God is Odd

Reformed theologian Walter Brueggemann has a great quote. In reference to God's displeasure and active punishing of the socially unjust Israelites as portrayed in the prophet Isaiah he says,

"It's easy in our secularized time to find such a Yahweh reference more than a little naive, and surely life can be well imagined and well understood without reference to Yahweh. But it must have been equally easy to do so in that ancient context. It is easier to perceive reality in terms of practical politics than it is to situate a decisive Yahweh at its center. According to the prophetic tradition, however, such a construal of reality is deeply misguided and will never bring security, well-being, or joy. Yahweh is the inescapable character at the center of things. Yahweh is, insists the poet, (Isaiah), deeply offended and mobilized to wound. All this from Yahweh can be avoided, but the requirement for such avoidance is taken by Judah to be too heavy. For that reason the hand of Yahweh remains vigorously and hostilely stretched out. Such poetry is an odd rendering of reality. But Bible believers do indeed operate with such an odd sense of reality as the only version of reality that makes sense of the whole world."

One might question exactly how "odd" this view of reality is. But it doesn't need to be too "odd" for Brueggemann's point to be grasped. For the prophetic perspective is in any age, as Brueggemann points out, conter-cultural. It certainly is odd in a secular age. And in mentioning secularism at all Brueggemann may have dug himself into a hole, but despite his vagueness, one like myself who shares many of his presuppositions can appreciate what's being said here, which is very relevant. We rarely put ourselves in the situations of the subjects who are receiving these prophecies. We get to see it all from God's objective point of view, and we sometimes in the prophets get a glimpse of God's personal feelings. But suppose that we were receiving the prophecies, let alone as secular people, but as ancients, it's relationship to our experience, our reality would certainly be difficult to detect, unless we have already decided to look at things from God's point of view. If there is indeed a difference between God's perspective of our experience and ours, and God is of the opinion that our refusal to hear his perspective is the cause of our rebellion, then we are doomed unless we choose to hear it from God's perspective, because there are two realities, and ours is not really reality. An Israelite might say for example that the reason Assyria is an Empire is that they have the biggest and best army in the whole world, the prophets would say that God has granted Assyria the biggest and best army in the world so that He can bring punishment upon disobedient Israel. So for an Israelite the correct perspective is one which is focused on their relationship to God. And perhaps the most stunning and I would say beautiful aspect of this line of thinking is that God is so much less world-event oriented than he is covenant relationship with Israel oriented. If history was a newspaper, (bear with the analogy)God's favorite page might be the Israel section which to the editors of this particular paper is worthy of (if its worthy of the paper at all) section E.

"His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts"

In a nutshell God is counter-cultural.