506 - Israel's Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology

Israel's Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology

By Walter Brueggemann

Philadelphia, Fortress, 1988. 196 Pp. $10.95.

Brueggemann takes up the sociological question of the Psalms, which function "inevitably in the deployment and legitimation of social power"; relates this to the contemporary task of the pastor in "world-making"; and lifts up liturgy as a key meeting place of these ancient and modern social realities. Liturgy is a constitutive act, through which our world is renewed and transformed. But liturgy can (re)shape that world in negative ways. Many psalms have served faith and world well. But many others (for example, the hymns) serve idolatrous (portraying a god who has no history and does not act) and ideological (uncritically supporting existing social arrangements) purposes. These are the "establishment liturgies" of king and temple, which neglect the world's pain and surround the existing order with the magisterial rule of God.

This is one of the most rigorous applications of the "canon within the canon" hermeneutic of which I am aware. It applies the prophetic critique to those forms of worship not explicitly normed by the Exodus tradition and specifically informed by the pain of life. Pain must be "the matrix of praise." Hence, the laments and songs of thanksgiving become the center of the canon, while other psalms are pushed to the edge of the canon as triumphalistic. Psalm 46, for example, "silenced the hard tales of hurt, bondage, and injustice... and the world was now whole, good, lovely, ordered, under control. Such selfassured doxology... surely leads to social ideology." Brueggemann is not hesitant to indict many contemporary liturgies for cloaking comparable idolatries and ideologies, and convincingly so.

This book may be considered a specific application of Brueggemann's agenda for doing Old Testament theology (cf. Catholic Biblical Quarterly 47 [19851, pp. 28-46, 395-415). Provocative and rhetorically powerful, the book often left me wanting more precision in its formulations and wondering whether lament can carry the theological freight suggested.

Terence E. Fretheim, Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minn.