Creative Word: Canon As a Model for Biblical Education by Walter Brueggemann

Author:Walter Brueggemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-05-10T11:59:00+00:00

Both God and humankind have their proper work. The drama of concealing and searching out is the main vocation of human persons. Human persons are recalled to power. Much power comes in knowledge. This knowledge, however, leads not only to power. It may also lead to praise. And it is praise that conceals and redefines power. Thus the upshot of wisdom teaching is not techniques for manage ment, but it is finally doxology which is based on wonder, awe, and amazement.

4. However, the dialectic must be corrected again. We must not turn it too far toward the experience of God. In the midst of doxology toward God, there is still the experience of the world that claims our best attention. What do we discern if we study the world? Most of all we learn of its orderliness and reliability, its continuity and regularity. Von Rad has shown that even the most innocent looking proverb is not just casual chatter."5 Rather, each such proverb is an enduring summary of long-tested experience. Events are not observed one at a time. Each proverb is a "system analysis." Specific observations are pressed to generalization. The wisdom teachers are concerned with the kinds of consequences that regularly flow from certain kinds of action.

Both the premise and the conclusion of such study and analysis are the judgment that life is connected. The connection is attested by daily experience and is wrought by the abiding rule of God. I submit that it is the discovery, premise, assumption, and conviction of the interconnectedness of life that is the central substance of the wisdom teachers.41 The interconnectedness of life is an enormous problem. On the one hand, obscurantists, superstitious people, and naive children imagine connections that do not exist. But how does one know when a linkage is correct or is an imagination? Medical science, for example, is based on the connections of medicines and bodily responses. Attention to the strange phenomena of placebo, however, gives us pause and reminds us that the interconnections are much more concealed than we like to think."

Still, it is the opposite danger that is more prevalent for us. The danger among us is not to imagine that life is too much connected. Rather, the danger is to assume that on the basis of technical competence, life is not connected, or we can outflank the connections, or we have some options about the nature of the connections if we are wise and strong enough.

Berger has shown that the bureaucratic consciousness is based on the notion that life is not connected.48 Life is made up of components which have no necessary linkage to one another. Therefore life can be parceled out in administrative units and dealt with a piece at a time. So we can separate private and public goals, social action and evangelism, foreign policy and racial justice.49

We learn so late and so often in public life that our power does not give us the capacity to connect life differently. There are certain givens, ordained of God, that no administrator can overcome.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.