Category: The text as critic

This is a long quotation.

It took a while to type in.

It was worth it.

Wolff on Micah 7.18-20.

"The seventh statement brings a final climax, "Thou dost cast all our sins into the depths of the sea." In Exod. 15.5 we hear concerning the Egyptians who pursued Israel, "the waves covered them; they went down into the depths like a stone." As the foe went down like a stone, so sin our foremost foe, sinks into the depths of the sea like a stone. Let us note that the determining categories here when the forgiveness of sins is being discussed, are those of the exercise of power, of conquest over foes! The Lord displayed himself as victor, as the victor over the Egyptian army on Israel's behalf; similarly forgiveness is an act of surpassing victory which completely transforms the entire situation. Sin is humanity's deadly enemy – that is the presupposition here. When the foe has been hurled into the depth of the sea, life's circumstances are entirely new. Sin can cause no more trouble; it has been entirely removed.

Preceding everything that Israel could achieve or ruin was the word of God's unbreakable faithfulness, his promise to the forefathers (v 20). Through Jesus, the cross, and resurrection at the centre of history, that word of promise has been sealed for Israel, and at the same time put into effect for all peoples. It is in force and valid! Before I was born, this fundamental principle of the forgiveness of all our sins was put in force as the end of all our disputations with God and of all God's disputations with us.

When the burning fire within has been stamped out, and our sins sunk into the depths of the sea, then our community and each of its members experiences the legally valid end of God's dispute with us. That means nothing less than this; the final judgement, the last judgement has already been validly anticipated. Everyone can join in singing the sevenfold hymn of 7.18-20."  (H W Wolff, Micah the Prophet,pages 130-31)

Here is Wolff on Micah's Manifesto, about acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. The comment is on what it means to walk humbly  – shows why this is my kind of commentary

"Education for Dissent" is a necessary thing insofar as it is based on the fear of God. Disobedience to human authority is good for humans to the precise extent that it arises from unconditional obedience to the good Master of all humans and to his word and not from pure belligerency and lust for controversy. To say it another way, dissent is good insofar as it arises out of deep humility, the will to submit to humanity's Creator and Liberator. From that source arises a new style of living, a new way of acting out of dissent. The new lifestyle is a part of humility in the presence of God. It brings a new life up out of the waters of baptism.

But the Hebrew word for this third description of what is good contains a bit more than is expressed in our word "humility". Hasenea denotes attentiveness, thoughfulness, watchfulness. What then is good for us humans? "to live attentively, thoughtfully, watchfully with your God." It would take a lifetime to exhaust the implications of this expression. This third description of what is good does not refer to humility as an ethical posture of being ready to accept a lower social ranking (to say nothing about it being what it is often understood to be, an inauthentic pose, a false posturing of submission). What is meant is the attentive sharing with God in the journey on which He is travelling, "attentive journeying together with your God", what the New Testament calls "following Jesus". (pages 112-13)

Oh my goodness! Can that text be expounded better?.

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You'll see from the sidebar that I've been reading Hans Walter Wolff's far too little known exposition, Micah the Prophet. Published in English translation in 1981 it is a different kind of commentary. The first half is exposition which is a brilliant example of erudition made accessible, and biblical theology made relevant to contemporary cultural realities.

The second half (remember, published 1981) looks at problems faced by the world then – early ecological concerns, injustice and the poverty of the "Third World", European terrosist cells. In this section of the book Wolff looks at terrorism, social responsibility, ecology, the future of the church, and examines the implications for Christian existence through the lens of Micah. It's a fascinating experiment in Bible study that was way ahead of its time and still excites to read.

One of my lightly and undogmatically held theories is that at different times in our own lifetime certain biblical books seem to have a specific relevance to our lived experience, personally, nationally and globally. Micah is a prophet whose time has come yet again. Around the time Wolff was writing, Jimmy Carter began his Presidency hoping he would be remembered for an administration that acted justly, loved mercy and walked humbly. However much he succeeded or failed, he did articulate the fundamental ethical essentials for human flourishing and co-operative existence, and those same meta-values remain required principles of political action and social responsibility. Without them we will have more of the world we presently have, and less of the world God intends where human community grows out of justice, mercy and dethroned pride.

Here's Wolff on Micah's use of wordplay, and I read it the night the news reports on the Iraq inquiry featured the evidence of Tony Blair, when it seems words were played with in a quite different way:

Micah is a master at play on words. They help to make his message unforgettable…I am not interested in inspiring you to construct linguistically more brilliant or substantively more accurate proverbs. Rather my point is this: prophetic language is well honed. It is clear, unambiguous and penetrating. As such, it is therefore language that can be remembered, not readily forgotten; a person has to have heard it only once. In our current crises…the language we use to proclaim our message dare not piddle around with generalities, four fifths of which go in one ear and out the other without any effect. Micah is concerned with every syllable that he employs. (page 40-1)

There it is  – clear, unambiguous, penetrating, not piddling around with generalities, concerned with every syllable. That would give preaching a bit more bite, urgency and prophetic edge finely honed.

More of Wolff anon

Meanwhile, here's another kind of wordplay that subverts our cognitive sleepiness.

What did you read first – the colour or the words?

What happens in your head when you read the word orange and it is printed in green?

And what conclusions do we jump to when we read or hear words we think we already understand?

Words like act justly

                      love mercy

                             walk humbly.

.

"Christ came mainly for this reason: that we might learn how much God loves us, and might learn this to the end that we might begin to glow with love of him by whom we were first loved, and so might love our neighbour at the bidding and after the example of him who made himself our neighbour by loving us."

Augustine, quoted in L Gregory Jones, 'Baptism', in J J Buckley, D Yeago, Knowing the Tirune God. The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 168

Talking about how Christians make such a mess of living with difference and diversity in their understanding of their faith, a very good friend once remarked, "The way you relate to people demonstrates your conception of God."

Those who prefer conflict to reconciliation and argument to dialogue; those who see gentleness as weakness; those for whom openness to revision of thought is called compromise, and theological peacemaking is the culpable surrender of perma-fixed dogma; those who think certainty means the same as faith; those who believe that humanly framed theological propositions can be relied on to adequately express the mystery of sovereign self-emptying love as revealed in Jesus Christ; those whose standpoint is on that kind of terrain will have one kind of God.

But it will be hard to square that God with the God revealed and made known in Jesus Christ; the One in whom God was and is reconciling the world to himself; in whom the fulness of God was pleased to dwell in bodily form, in whom the Father who blesses all peace-makers as God's children is finally and definitively revealed; this God whose defining nature is love, and whose love is defined by the Cross.

I find this argument utterly compelling, and biblical in the most profound and searching sense of that often abused adjective – biblical. Amongst my theological and biblical ambitions (can you have such things?), for the next six months is to immerse myself in Colossians, that unparalleled exploration of what it is Christians claim when they confess, "Jesus is Lord!" – and in doing so bow in adoration before the One who is "the image of the invisible God..in whom all the fullness of God dwelt bodily", and the One through whom "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things in heaven and on earth, making peace through the blood of his cross."

The remarkable sculpture which illustrates this post is by Lyn Constable Maxwell. It was commisioned in 1994 and is titled ‘The
Crucified and Risen Christ’. It adorns All Saints Pastoral Centre,
London Colney.

'Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.'

'Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.'

'You explain nothing , O Poet,  but thanks to you all things become explicable.'

The above are several one liners on poets and poetry that I've noted from here and there. The first one is whimsical and hints at the capacity of poetry to juxtapose the unlikeliest things, so that incongruity and ambiguity undermine logic and linear thinking. The second reminds of the partiality of our sight, the transience of our perceptions and the possibilities of seeing the unexpected. The third defends the significance of mystery as that which awakens our deeply human longing for explanation, while recognsing that part of that same humanity is recognising the significance of the inexplicable. Poetry does all these things.

These thoughts link in my mind with a book I recently ordered, Seeing Things John's Way, by David DeSilva, (Westminster John Knox, 2009). It's an examination of the Apocalypse using rhetorical theory, and exploring what John does with words and images used to rhetorical effect in the service of theology. John's goal is to help his readers / hearers to see things in a new way, (or in the words above), opening and closing doors in order to give glimpses into an alternative reality, explaining nothing but enabling all things to become explicable. For Christians under the constraints of Empire, such rhetorical deconstruction of power, and reconstruction of divine purpose, would embolden faith by recharging the imagination with visions of the majesty of Christ, and the planned future for a Creation in which God will be all in all.

It's one of the great losses to Christian discipleship that the Book of Revelation has far too often been made to say and mean what it was never intended to say and mean. While on the other hand the author's artistry as a poet and his prescience as a prophet have seldom been given the attention they deserve as great gifts of vision and imagination capable of subverting even great empires, by appeal to the One who is greater and whose Kingdom is more durable. At times of cultural crisis, we need the poet prophets to deconstruct the rhetoric of empire by exposing it to the rhetoric of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, who sits in the midst of the throne, and who thus redefines power and majesty in ways that have eternal and cosmic consequences.

I remember as a young and innocent (ignorant?) Christian reading through the Book of Revelation and being thrilled, scared, puzzled and hooked. Since then NT scholars like Austin Farrer, G B Caird, and Richard Bauckham have educated my responses. There's a lot in this new book that should be preached today (you can see the contents on the amazon.com site) – and I don't mean the allegedly safe first three chapters. In a world awash with secular apocalytic scenarios, projected and actual, the Book of Revelation represents a triumphant canoncial contradiction of all those who say it has to be that way. And it does so by calling in question all those counsels of despair that simply assume evil and power have an unbroken monopoly in human history.

I hope De Silva's book is taken seriously by preachers, and will make a substantial contribution to the kind of preaching on Revelation that is neither other-worldly, world-hating nor world-denying. Instead, using this massive visionary text, preachers will once again call in question secular apocalyptic scenarios, by pointing to a redeemed and renewed creation, imaged in some of the most theologically potent ideas which focus on Christ as Lord of all, the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, and the permanent overwhelming of evil by that which finally negates it. In his Apocalyse, John speaks forth the renewal, redemption, reconciliation and eternal shalom of God's Creation, and the reign of a God whose nature, revealed in Jesus Christ, is eternal purposive love, expressed as communion and endlessly creative mercy.