Voices In My Head Podcast #223: Walter Brueggeman and Rick Lee James Discuss Imprecatory Psalms as F

Today's podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook download and 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. That's audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. Over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or MP3 player. That's audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. Give it a try today. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Hello, my friends. I just wanted to let you know what happened at the beginning here. I didn't quite have the mic set up right, so the introduction where I say things like, "Hey, welcome back to Voices in My Head. This is your host, Rick Lee James," didn't get in there. So just to set up the context a little bit, This is my third podcast with my guest Dr. Walter Brueggemann, and I hope you enjoy it. I think you will. We're going to be talking a lot about imprecatory psalms and how we should pray, and is it possible to pray those types of prayers, those wrathful parts of the Bible, and actually be loving our enemies in the process and being faithful. So here's my conversation recorded on August 22nd, 2017 with Dr. Walter Brueggemann. Okay, now we're going with that one.

Sorry.

Good thing I have the other recorder going because it's going to pick it up over there. I forgot to turn the mic on. So let's— Oh well, we'll get it. Well, it's good to be back with you. And I always enjoy having conversations with you. And we had a good time talking at lunch today. And— Or maybe it was brunch, whatever it was. There was no breakfast food really. So I guess it was actually lunch. That works that way. Yeah, but it's always good to catch up a little bit and hear what's going on in your life. My purpose in coming here today is this last couple weeks, especially in our country, it's been a tough one. And depending on when a listener is listening to this podcast, many people listen right away, some people listen weeks down the road. We are in the aftermath of the Charlottesville riots, I guess I will say. Not really a riot, but it was a lot of protesting that was going on there. And the country has sort of been— I mean, we've sort of been divided anyway for quite a while, but it's been a really rough last couple weeks in many ways. And one reason I wanted to get together with you, aside from just the podcast, is I find you to be a very hopeful voice. And I find that I need some encouragement, and I, I need to hear sometimes from other people who I respect and admire that God is still in control, you know, that he is the one who ultimately is the true authority in all these things. And so I thought maybe we could, could start today, and you would know a lot more about this than me for sure. But there's this thing called the imprecatory psalms, and the imprecatory psalms, they're not pretty. I mean, they certainly, as you know, um, when it has phrases like, you know, break the teeth in their mouth, Lord, you know, things like that, they seem very cruel. But I wonder if you could just talk to us a little bit about first just what the imprecatory psalms really are and, and kind of why they are in our our psalm book, I would say, the Book of Psalms.

So the imprecatory psalms, as you know, are a part of the lament or complaint psalms in which the speaker details for God the sorry situation we're in, and then as one element of that kind of prayer makes some powerful suggestions to God about what ought to be done to the terrible people that are causing me all these problems.

Right.

In the Episcopal Church where I now worship, the prayer that we pray every Sunday to open the service says that God is the one from whom no secret can be hid.

Mm.

And I think that is an invitation, assuming that's true, It is an invitation for us to lay it all out before God so that if we have impulses toward anger or hate or vengeance, we already have them and God knows that. So best to speak them out. And I think that long before psychotherapy and all of that therapeutic processing that we now know is useful to do. The imprecatory psalms function that way to get this ugly destructive stuff out in the open.

Sure.

And I think that at its best, those prayers mean to hand over those impulses of anger and hate over to God, or as I like to say, they put them on God's desk and let God deal with them. And what I think we know psychologically is that if we do not do that, then that stuff works on our gut. And eventually, if we don't yield them to God, we will act them out. We will act them out either in destructive ways towards someone else, or we will keep them internally and they will work negatively on us in our internal life and our faith and our being. So the alternative to keeping this stuff in, in that will, that will be destructive, is to let it out toward God on the assumption that God is a generous recipient of everything that we've got going on with us. And I think that the use of the imprecatory psalms is so important because so much of the prayer life of the church has been excessively pious and therefore dishonest and therefore engaged in denial. And I suspect God is not fooled by that, but we fool ourselves, I think. Yeah. So I, I think that the The recovery of this stuff in the Psalter is really very important for us.

Yeah. Well, it's there for a reason, I think. You know, when they canonized Scripture, they could have just left that part out.

That's right. And they didn't.

And in the Reformation, some stuff did get left out for sure, but I think Martin Luther cherished his imprecatories too much, you know.

He was good at them, I think.

He was a pretty wrathful guy, I think. But you're on to something here. I'd love to talk about this because I think you probably have been as upset and discouraged as I have many times, you know, at the current administration and things that have happened. And I'm always told, you know, "Well, you need to pray for those in authority." And sometimes I just pray those imprecatory psalms for them. Exactly. And I don't mean that in a way that I actually necessarily even want that to happen to them. But it's like you said, there are— there must be a way for us to get those things out in healthy and constructive ways. It's always amazing to me, and maybe this is just because— maybe it's a Protestant problem, I'm not sure— but we seem to be so disconnected from the Psalms as the hymn book of the church, you know, because they originally were what was sung. And even in the Christian tradition for many, many years until relatively recently in our history. A lot of churches, that was all they sang. They came and sang the Psalms.

That's right. On Sunday morning.

So it's interesting to me, as we're trying to recover, and I as somebody who leads music in churches and I'm very interested in the life of what goes on in the church with music, I don't have any songs like that that we sing on Sunday morning.

We don't have any in our hymnals at all. No. And my experience in most of the church is we don't use those Psalms. We just skip over them, or if we use the Psalm, we leave out the worst verses, right? And I was some time ago worshiping with some nuns, and even the nuns left out those terrible verses in 109. Yeah, that are probably the most vigorous in the, in the whole of the Book of Psalms.

Yeah, I, and I meant to grab my Bible so I could open it up. I was going to read some of 109, but Well, oh yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. Well, tell you what, um, say something brilliant. I'm gonna grab a Bible. I'll be right back. I'm gonna lay my microphone down.

So I, I really do think that what we— by, by leaving out these Psalms in the life of the church, what we do is communicate to people that you shouldn't feel that stuff. And if you feel that stuff, please feel it somewhere else Right. But not here because we're all nice people.

That's true. Well, okay, I have a Bible now in front of me. I'm so glad that we are sitting in a— I thought it was a library, but it's a parlor. Um, and so let me give an example of that because I think our listeners might need to hear it because I think we don't know what to do with these Psalms sometimes. And I want to also, as, as I read this, um, I, I always have to remind myself too Prayer is a function that is supposed to form me, you know. I am supposed to be formed by God in these times. My prayers, even though I pray for God to do something, that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to form God or to make him do these things. Oftentimes it's God's way of helping to shape me. So I can realize that even though I pray these things, um, God's answer may very well be no, or I have something else in mind., but you still need to get this out. So let me just give a little bit. I won't read the whole Psalm 109, but since I have it here in front of me, and I had said to some friends the other day, I think I even put it on Twitter, I said, you know, I'm praying this verse today for the president, you know. And I didn't like write it out, I just said that. So if anybody looked it up, they may have been, what? But it said, they say, put some rascal to denounce him, an accuser to stand at his right side, but when the judgment is given, that rascal will be exposed and his all he's accounted a sin. May his days be few, may his hoarded wealth fall to another, may his children be fatherless, his wife a widow, may his children be vagabonds and beggars, driven from their homes. May the moneylender distrain on all his goods, and strangers seize his earnings. May none remain loyal to him, and none have mercy on his fatherless children. May his line be doomed to extinction, may their name be wiped out within a generation. May the sins of his forefathers be remembered and his mother's wickedness never be wiped out. And it goes on for a while with a few more curses along the way, right? But I have said before, and as I've studied the Psalms, um, it helps me to pray that way so that I don't act out on it. That's correct. Because, because I feel like God's answer to me is, but I say to you, love your enemies.

That's right.

Pray for those who persecute you. And I think it's all part of the same process. I don't think it means we have to do away with our anger. I also don't think it means we have to pray for like good blessings and good things upon those people. But maybe that is part of it, I don't know. But the main thing is that God would shape us and form us through those scripture times. And if we hold these feelings inside, I'm thinking it anyway, like you said.

That's right.

That's right. It's helpful for us to get those out. But I feel like there's almost a danger too, you know, in some ways of— when I pray these things again, I say I pray them so that I don't enact them, you know. I pray them so I don't have to say it out loud sometimes. But in our age of hate language and things like that, and we just talked about, you know, things like neo-Nazis who are very hateful in their language, or the KKK, or different ones like that. My question is, in using a source like these, and if we have language that sometimes sounds like this towards other people—

Yeah.

What's the distinction in your mind between our language and between hate speech like the other side?

Well, I think if we were going to use these kind of prayers in the life of a congregation, we have to do a good bit of teaching about the structure and intention of the Psalms and how they imprecatory petitions are framed in the life of the psalmist so that you can't just take them out of context and all that. Right. I think the difference between hate speech and this stuff— it is hate speech, but it is hate speech addressed to God with a readiness to leave it in God's hands. The analog that I use for that sometimes is if you imagine in a in a family, two small children are engaged in civil war with each other, and the mother or the father separates them and tries to decide who's at fault and who to discipline and all of that. And then one of the kids will say to the other one, "I want you to send him to bed without his supper, and I want you, and I want you, and I want you." Right. Now, a good parent doesn't do two things. A good parent doesn't say, "You can't talk that way," because he needs to talk that way, but a good parent also doesn't say, "Oh, let me write this down so that I can do exactly what you want." What a good parent says is, "I hear you. Now you leave that to me, and I will decide what is best for both of you." And I think that's the analog that I think is useful. There is a trick in that Psalm, and I don't know what translation you have, but if you look at verse 5, which begins this awful stuff, in that translation, is there— does it begin by saying, "They say"?

Uh, let's see, in verse 5, "They have repaid me evil for good." No, they don't.

If you look at many translations, I think it's verse 5 where the awful stuff begins. Many translations have inserted the words 'they say' so that the words are transferred from me to the enemy, as though the enemy were saying it, because a nice guy like me wouldn't say this. And there is no manuscript evidence for 'they say.' Wow. So it is a translator's device for protecting pious people and saying that the wicked who are being assaulted here are really the ones who talk that way. It's another little maneuver of denial that nice people like us really don't talk that way.

We can't talk that way. That's right.

That's right.

Yeah. Well, while we're on the same subject, and that was from Psalm 109, and I wonder if you— I know I'm asking you this off the top of your head to do this, but I wanted to look over at Psalm 137 2. And Psalm 137 is, um, you know, the passage, by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept. Uh, do you remember enough off the top of your head to give us a little bit of context for that song?

I do, because I've been working on that song. Oh great, that's, that's a psalm, uh, that said, is said by, by the rivers of Babylon. So it is, it is the elite Jews who were carried away by Babylon into exile, and they're in Babylon and they are engaging in huge nostalgia for good old Jerusalem that they remember. And as you move through the psalm, there is a resolve that I am never going to forget Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the great treasure of my life, and I want to be in Jerusalem, blah blah blah blah blah. And then at the, at the last verses, the psalm notoriously turns to violence and asks God to destroy the Edomites, and it's a wish for crushing Babylonian babies. And I, I just came, Rick, to a new insight about this psalm, and what I think it is, an act of nostalgia for a Jerusalem that never existed.

Really?

So I, I I think they over-remember, and when you over-remember, you have huge anger toward people whom you think took it away from you. So when you over-remember Jerusalem, you are ready to verbalize violence against the Babylonians who have taken Jerusalem from you. Now, if you translate that into contemporary life, I think the nostalgia for a pristine white America that never existed, but we remember it that way, turns to violence toward the people whom we think have taken that wonderful white America away from us, so that all these mantras about take back our country and make America Make America Great Again are all acts of nostalgia to recover a world that never existed, that then invites violence toward— well, who would you say has taken it from us? Toward gays, toward immigrants, toward Muslims, toward everybody that doesn't fit in a pure white society. So I think the— Psalm 137 is a marvelous script for understanding how destructive nostalgia has become for us, and I think that all those Klansmen and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, they are over-remembering an America that never existed, and And they are ready for violence against all those that they perceive detracting from them.

Yeah, they perceive them as a threat. And it's sort of, and to some extent, you know, I think we get real nostalgic, and I like the show as much as anybody, Andy Griffith. We have this Mayberry mindset.

That's right, that's right.

And there's almost this sense in which, you know, we once, that was real at one time.

Yeah.

And we don't I fully remember, and I wasn't around when it originally aired, so I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty certain even that was kind of a nostalgia. That's right. That if you went into any town in America at that time, you wouldn't exactly find Mayberry. That's right.

That's right. Well, I grew up in a town like Mayberry, or it was smaller than Mayberry. And, you know, what we did is to confine all the black people in one little section. And they lived in poor houses and had poor jobs, but you never noticed that.

You didn't see that on the show, did you?

Right, that's right.

And that's another part of the conversation too, of because of our white privilege, we just choose not to see the other side of the coin.

That's correct, that's exactly right. And about Psalm 137, if you look at the critiques of Jerusalem of the great prophets of Israel, Jerusalem was a quite unjust city according to Amos or Jeremiah or any of those. And obviously the people that are remembering it didn't notice those injustices, remembering how great it was. That's right.

And it's interesting too because I think part of the context for this Psalm too is, as far as I know, they, they were in exile, and so they did have a great deal taken from them. It wasn't like it was all easy street either.

That's correct.

That's right. But to remember it not fully in the way that it once was, like you say, the prophets we're calling them out for their wickedness. And maybe I should just read a little bit of it. Okay, as we're talking about it, uh, Psalm 137. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. There on the willow trees we hung up our harps, for there those who carried us off demanded music and singing, and our captors called on us to be merry. Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither away. Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. Remember, O Lord, against the people of Edom the day of Jerusalem's fall, when they said, down with it, down with it, down to its very foundations. Oh Babylon, Babylon the destroyer! Happy the man who repays you for all that you did to us. Happy is he who shall seize your children and dash them on the rock. Or some translations, seize your babies, that's right, and dash them on the rock. Yeah, that's right.

Yep, yep.

Um, and, and as the, the songwriter, you know, sitting here talking about it too, I do find it interesting that the captors are saying, sing your songs. Yes, you know, do a dance for us or do whatever. And I wonder, um, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to this, of Jerusalem for them, maybe in some of their nostalgia, thinking that maybe the temple in Jerusalem was the place that God dwells and we don't have that now. So what does that say about our faith? I can't sing the Psalms anymore, the walls are down, you know. And, and what does that mean? If you take that perspective on it too. Can you just speak a little bit about that too?

Well, I think that the— if we take that statement at face value, that what the Babylonians were doing were taunting the Jews. I've read that the Nazis did that to Jews in the death camps, in which they made them sing Jewish songs. And then I suppose either verbally or implied they would say, "How's that working out for you now? Not so good, is it, huh? Sing it again for us." And I think that that would, if that's true, that would even feed the nostalgia greater and evoke a greater thirst for violence against people who were abusing them and so on. What I've done recently, Rick, is to juxtapose Psalm 109 37 with the oracle in Isaiah 42, where the prophet says, "Behold, I am doing a new thing. Do not remember former things." And I think it's about 42:10 or something like that. The former thing that he's asking them the Jews in exile to forget is the Exodus event of all things. Don't talk about the old Exodus, but notice the new Exodus of emancipation that I am doing for you now. So if you, if you take Isaiah 42 and Psalm 137 together, I think that 137, that that's a backward look, and, and what What Isaiah is asking them to do is to turn their life around, quit looking back, and start looking at the future in which God will be doing a new thing. And then he says to them, "Do you not perceive it? Can't you see what I'm doing?" And the reason they cannot see what he's doing is that they are locked in on nostalgia. So the more we are fixed on the way it used to be, the less we are receptive for the newness that God is working among us. That's right. What I think—

well, I think that's pretty good. Yeah, I'm seeing it here around verse 9. See how the first prophecies have come to pass, and now I declare new things before they break from the bud. I announce them to you. Sing a new song to the Lord, sing his praise throughout the earth, you that sail the sea And all sea creatures, and you inhabit the coast and the islands, let the wilderness and its towns rejoice, and the villages of the tribe of Kedar. It's interesting too, calling people to rejoice at a time where they don't feel very joyful.

That's right. I had not thought till you read it that way that the new song, whatever that's supposed to be, replaces the old songs of Zion. That's astonishing.

Yeah.

Yeah, which opens the door for music writers like you to do the new song.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. A lot of times we just recraft the old ones, but there's something to be said for that too. But yeah, no, this is good. I think it's helpful for us. There have been times, and again I'm gonna go back to personally in my life, where I have just felt like I've had no other recourse except to pray those particular Psalms.

Yep, yep.

And I'm finding that more lately. I think for a brief period in the last couple years, um, I've been asking questions and, and, and saying, well, I don't think Jesus would pray this Psalm, so maybe I shouldn't either.

Yeah.

And yet what I'm finding to be, I think, a healthier path is, while I don't think Jesus would necessarily condone it, and I don't think that we see Jesus enacting those things, I think that these are still the Psalms Jesus prayed, you know. I mean, this, this was his song, right? And, and again, it's, it's allowing God to be God and for us to just carry those things to us that we're feeling anyway. It's okay to admit that we're having a bad day. It's okay to admit to God, I'm just frustrated, I don't know what to say about this situation. I mean, there's been times that I've just— uncharacteristically of me, I think, even because I don't feel like I'm an angry person— there have been things over this past, you know, since it's the election that I'm just like spitting mad about things. I just can't believe the depth of just whatever. I could go on and on, but I won't today. But I do want to bring that around a little bit because we've been talking about the nostalgia factor. And I think that's very interesting. And I tried to make it to a few notes in there. They're too long. But Christianity Today had an article not too long ago. And it wasn't so much about like President Trump, but more it was about what it says about us as a nation and as people who, many of us, you know, who are Christians, who seem to be supporting that. And they made some interesting observations, and I'm going to try to pare them down just a little bit in what I read, but I'm concerned about what it says about us as Christians, as white Christian evangelicals especially, in this nation. I'm concerned because I've been asking this question a lot lately: if a person was to worship in my congregation for 25 years, what did that— was that person look like, you know? And if I multiply that by a nation of Christians, many of whom have been going to church, you know, for 50, 60 years, often in the same context, And if en masse, in white evangelicalism, what we have seen to be the way of Christ is the way of Donald Trump, it scares me about what that has meant for what we have done for discipleship.

Yes.

You know, and I'm not saying Hillary would have been any better. I'm not. I mean, on some level, I think she would have been better, but I still don't think she's the— I guess what I'm trying to say is it's not a pro-Hillary statement. It's a pro-Jesus statement. And that we've become so wrapped up in American evangelicalism and in nationalism tied together, yeah, that we can't see how separate they really are supposed to be. That's right, I guess. So a couple quick, quick observations here that Christianity Today made about this, and I'll just— maybe if you don't mind, you can just add some comments if anything comes to mind. He said that his candidacy has revealed the intersecularization of significant portions of the evangelical evangelical movement. And he wants to focus on 4 theological words to highlight the problem. The writer of this article, who I unfortunately didn't write down, I'll have to look that up and reference it later, but creation was the first word. So Trump reveals that many evangelicals have come to embrace a new doctrine of creation according to which the state accords basic rights instead of recognizing their dignity as fellow image bearers of God. Do you have any comment about that? I thought that was a pretty powerful statement.

Well, I think that when you take the wonder and majesty of creation and try to box it into an ideological loyalty, you obviously have lost all of the primary claims of creation. The the wonder of creation means that God's generous goodness in sustaining the world cannot become the property of any partisan claim of nation-state or church or tribe or anything like that, and I think some forms of evangelicalism have done that, as though we sort of are able to capture the truth of it and have it our way, which it seems to me is a terribly awkward misconstrual of the mystery that is contained in our confession that God is the Creator.

Yeah, yeah, that's powerful. The second word I'll have you comment on Sin. Trump reveals that many evangelicals have come to embrace a different idea of sin than evangelicals have in the past. First, sin is now seen less a condition that renders us miserable offenders before a holy God than mistakes good people make that fail to contribute to our best life now. Card-carrying evangelicals should have gotten it when Trump announced that he has never asked God for forgiveness because he doesn't really do anything that would require it.

That's right.

This is problematic from a Christian perspective on several levels. I wonder if you'd like to—

Well, it is the matter to which the church is always tempted, and that is to turn sin into a question of morality rather than to see that it is an elemental relational alienation. I would call that sin-lite.

Sin-lite.

If you get sin-lite, then all you need is grace-lite, and grace is not serious because sin is not serious. So obviously Trump is among those, or representative of those, who do not understand, according to evangelical faith, how deep is our alienation from from God, and that even our best virtues are distorted in ways that require the goodness and graciousness of God.

Right. And I can— the thing that's so puzzling to me about all this, because I was in high school when Bill Clinton was president, and of course we all know the scandal with Monica Lewinsky and everything like that. And I think rightly so. The church was outraged, you know, by it. Um, my, my question now as I talk about this is, why isn't the church outraged about some of these things that many times are even worse, you know? Or, um, and so it's, it's one of those things, it's, it's like we've come to a redefining of sin. Yeah, you know.

Well, I think that very many people hear Trump legitimating our fears. He is an embodiment of our fears. He's a very frightened man, and he echoes our fears back to us. And as long as he does that honestly, we will forgive him much else. And I think his functioning that way is very different from the way Bill Clinton positioned himself in the public domain. And I think with Clinton, it was very easy to be indignant about sex, whereas Trump's affronts are more manifold and more diffuse and more various, so it's not as easy to focus, I think.

Right. Yeah, very interesting. Uh, two more words from this article that I'm gonna come and bring us around to, and then I just have a couple comments from listeners that wanted me to share some things. Uh, the third word is Christ, very important one to us, obviously Christians. Jesus has become a brand and cultural political mascot. The term evangelical used to mean that the global community of those from every tribe, tongue, and nation, according to Revelation 5:9, were united by one Lord, one faith, one baptism through faith in Christ alone as the all-sufficient Savior from the condemnation and death that our sins deserve. Our ultimate demographic is in Christ. This trumps—no pun intended—our identity as Americans or as Democrats or Republicans, but Trump reminds us that many who call themselves evangelicals today find their ultimate loyalty in preserving or regaining a lost sociopolitical and cultural, perhaps even racial hegemony in an increasingly diverse society. By his gospel, Christ speaks to our deepest need to be united to him and to each other in his body.

Well, I think this is a— this is another example of of the great claims of gospel faith being captured by ideology and reduced to manageable proportion. And I think the attachment of Christ claims to national claims is a taproot ideology among us so that many liberal pastors tell me that they can critique critique the Bible, what they can't critique is the Wall Street Journal with American capitalism and all of that. So that particular sin of evangelicals is shared by progressive Christians as well, in which our racial privilege has caused us to redefine all of the categories categories in terms of Americanism. Yeah. And it is, it is an obscenity.

Yeah, it's, it's highly troubling to me for sure. Well, one more word, leadership. And this is again from this Christianity Today article. Trump reveals that godly leadership is apparently for some evangelicals the celebration of narcissism, greed, and deceitfulness in the pursuit of power. They like Trump's strong leadership and ability to get things done. They seem to value pragmatism over anything else. So how does that line up with Jesus?

Not well. Not well, does it? No, Jesus— it seems to me Jesus led from his vulnerability. Yeah. And Trump models leadership that has no vulnerability. We're talking here the morning after Trump gave his Afghanistan war speech. And I think that's a perfect example of huge posturing of virility and victory and all that crap that has no contact with reality. And I think that people, many people, are snookered by that presentation even though there's nothing behind it. That would legitimate it. Right. So if you think about Christ's conflict with the Roman Empire, that mode of leadership is an echo of the Roman emperors who were all-powerful and all everything. Yeah. And it seems to me that our evangelical confession is that in the mystery of Friday and Sunday, Jesus has defeated the imperial powers. Yeah. So we don't have any business, uh, signing on for those models.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And, you know, I've, I've thought about this recently too. It seems like— and maybe we've always done this to an extent— but with— as I look back in church history at Constantine and, you know, his I'm going to use air quotes, his conversion, you know, as I call it, when, when the emperor— because from what I understand, you know, he used the cross in battle as a symbol and he had victory in battle, and hey, I think I should be a Christian. And, you know, it becomes— I mean, that's simplification, obviously, but there's a sense in which the church lost a lot of its prophetic voice when it joined itself with Constantine and the empire, whereas before it had been very much a completely different kingdom unto itself. That's right. And it lost much of its power and much of its prophetic voice. And what I keep finding frustrating again and again, it's not so much even Trump, because I don't expect the empire to be anything except the empire, right? I always expect the secular realm to be the secular realm, right? What's so troubling to me is how much it has infected the church. —Yeah. —And that's what I really— I guess what I'm going for is that the church would be the church. And as Stanley Hauerwas says, "Allow the world to be the world and the church to be the church in the midst of it." And right now the line is very blurry, you know, and it's hard to see at times.

—Yeah, and I think we've been on that track, as you suggest, since Constantine. And in fact, the Reformation teachers did not interrupt that at all. All. They continued to think and operate in those patterns.

Yeah, well, it's a lot easier to not be the persecuted people on the run, you know. I mean, it's— that's right. Uh, I, I forget which theologian had said that it was looking over Rome and at one time, and the, and the phrase was, uh, the, the king had looked and said, no longer can we say silver or gold I do not have. And the Christian that was standing next to him and says, "Neither can we say, 'Rise and walk.'" That's correct. And I wish I could remember who said that, but it's exactly right.

So that our huge power in gospel terms makes us impotent.

Yes, yes, very much so. Well, just a couple comments and kind of a couple questions really, and you can answer them as well as you can. They were sort of last-minute things. One of them even just came in this morning, and I didn't have hardly a chance to process it myself.. But one of them, Rodney Brown writes in and he said, to ask you to elaborate on old versus new forgiveness. That's what he says. I think a great question is how we are to forgive as we are forgiven. The old ways, let's see, the old had ways to reconciliation that the new does not. In the midst of hate, do we reconcile where a person is at? Or whether the historical context has pushed us forward to just forgive and forget. It seems Jesus is not enough to just forgive and forget. So anyway, he's got some more that he goes on with the question, but I wonder if you could speak into that, into old versus new forgiveness.

Well, I don't know what he might mean by that. Bishop Tutu has written a very important book on forgiveness. And I think that Tutu's work on the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation sort of discovered that the forgiveness— that forgiveness is not an abrupt one-time deal, but it is a long-term process of taking seriously someone else's narrative. So when you told me at lunch about offering to meet with this guy who was objecting to some things you had said, you were taking the right path. Let's talk. Let's find out about this. Let's see how we each have become whom we have become. And I think that requires more of an investment in the life of another than most of us want to undertake.

Yeah, that's true. Um, all right, and then, um, here's a person that this morning, um, says his name is Troy, says, I'm coming out of a sovereign grace historical Baptist or primitive Baptist tradition. And, uh, and again, this may be a hard one to answer off the cuff, so I'll just read it and we'll see where we go. All right. Uh, what are some of the Bible verses, if any, that support a universal redemption, um, meaning Christ eventually redeeming all human beings unto himself? Um, he says also, what do I do with the verses I was taught that support a concept of a place for eternal damnation and punishment, or verses labeling some as children of wrath? So that's kind of a big question with no preparation.

I don't think I can answer it that way. What we have to see is that the Bible contains a spectrum of responses on any given question. So it doesn't do any good to quote Bible verses, right, to each other. But if we're going to center on Bible verses, then we must not take them as flat absolutes but we have to find out where did these verses come from, how can we contextualize them, and how can we correct them by other verses that say otherwise. What we have to recognize is the Bible speaks with many voices, and when we are— when any one of us is drawn to text A rather than text B, Then we have to ask, why is that so for us? Why do we like this verse, or why do we find this verse more compelling than this verse? And when we begin to, to think that way, what we've got to do is to go back in our own personal history and discover the things that are operative that cause us to embrace certain dimensions of Revelation to the dismissal of other dimensions of revelation. To recognize that the whole matter is very complex and is not simply a matter of lining up texts to oppose each other. It really doesn't work. And we need to, we need to quit using Bible verses as though they were clubs to beat up on other people with. What we have to do is to try to entertain those biblical texts that we like the least and see why somebody thought it was important to include it in the Bible.

Which brings us full circle back to those imprecatory Psalms.

It does. That's right.

Brilliant, the way you just did that for us today. Now, I, I think you're, you're very right. We're not very good at looking at the Bible as a whole. We're very good at taking a verse here and a verse there, and we don't realize that the Bible is often arguing with itself. That's right.

My phrase for that is that we are all, we are all selective fundamentalists. Yes, we've all selected verses that we regard as absolutely true, uh, at the expense of all other verses. And we have to get with other selective fundamentalists who have selected other verses and have a long-term conversation about what's going on between us.

Yeah, it's true. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking some time today. This has been exactly what I needed. And I'm just going to close with one last question today, and hopefully you won't have to think too hard about it. But you've been around and you've been doing this for a while. You know, if anybody's thought about theology, it's you. And if anybody's thought about the world, it's you and God. And I just wonder these days, what is bringing you the most hope?

Well, I think I am in a mood of back to basics. I think much of the constructed scaffolding that liberals and evangelicals have got about the faith is shown to be a fraud, and we are back to the most elemental claims about the godness of God that we know in Jesus of Nazareth. And, uh, I think that, uh, the ground of hope is found in the confession that he was crucified and raised on the third day, and that God will out in ways that we do not understand. Now, having said that, I, I think there are concrete, visible signs here and there of people who are committing society-changing acts, and I think we need to hold on to those desperately, but eventually we are driven behind those concrete visible acts to the confession about Jesus of Nazareth. That's what I think.

Well, that's, as the hymn writer says, my hope is built on nothing less. That's right. In Jesus' blood and righteousness.

Or Calvin's great hymn, "Our hope is in none other save in thee alone." Exactly true.

Well, I don't think we can top Jesus today. That's right. I think that's a good way for us to probably end our conversation. That's right. Well, Dr. Walter Brueggemann, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week. Thank you.

Good to talk.

Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author page on Amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace who raised Christ from the dead strengthen your inner being for every good work, and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.