Word that Redescribes the World by Brueggemann Walter

Author:Brueggemann, Walter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

Options for Creatureliness

Consumer or Citizen

A remarkable turn has happened in the theological interpretation of the Christian Old Testament. Through the first part of the twentieth century, theological interpretation was dominated by an accent upon “God’s Mighty Deeds in History,” together with an intentional disregard of the theme of “creation.”1 This one-sided account—instigated indirectly by Karl Barth and given primary impetus by Gerhard von Rad—was in response to the brutalizing ideology of German National Socialism with its distorted “theology of creation” expressed in its “Blood and Soil” mantra.2 In that crisis situation, it was relatively easy to find a warrant for “history against nature” in the more ancient polemic of Israel against “Canaanite fertility religion.” That polemical contrast came to dominate Christian (especially Protestant) theological interpretation. It is not necessary to polemicize against such an interpretive practice but only to appreciate the great extent to which that interpretive angle, like every interpretive angle, is context-determined.

It was not until the 1970s that interpretation, led by Claus Westermann, Frank Cross, and Hans Heinrich Schmid, began to break free of the older German church struggle and to move in new directions, with explicit reference to creation as a primal theme of theology in the Christian Old Testament.3 The reason for this interpretive turn are many and complex, but it is at least indirectly related to the emergence of a feminist hermeneutic and to a growing awareness of an environmental crisis. In what follows I will explore some dimensions of a freshly articulated creation theology and consider the ways in which this fresh interpretive accent may be drawn closely toward the contemporary crisis of society and of interpretation.

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