The Prophetic Imagination
Page 7
In responsible biblical faith the freedom of God is always in considerable tension with the accessibility of God.[12] This tension was sharp for Moses, who tended to stress the freedom of God at the expense of his accessibility. With Solomon that tension has been completely dissolved in the interest of accessibility. Now there is no notion that God is free and that he may act apart from and even against this regime. Now God is totally and unquestionably accessible to the king and those to whom the king grants access. This new dissolution of the tension is asserted in the old poem of reliable presence:
The LORD has set the sun in the heavens,
but has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.
I have built thee an exalted house,
a place for thee to dwell in forever. (1 Kgs 8:12-13)
God is now “on call,” and access to him is controlled by the royal court. Such an arrangement clearly serves two interlocking functions. On the one hand, it assures ready sanction to every notion of the king because there can be no transcendent resistance or protest. On the other hand, it gives the king a monopoly so that no marginal person may approach this God except on the king’s terms. There will be no disturbing cry against the king here.
The tension between God’s freedom and God’s accessibility is a tricky issue that every religious person and especially ministers would do well to reflect upon. Indeed, the whole point of having religious functionaries is to assure access. That is the sociological expectation: “Will you say a prayer, pastor?” It is a burdensome irony that the bearer of the same office is the one called to assert the freedom of God that tempers the notion of accessibility. As it concerns Solomon, this tricky issue is resolved in an undialectical fashion. This poem, commonly regarded as in fact from the dedication of the temple, has God now as a permanent resident in Jerusalem. Any abrasion on the part of this God is unthinkable and untenable.
I believe that these three factors necessarily go together and that no one of them would occur or endure without the other two:
Obviously, oppressive politics and affluent economics depend on each other. Nevertheless, it is my contention that fundamental to both is the religion of the captive God in which all over-againstness is dissipated and the king and his ideology are completely at ease in the presence of God. When that tension concerning God’s freedom has been dissolved, religion easily becomes one more dimension, albeit an important one, for the integration of society. That was not new, and Solomon is hardly to be celebrated for his appreciation of religion. The oppressive pharaohs before him, of course, never doubted the importance of religion, but it was a religion of compatibility in which abrasion was absent. It provided a God who was so present to the regime and to the dominant consciousness that there was no chance of over-againstness; and where there was no over-againstness, there was no chance of newness. This, of course, is discerned as a danger and a threat.
This God is no court of appeal for the marginal ones over against the king, for he is now completely beholden to the king. The essential criticism of Marx is obviously pertinent here. It is precisely religion that legitimates and makes possible the economics and politics that emerged. And prophetic faith knows that if a criticism is to be mounted, it must begin in the unfreedom of God, which in turn results in a royal order quite free now to serve its own narrow interests.
Solomon was able to counter completely the counterculture of Moses.
1. He countered the economics of equality with the economics of affluence. The contrast is clear and sharp. Mosaic experience had this kind of vision: “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; each gathered according to what he could eat (Exod 16:18). Here there is no thought of surplus and the accumulation of consumer goods, for that is all over by the time one sits at the royal table in Jerusalem.
2. He countered the politics of justice with the politics of oppression. Mosaic experience had this kind of vision:
And if your brother becomes poor, and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall maintain him; as a stranger and a sojourner he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or increase, but fear your God; that your brother may live beside you. . . . For they are my servants, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves. (Lev 25:35-42)
That is all over by the time Solomon gets around to forced labor to enhance his rule.
3. He countered the religion of God’s freedom with the religion of God’s accessibility. Mosaic experience had this kind of vision of God’s freedom. Moses had insisted on God’s presence: “Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth?” (Exod 33:16). But Yahweh answers in his uncompromising freedom, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But . . . you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live” (Exod 33:19-20).
Solomon managed what one would think is not possible, for he had taken the Mosaic innovation and rendered it null and void. In tenth-century Jerusalem it is as though the whole revolution and social experiment had not happened. The long sequence of imperial history went on as though it had not been interrupted by this revelation of the liberating God. Solomon managed a remarkable continuity with the very Egyptian reality that Moses had sought to counter.
It need hardly be added that the Solomonic regime was able to silence criticism. There are two ways to silence criticism. One is the way of heavy-handed prohibition that is B.C.E. by forceful sanction. The treatment of Jeroboam in 1 Kgs 11:40 suggests this way of handling criticism, which is consistent with the style of bloodbath with which the long reign began (1 Kings 2). It is curious that, given the extended criticism of Ahijah the prophet in 1 Kings 11, Solomon makes no response. Indeed, the prophet is ignored. That is the second way of handling criticism: develop a natural immunity and remain totally impervious to criticism. The narrator seems to present that response of cold, resistant silence in deliberate irony. The same response is evident after the strong warning of 1 Kgs 9:1-9. Immediately the narrative responds: “At the end of twenty years in which Solomon had built two houses . . . King Solomon gave to Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee” (9:10-11). The royal consciousness was completely contained. Criticism had no viable alternative ground and did not need to be taken seriously. If Solomon had had television at his disposal, he would have managed to buy the harshest critics and make them talk-show celebrities.
There is no concrete evidence about the loss of energy in the regime. Indeed, the narrative suggests a remarkable level of energy toward all kinds of state developments, especially in economics and architecture. But one may at least wonder about the “happiness” of Solomon’s community (1 Kgs 4:20; 10:8), which reflects the happiness of satiation. It is at least thinkable that happiness characterized by satiation is not the same as the joy of freedom. It is evident that immunity to any transcendent voice and disregard of neighbor leads finally to the disappearance of passion. And where passion disappears there will not be any serious humanizing energy.[13]
While the late critical dating of Ecclesiastes is not to be doubted, one may hypothesize that the tradition was intuitively correct in assigning that teaching to Solomon.[14] I believe that the mood of world-weariness, satiation, boredom, and vanity in that literature is reflective of the Solomonic situation. To the extent that Ecclesiastes reflects a situation of alienation, it likely speaks of a situation like that of Solomon. Solomon had set out to counter the world of Moses’ community of liberation and he had done so effectively. He had traded a vision of freedom for the reality of security. He had banished the neighbor for the sake of reducing everyone to servants. He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely.
That is to make a harsh judgment upon a cultural reality that can, on the other hand, make certain positive claims for itself. But we are not enga
ged in a study of the royal consciousness on its own terms. We are here considering the meaning of prophetic alternative, an alternative to a social world void of criticism and energy. At the same time, we must at least pay attention to the theological contribution of this period in order to be alert to what is there so as not to overstate the prophetic perspective.
We may discern two major theological contributions from the period, both of which are important for biblical faith and for the Christian tradition. First, there is little doubt that creation faith is fully and formally articulated by the Jerusalem establishment.[15] Viewed negatively, creation faith is royal propaganda, daring to claim that the king–temple–royal city complex is the guarantor of both social and cosmic order, and that center of reality protects persons and communities from the dangers of anarchy. Positively, creation faith speaks to a community that has lost interest in survival questions and that is prepared to think more broadly about large issues of proportion, symmetry, and coherence. Thus it is precisely creation faith that rescues the Bible from a parochial discernment of human issues. However, from the point of view of the prophets, we are put on notice. In fact, creation faith tended to give questions of order priority over questions of justice. It tended to value symmetry inordinately and wanted to silence the abrasive concerns of the have-nots. It wanted to overlook the angularities of historical brothers and sisters and focus on large issues over which the king would preside. Hence, a prophetic alternative knows that creation faith brings with it certain costs and that these costs are paid by marginal people who do not figure in the ordering done by the king.
This, of course, is not to imagine that creation faith was first articulated in tenth-century Israel, for there are certainly older evidences. But it does seem likely that in the tenth century creation faith first received its programmatic statement in Israel. As the Mosaic community had sought and worked a sharp discontinuity with the imperial consciousness, now the theological enterprise involved a return to those very imperial perceptions and concerns.
Second, this period obviously features the emergence of messianism, that is, the presentation of the Davidic king not only as an important historical accident but also as a necessary agent of God’s ultimate purposes. Positively, the Davidic king is understood as an advocate for the marginal ones and so potentially figures as an agent of the Mosaic vision.[16] Negatively and more realistically, as the king takes on increasing significance and power and is assigned an enduring role in the purposes of God, the primary vision becomes the well-being and enhancement of the king per se and not the role of advocate for the marginal. The meaning of kingship could have gone in either direction, but in practice it became not an office of advocacy for the powerless but an agent of greater exploitation by the powerful. Prophetic consciousness thereby is put on notice against every historical agent that assigns to itself enduring, even ontological, significance.
Both creation faith and messianism have the potential of making major positive contributions to the life and faith of Israel. Both could have advanced the vision and promise of Moses. Creation faith might have articulated a vision of a just cosmic and social order. Messianism could have promised a reliable, powerful advocate for the powerless. In fact, both had intrinsically reactionary tendencies that functioned to enhance the status quo and to resist the abrasive covenantal questions. Thus, not only economically and politically but also theologically, tenth-century monarchic Israel moved against the revolution for the freedom of God and the politics of justice and freedom.
It may be that I have schematized matters too much, but I believe that schematization is evident in the text itself. The emergence of royal reality could have gone either way, and the tradition holds out a hope for faithful royal reality, even as late as Josiah (c. 640–609 B.C.E.). In fact, it did not turn out that way, and that indeed presents a major problem for biblical faith. Royal reality rode roughshod over Moses’ vision. The gift of freedom was taken over by the yearning for order. The human agenda of justice was utilized for security. The god of freedom and justice was co-opted for an eternal now. And in place of passion comes satiation.
I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate. We do not need to review the literature of passion but only to make reference to Soelle, Moltmann, Wiesel, and especially Heschel.[17] Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. That same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for—even Solomon in all his splendor.
This model of royal consciousness does not require too much interpretation to be seen as a characterization of our own cultural situation. I have no need to be too immediately “relevant” about these matters, for the careful discernment of these texts will in any case illuminate our own situation. So I offer this paradigm with the prospect that it may indeed help us understand our own situation more effectively. It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition.
Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.
Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.
Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology.
Perhaps you are like me, so enmeshed in this reality that another way is nearly unthinkable. The dominant history of that period, like the dominant history of our own time, consists in briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems. And that is not a place where much dancing happens and where no groaning is permitted.
We are seldom aware that a minority report may be found in the Bible, the vision of some fanatics who believe that the royal portrayal of history is not accurate because it does not do justice (sic) either to this God or to these brothers and sisters.
In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon, the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon. He is a God with a name of his own, which cannot be uttered by anyone but him. He is not the reflection of any, for he has his own person and retains that all to himself. He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries to the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.
So this is the paradigm I suggest for the prophetic imagination: a royal consciousness committed to achievable satiation.[18] An alternative prophetic consciousness devoted to the pathos and passion of covenanting. The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness, and it has done that to all of us. It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction. It has denied the legitimacy of tradition that requires us to remember, of authority that expects us to answer, and of community that calls us to care. It has so enthroned the present that a promised future, delayed but certain, is unthi
nkable.
The royal program of achievable satiation:
Is fed by a management mentality that believes there are no mysteries to honor, only problems to be solved. This, the Solomonic evidence urges, was not a time of great leadership, heroic battles, or bold initiatives. It was a time governed by the cost-accounting of a management mentality.
Is legitimated by an “official religion of optimism,”[19] which believes God has no business other than to maintain our standard of living, ensuring his own place in his palace.
Requires the annulment of the neighbor as a life-giver in our history; it imagines that we can live outside history as self-made men and women.