Walter Brueggemann is one of my favorite Old Testament scholars, primarily because I am not an Old Testament scholar! I find his writing very accessible, very interesting, and always thought-provoking and generative.
I just finished a recent book of essays, Truth and Hope: Essays for a Perilous Age. As the title suggests, the chapters are deeply relevant in this current political climate, and I really enjoyed all of them. However, there were two in particular that I wanted to share because I found them especially pointed and worthy of reflection: chapter 9, “Prayer as Neighbor Love; and chapter 10, “Justice as Love of God.”
He introduces these two chapters together, considering the “twin themes” of prayer and justice. He writes, “I take these twin themes to be decisive marks of the church and its contemporary call from God.” He goes onto note that too often, these two “evangelical disciplines” are presented oppositionally, as some kind of moral either/or: “either leaving things in the hands of the God whom we trust or accepting singular responsibility for the well-being of the world.” He rejects that false dichotomy and writes instead, “I will consider the ways in which these two disciplines are intimately and intrinsically bound together so that they need not be…rent asunder.”
He goes on to offer a few key questions for the church to which his argument pertains, the last of which I find particularly significant. He writes, “[the twinning of these two themes] raises the issue of whether we shall divide the church in the United States between ‘red’ and ‘blue’, or whether communion with God and societal compassion for the neighbor might pervade the entire life of the church.
The overarching point he makes in these two chapters is perhaps obvious in their titles, but he states it explicitly this way. “My argument in what follows is that prayer and justice correlate with the two great commandments, prayer as love of God, justice as love of neighbor. In this exercise, however, I will consider what happens if we reverse the correlation. It occurs to me that we should not too readily slot things ‘toward heaven’ and ‘toward earth’ precisely because the enfleshed character of our God suggests that such categories be deconstructed. Thus, I ask that we:
- see prayer as a way to love neighbor; and
- see justice as a way to love God.
Together, the two chapters go on to make that argument.
I can’t summarize the whole of both chapters, of course, and I genuinely commend them for your reading, but here is what I will say in summary about the argument he makes.
He emphasizes that prayer has an influence upon God’s actions—and he quotes Karl Barth here, emphasizing that prayer “is the work of evoking new futures that have not yet been given by mobilizing YHWH’s good power that can alone affect newness.”
But the nature of prayer is such that we never pray only for ourselves. In our need, we pray for all in need: we “go to court and bring [our] friends with us, making petition on behalf of all who suffer the same grievance in the same uncaring social system.”
And in our prayer, we wager that God can be summoned into solidarity with the petitioners who intercede.
And for those of us who don’t find ourselves in particular need? Brueggemann argues that the well off, “led by way of the Psalter, are summoned by the tradition to move past themselves in order to join the prayer of the needy.”
This way of interpreting prayer is deeply grounded in the Old Testament, especially the Psalms. He writes, “Prayer as a cry for justice is real prayer, a spiritual act addressed to a real God who hears. While it is real speech by real people in real hurt, addressed to God, it is a public act. For that reason, the transaction spills over into the public realm, whereby the rhetoric of prayer inescapably becomes political talk.
In this way, prayer is how we love our neighbor.
The next chapter takes up the second part of Brueggemann’s argument, seeing justice as the way we love God.
He argues that because of the witness we have in Scripture, “love of God is not primarily a ‘religious act’ as it might be in some other interpretive traditions.” Instead, “in that great founding tradition of Israel’s faith, YHWH is linked to the political economy. Those who would love God must engage themselves in the political economy.”
He emphasizes this point strongly: In the various traditions of the Old Testament—exodus narrative, covenant at Sinai, commandments of Deuteronomy, and prophetic oracles, “love of God is being responsibly engaged in the body politic. It is for compelling reason that Karl Barth conducted a sustained polemic against ‘religion’; what he meant by ‘religion’ is characteristically an escape from the more demanding engagement in the arena of public power, where neighbor may be diminished or enhanced, brought low or lifted up.”
The God who made a covenant with God’s people is fundamentally a lover of justice.
After extensive exegesis, he makes an interesting move to bring this argument firmly into our contemporary moment. He writes:
“Now I want to change direction and push behind these core claims of covenant in order to suggest a quite particular linkage to our time and place, a time and place overflowing with anxiety because the world as we have known it is falling apart. We may ask about YHWH whom we are to love: Who is this YHWH who loves justice and who brings the world—and the political economy—to well-being? The answer surely is this: YHWH is the unanxious Creator who faces into the recalcitrant reality of chaos and the recurring threat of injustice and who preside over the coming order of justice and shalom.”
Justice springs from this un-anxious posture, a posture that resists the “grip of production and consumption.” It is a Sabbath-posture, a posture that trusts God to secure the world, that trust “that the world will hold without our feverish efforts at control.”
Knowing this God, trusting in this God, and loving this God invites us into a specific posture in the world:
“Our society, in its fearfulness, pursues the fever of injustice, believing that if we can trump the neighbor economically, we shall be safe. But the people of God—the ones who practice a trusting creatureliness—know better. We know better because we have entered into God’s Sabbath rust and refused the fever of anti-neighborliness.”
“Unanxious people, in response to the Lord of the exodus, who is also the creator of abundance, act differently and make justice possible.”
In this way, justice is how we love God.
Happy Lutheran 