Book Reviews

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Reflections on The Covenanted Self by Walter Brueggemann, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press 1999.

Like the wanderings in the wilderness and the lessons that unfold there, The Covenanted Self is a journey into the meaning of being the people of God. In typical Brueggemann fashion, the journey goes deep into the heart of the scriptures and deep into the soul of the reader.
Brueggemann begins with the relationship between the individual and God. He gives attention to this relationship, not in a legalistic fashion as blind and static obedience, but as "the kind of delight whereby friendship ripens into love, and obligation is the chance to please and delight the other, the Thou who hopes and delights in us, as well as commands us."1 Next, Brueggemann stresses that this same love, this same covenant relationship, also relates to the neighbor, arguing that if Christians apply this love for neighbor, many of the dogmatic impasses seen in the church today can be resolved.
I identified a number of themes in the collection of essays in The Covenanted Self. Brueggemann begins, as does the scripture, you shall love the Lord your God.2 Brueggemann discusses lament and praise as the formula for expressing that love for God.
My beginning point here is that lament of assertion and hymns of abandonment are required and indispensable practices whereby this community of covenant makes itself ready and keeps itself ready for obedience to the commands of the "other," the "Thou" who gives life.3

Brueggemann is suggesting that there is no relationship, especially a relationship of love, without both components, lament and praise. There is a basic dishonesty in the absence of complaint and lament. Brueggemann refers to this as graceless obedience.4 Brueggemann compares the relationship and the development of a functional relationship with God to that of a mother and child.
The outcome is a "false self" and phony self in which all sense of real self is ceded over to mother and the baby never receives or embraces or enacts a full, true self, but is devoted ... in a life of bribery.5

Until one is free to express their total self to God, in lament as well as praise, the relationship is hollow. True love for God is being true to our humanity, to our selves; it is trusting of God to handle our complaints.
The people of God today are largely sycophantic in their relationship to God. Recently we have seen the powers of nature erupt (tsunami, earthquakes, hurricanes) with destructive power. A true love relationship allows the believer to weep and wail and voice their complaint to a God they know cares about their tears and pain. Like little boys of previous eras we are largely programmed in our churches that "big boys (and girls) don't cry." However, throughout the scriptures God responds to the cry. God does not respond by flattery. Often we substitute flattery for true praise that comes from a true love relationship with a God who can be trusted with all our pain and hurt.
Brueggemann expands this theme of love to the area of mutuality. He again uses the comparison of parent and child to express mutuality.6 He discusses that the love relationship with God is both mutual and incommensurate. This reminds me of the discussion concerning the divine name. That God is a God who desires relationship and He will be with us, He is all, but it will always be on His terms. Brueggemann suggests the same concept:
Rather this God is an endless live, demanding, giving surprising, problematic other in Israel's life. And Israel's life consists in coming to term with this other who refuses to be slotted, in the strange transaction of mutuality and incommensurability.7

Brueggemann seems to call both the "conservative" and the "liberal" to a balance in this area. God is not only a close friend who is near and dear to us and can be trusted when we lament, but He is also the God who commands and sets the terms for His engagement with the people of God.
In all the discussion about love, trust and fidelity to God, Brueggemann consistently returns to love your neighbor as your self.8 To love God without loving your neighbor is to not love of God at all. If I were to identify only one theme in The Covenanted Self, it would be that Brueggemann calls the people of God to love their neighbor. As in the scripture, Brueggemann asserts that there is no dividing of love for God with love for neighbor, they are inseparable.
Brueggemann expands this call to love your neighbor into what I would call a plea for social justice. Using the Pentateuch and on occasion the prophets, he calls us to examine modern social issues of economic disparity. He states:
...the practice of covenanted fidelity and covenanted freedom, fidelity to see all of our resources are held in trust in and for the neighbor with whom life is shared, and freedom that entails the practice of choices that attend both to the genuine regard of self and the genuine delight in generosity that enhances the neighborhood.9

Such a statement is difficult to hear in this country of plenty and in particular in the "Bible-belt" where the doctrine of capitalism and self-reliance are believed to be cardinal truths. We have bought into what Brueggemann calls the seduction of power, land and the social structure of Canaan.10 He strongly asserts that we view our economy as acceptable in its own terms and that we have "imperial gods and a pliable Jesus."11 A pliable Jesus is one that we fit into our own quest for power and economic dominance.
A call for the people of God to love your neighbor as yourself is largely stifled in our evangelical cathedrals. Brueggemann's assessment of our lack of love for neighbor is difficult to refute.
Throughout the essays, Brueggemann attacks what I would call sloppy grace, a grace that has no accountability. Brueggemann questions the Enlightenment's offer of unfettered freedom and calls it a distortion. He claims there is no unconditional or conditional relationship. Rather, this relationship must be both free and accountable. They are so intertwined that they are inseparable.12
Particularly in the last essay, Brueggemann attacks the myth of scarcity. With Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in our collective memory, with the failures of FEMA, it would be easy to claim scarcity and preach a need for total self-sufficiency. However, Brueggemann asserts there is enough. He asserts that God is a generous God who holds the world in His hand and therefore there is not only enough but there is abundance. He brings the people of God to accountability. If we accept the myth of scarcity, we will hoard for ourselves with closed hands and hearts. If we understand the truth, that there is enough, and that God has supplied in abundance and that our resources are truly in trust for our neighbor, our hands and hearts will be open. The miracle of multiplication will occur as we open not only our pocketbooks but our hearts and hands as well. Faith without works is dead is echoed in these assertions.13
To Brueggemann, to accept the myth of scarcity is to be in disbelief.
It may be that at bottom our problem is a kind of atheism that does not trust God's generosity. Without generosity of mind and heart, the second commandment is null and void.14
It is an act of atheism that is very deep in the practice of much greed, fear, and anxiety...But it is unfaith. The alternative rooted in God's abundance and enacted in the second Commandment, is that giving generates more, because beyond all of our generosity is the bottomless generosity of God. They gave themselves to the generosity of God, and then there was ample ground for giving. The claim of abundance over scarcity is not simply a nice theological idea, but is a concrete communal practice. Generosity transforms.15

Brueggemann reminds the church of its baptism. That being a baptized community is a community that has died to self, greed and brutality. It is a community that will empty itself for the sake of the other; it is one that will be vulnerable. It is a community that functions as Christ did, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, associating with the outcast and bringing them into the family of God. Moreover, it is a community that knows that by death to self, there will be resurrection to new life.16
To be such a community is to begin to be that peculiar people, the kingdom of priests and a holy nation. As I look at the people of God of today, with our capitalistic mindset, what Brueggemann calls the seduction of power and land, it is difficult to think that we can be transformed into a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. However, the beginning, the truth of creation, that there is enough; the truth of God's desire for relationship established in the Torah; a return to the teachings of the covenant and its framework for an alternative lifestyle must be re-examined. In Torah God gave promise first landless and childless people and then took slaves and through covenant showed them how to be a holy nation and a kingdom of priests. This framework is available to us today through the study of the Torah.
As Ancient Israel found it necessary to re-interpret and re-examine what the "law" meant in light of a changing world and society, so the church today needs to go back to the basics and re-examine what it means to be the people of God. Jesus is portrayed in the Gospel of Matthew as the "new Moses", as such Jesus fulfilled in His personhood and teaching all that the law contained. He told us that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God and the second is like it: love your neighbor as yourself.17
Perhaps we need a prophetic voice in our time to declare to the Pharisees of our day that our neighbor is not the person who literally lives next to us in our nice suburban homes. Nor is it the person sitting next to us in our evangelical cathedrals. Our neighbor includes the widow, orphan and the alien. In our time, the widow and orphan may be the single parent and their children or the grandparent raising grandchildren. What are we going to do with these neighbors? How we treat these neighbors is as important as our love for God. If the way we treat our neighbor is so intertwined with our love for God, then we do not truly love God until we love our neighbor.
The alien in our community may be the illegal Mexican. The alien may be the homeless person. The alien may be the prisoner or the addict. The alien may be an immigrant from a culture that we do not understand nor embrace. Again, Torah teaches us that as the people of God, we must never forget that we were once aliens before we were redeemed by the grace of God.
As God heard the cries of the Hebrew when they were in slavery in Egypt, and as God heard our cries, so God hears the cries of the widow, the orphan and the alien. The questions for the church today are, do we hear their cries and what are we going to do about their pain?
In my opinion, The Covenanted Self is a must read for the church today. However, more important than reading The Covenanted Self, is for us to teach in our Sunday Schools, Youth Groups, Bible studies, our Senior adult classes, and morning worship services, that Torah is for today. The gospel is found in the Torah as well as in the New Testament. The good news is that God desires relationship and has been at work since the beginning to redeem and restore people to Himself. The good news is that there is enough. The good news is that to love God is to embrace and be the means of grace for your neighbor.
We must repent of our sin of unbelief by believing in the myth of scarcity. A reminder that we are bound to God through covenanted relationship is necessary. The cross has not negated Torah; rather, it has fulfilled it.18 It is crucial to understand what it means to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. This understanding will bring the church into its full missional responsibility, to be Christ's representatives on earth.19
1 Brueggemann 31
2 Deuteronomy 6:5
3 Brueggemann 20-21
4 Brueggemann 21
5 Brueggemann 4
6 Brueggemann 38
7 Brueggemann 6
8 Leviticus 19:18
9 Brueggemann 44
10 Brueggemann 100-101
11 Brueggemann 98
12 Brueggemann 44-45
13 James 2:14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, "Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill," and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17 So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 18 But someone will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe-and shudder. 20 Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is barren? 21 Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. 23 Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness," and he was called the friend of God. 24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 Likewise, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road? 26 For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead. (NRSV)
14 Brueggemann 88
15 Brueggemann 87
16 Brueggemann 76-90
17 Matthew 22:37-40
18 Matthew 5:17
19 1 Peter 2:9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (NRSV)

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