Divine Presence amid Violence. Walter Brueggemann

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Divine Presence amid Violence - Walter Brueggemann


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analysis. Literary analysis seeks to take the text on its own terms as an offer of meaning, as an exercise in creative imagination to construct a world that does not exist apart from the literary act of the text.12 The nuances of the text are not simply imaginative literary moves, but are acts of world-making that create and evoke an alternative world available only through this text. The authoritative voices in such a method are

      In Old Testament studies, among the more effective efforts at analyses of literature as “making worlds” are those of:

      In any use, any awareness of ideology at all serves to alert one that texts are not to be read and trusted with straightforward claims, but that one must ask what the text and the interpretation of the text seek to do in the act of interpretation. It is for that reason that critical studies of late have become much interested in ideology critique as a counter to the kind of historical criticism that has tended toward positivism. The methods I have identified—rhetorical criticism and social-scientific criticism—recognize that every interpretation—and every text—is an act designed to accomplish something. Ideology critique is an effort to exercise a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion that does not dismiss the text in a skeptical way, but that recognizes that texts not only say, but do.

      Once one has recognized that texts do as well as say, it is useful to refer to the rubric of my Theology of the Old Testament with its subthesis of “testimony, dispute, and advocacy.” I have utilized these terms in order to explicate Old Testament theology because I have come to view the Old Testament (and its interpretive trajectories) as a contestation about the truth of God and of God’s world. The juridical terms I have employed suggest that the text and its interpretations are an ongoing act to determine what is true. There I have suggested

      • that testimony is a verbal account of reality that bears witness to a certain version of reality;

      • that such testimony is inescapably in dispute with other versions of reality that are also attested,

      • so that every version of reality—each text and each interpretation—vis-à-vis other texts and other interpretations advocates a certain version of reality that seeks to challenge and refute other versions.

      It is for that reason that I have utilized a juridical metaphor for Old Testament theology, because texts are like witnesses that trace out the character of Yahweh against other characterizations of Yahweh, and thereby advocate a certain rendering of reality.

      The upshot of this view of method, ideology, and testimony–dispute–advocacy is the recognition that every text makes its claim. Each such claim, moreover, requires attention, that it be recognized and understood and weighed alongside other texts with other claims. Such a perspective on biblical texts sees the “canon” as a venue for contestation. It takes the canon seriously but recognizes that the canonical literature does not offer a settled, coherent account of reality; rather it provides the materials for ongoing disputatious interpretation. Any consideration of the “culture wars” of our society—wherein both sides appeal to biblical texts—makes clear that the biblical text is a venue for contestation and that the texts themselves are grist for the dispute. In what follows I consider a text that surely is to be understood as thick with ideology, but that nonetheless is a carrier of “a disclosure” of the Holy One of Israel.