of the century – a catastrophe. An honest evaluation of that evidence leads to a disturbing conclusion: Life as we know it is almost over. That is, the high-energy/high-technology life that we in the affluent societies live is a dead-end. There is a growing realization that we have disrupted planetary forces in ways we cannot control and do not fully understand. We cannot predict the specific times and places where dramatic breakdowns will occur, but we can know that the living system on which we depend is breaking down. We live in apocalyptic times.
To be continued next week: giving time to reflect.
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