Wilderness, grace and the journey to the common good
Seeking the common good is something that most Christians, at least in theory, consider integral to the faith. But what does it actually look like? Where do we find inspiration or instruction for the journey? And where will the journey take us?These are the questions Walter Brueggemann explores in Journey to the Common Good (Westminster John Knox). As a world-renowned Old Testament scholar, he sets out to locate the answers in three places:
- Exodus, which sheds light on the journey from anxiety to neighborliness;
- Jeremiah, an invitation to choose life over death; and
- Isaiah, which helps us move from loss to restoration.
I won’t attempt to do justice to his arguments here, but each of the three is an important way of understanding the journey to the common good.
I found the section on the Exodus particularly meaningful. In the Exodus, we see how those living lives dominated by anxiety and scarcity aren’t likely to seek the common good; they’re going to be too busy simply trying to survive. After God uses Moses to lead his people out of “the anxiety system” of Egypt, God miraculously provides manna (or “wonder bread,” as Brueggemann calls it), demonstrating divine generosity and abundance.
But as the biblical narrative makes clear, the people of God didn’t find it easy to move from the culture of scarcity to the culture of abundance overnight. That’s because having left the anxiety system of Pharaoh, they found themselves not in an ideal place of safety, security and comfort, but rather in the wilderness. Brueggemann writes:
“Wilderness” is a place, in biblical rhetoric, where there are no viable life support systems. “Grace” is the occupying generosity of God that redefines the place. The wonder bread, as a gesture of divine grace, recharacterizes the wilderness that Israel now discovered to be a place of viable life, made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.
Brueggemann goes on to argue that for us today a similar “departure” is required -- if not from a literal Pharaoh, then from adherence to whatever twenty-first century anxiety systems we find ourselves in. If we buy his argument that living in a culture of anxiety and scarcity all but precludes the pursuit of the common good, then the flip side is that when we experience God’s generosity and abundance (“our daily bread,” you might say) and recognize it for the grace that it is, we are freed up like never before to be good neighbors and to seek the common good.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” says Jesus. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
The journey to the common good takes us from scarcity to abundance, and from abundance to the practice of neighborliness. The challenge for all of us, then, is to cultivate lives of neighborliness right here in the wilderness. It may not be a place entirely to our liking, but it is a place of viable life, “made viable by the generous inclination of YHWH.”
Do we truly believe that the wilderness in which we live can be a place not of scarcity but of abundance? How does that shape our understanding of the journey to the common good?
[Photo credit: Thomas Dwyer/Flickr]
Until Justice & Peace Embrace (Part 2/3)
Yesterday, in the first part of this series, I summarized Wolterstorff's appropriation of the world-formative Reformed/neo-Calvinist tradition, how it is both similar to and different from the liberation theologies of Latin America, and how Scripture calls us to shalom -- a world-formative vision related to, but beyond, both. Now for some of shalom's ramifications, again in relatively bite-size chunks.
The rich & the poor
During the colonial era, Wolterstorff writes, it was the norm for Westerners to view poverty in other countries as "a natural condition for certain kinds of people." After World War II, however, there was new-found excitement about the possibilities of development (the field of work, incidentally, to which I belong). Wolterstorff writes of that enthusiasm:
All that was needed was technology and capital; both of these could be painlessly supplied by us. A new self-serving explanation! But development has not occurred as we expected. The poor are with us in greater numbers than ever before. And now we can no longer ignore their existence.
So if not colonial feelings of superiority, nor naive enthusiasm about quick-fix solutions that don't cost anyone anything, what does Wolterstorff propose? Well, first, he echoes the liberation theologians in saying that God has a special concern for the poor. To support this claim, he points to a series of passages from the Gospel of Luke (1:46-53; 4:16-21; 6:20-21; 7:18-23), and concludes with conviction but nuance:
If we consider Jesus to be God incarnate, and these teachings from the book of Luke to be God-authorized, as I certainly do, then we cannot but conclude that God has taken sides with the poor... On the other hand, the poor are not romaticized: they are not praised; they are blessed. And, yes, they can turn aside the blessing. Blessing is pronounced on those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Not all the poor do so.
God-given rights
Scripture teaches that every human being is made in the image of God, and that's what forms the basis for Wolterstorff's insistence on affirming the rights of the poor. "I want to say, as emphatically as I can," he writes, "that our concern with poverty is not an issue of generosity but of rights." Therefore, if we don't care about the poor, "we are violating the God-given rights of the poor person." He goes into more detail about the definition of rights, and the duties that correlate to them, but in the interest of both time and space I won't spell that out in detail here.
Nations & nationalism
If one desires to be an instrument of shalom, one must be concerned about the power of nationalism. Nationalism, Wolterstorff says, is basically "a nation's preoccupation with its own nationhood." A sense of woundedness, of having been wronged, is often at the root of a rise in nationalism. And it's not long before that kind of nationalism becomes, as he puts it, cancerous:
When a nation suffers from nationalism unchecked, the life of its members is twisted and distorted, and the nation becomes a menace among nations because it accepts no standards for international peace and justice. It acts solely in its own self-interest, breaking treaties when it sees fit, waging wars when it finds the advantage, thumbing its nose at international conventions and organizations. National self-assertion is the only goal. All that restrains it is a balance of terror... We in our century have seen, and continue to see, that there is nothing more destructive of shalom than such nationalism.
But for Christians, the alternative is clear -- or it should be:
What unites us as bearers of the image of God is more important than what divides us as members of nations.
I'll have a third and final post in this series, probably next week, taking a look at Wolterstorff's thoughts on what shalom looks like in a city; the relationship between justice and liturgy; and his call for scholars and academics to embrace the world-formative vision.
Featured Writing
Recent Posts
- Thoughts on Teju Cole’s “Open City”
- Not one square inch!
- Weekend Video: The Voice of Justice
- Repaso: Guatemala’s war years; The MBA Oath; Dakota prison letters; working poor in Latin America; religion vs. science
- Sustainability in the Valley of the Sun