Theology Today - Vol 42, No. 2 - July 1985 - ARTICLE - Passion and Perspective: Two Dimensions of Education in the Bible

172 - Passion and Perspective: Two Dimensions of Education in the Bible

Passion and Perspective: Two Dimensions of Education in the Bible
By Walter Brueggemann

"Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealist, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement."

IN 1918, Max Weber made the following statement: "Politics is a strong slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth-that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible."¹ There are clues here for understanding important dimensions of education, biblically understood.

Education in ancient Israel is education in a quite concrete passion. Education consists in the older generation communicating its concrete passions to the younger generation and, hopefully, having that younger generation appropriate them with zeal and imagination.

The texts that mark the beginning point of our discussion (Ex. 12:26, 13:8, 13:14; Deut. 6:20-21; Josh. 4:6, 21) are those that show the parents inculcating the young into what is foundational for the community. In one form or another, all of these texts anticipate a time to come when there will be learning readiness and the child will ask the questions

Walter Brueggemann is Evangelical Professor of Biblical Interpretation at Eden Theological Seminary, and a new member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. Some of his recent publications include The Message of the Psalms (1984), Genesis (1982), and The Creative Word:Canon as a Model for Biblical Education (1982)

¹"Politics as Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 128.

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of the community: What does it mean to be Israel? Why do we live the way we live and do what we do? The answer, in various castings, is to tell the story of this community, the long deep memory which started with nobodies who were surprised by transformation and became a community through the historical process (cf. Deut. 10:22). This community has a distinct identity that is in considerable tension with the values and the presuppositions of the dominant community. That distinct identity is the primary subject matter of education in passion.

Education in passion, in the Bible, is nurture into a distinct community that knows itself to be at odds with dominant assumptions. Torah education is an insistence on being full), covenanted Israel who has been chosen, summoned, commanded, and promised. This nurture in passion is concrete and specific, as indeed passion must always be. While Torah acknowledges that "others" are there and struggles with how Israel is to relate to and be understood in the midst of the others (cf. Gen. 12:1-3; Deut. 7:6-11, 23:3-8), it is nurture in particularity that is the main focus, a nurture that produces adults who know so well who they are and what is commanded that they value and celebrate their oddity in the face of every seductive and powerful imperial alternative.

Israel practices nurture in passion by including its young in its narrative imagination. Education in this mode consists in telling and hearing stories that are deeply rooted in the memory and experience of this people, but which are open-ended and can be imaginatively carried in many different directions depending on need, possibility, and circumstance. Israel asserts to its young that these are the stories. There can be no other stories. These are not negotiable. These must be embraced to be who we are. But Israel, at the same time, is enormously open to what these stories say and mean, and thus allows great freedom in interpretation. That is why some of the stories receive such different tellings. It is not because of redaction and editing, but because the stories are themselves acts of communal freedom.

The narrative life of Israel is a practice in tales of buoyancy. The narrative memory of Israel is cast as a story in which Yahweh, the invisible God and key actor in the narrative plot of Israel, is the subject of active verbs of liberation and nurture. Israel, and derivatively each person in Israel, is the object and recipient of Yahweh's liberating, nurturing work. The claim of the narrative grammar is that the crucial actions concerning Israel in the past are done for and to Israel, not by Israel (cf. Ex. 19:4; is a 40:31, 46:4). The central passions evoked in Israel by these stories are amazement which leads to praise, and gratitude which leads to obedience.

But, of course, the memory of Israel is more than a tale of well-being. Israel is capable of critical self-awareness and wants its young to be self-aware of the dangerous miscarriage of these tales of buoyancy. Therefore, the tales of buoyancy are oft-times made into tales of

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chagrin. Israel has enough self-knowledge to see that the relationship is skewed, that the gift of liberated life has been perverted, that the grant of free, fertile land has been abused. What has been given can be lost. The recital is turned so that it becomes a confession of sin (cf. Deut. 32:15-18; Ps. 78, 106; Neh. 9). It may be argued that this second version of the foundational narrative is not definitional. However, I suggest that the reality of "suspicion" in the life of Israel is indeed crucial. This does not lead to a sense of morbidity, but it does lead to a dialectic that is at the heart of Israel's passion. Both gratitude and guilt function to keep Israel's life with God alive and open.

III

Such nurture in passion leads to particular practices of passion in the public life of this people.

(1) This passion in Israel equips people to cry, to feel pain, to articulate the anguish, to sense the pathos and act on it. Israel's life with Yahweh begins in a cry (Ex. 2:23-25). That cry is not a confident address to God. Indeed, it is not even addressed to God. Israel's faith does not begin with theological boldness but with social need and social rage. The cry is a desperate assertion that life in its oppressive mode has become unbearable. Such a cry is not only an act of sensitivity but also an act of enormous boldness, for it dramatically delegitimates the claims of the Egyptian empire and announces that the imperial system is dysfunctional and therefore rejected. This cry is reenacted in Israel's credo (Deut. 26:7) and in Israel's law (Ex. 22:23, 27).

(2) This passion in Israel empowers Israel to care. The most succinct statement of this passion is in Deut. 10: 19:

Love the sojourner therefore;
for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

Nothing in that memory is as crucial and compelling as the core affirmation that Yahweh has strangely and inexplicably identified with and intervenes for those without social value and power. This central religious affirmation becomes the driving force for Israel's public ethic. Much of its ethical tradition is borrowed from common cultural deposits, but at the decisive points Israel's ethical tradition derives from this distinctive memory, as is evident in Torah instructions.

(3) This passion in Israel permitted rage, a theological act whereby Israel assaults what is or appears to be Yahweh's fickleness, indifference, or infidelity. Israel practices and teaches its young that it must not be excessively submissive even at the throne of God, for excessive submissiveness to God is most probably allied with excessive conformity to the social powers of the day. This is not to say that Israel refused awe, wonder, reverence, even silence at the throne, but that this is held in tension with the boldness to critique God to God's face.

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The material for this posture (now largely lost in the practice of a submissive church) is found in the lament Psalms, in extreme form in the poem of Job, and remarkably in the person of Moses in his daring prayers (see Ex. 32:32. 33:12-16, Num. 11:11-15). Such a passion for rage is, of course, a dangerous agenda for education, not easily welcomed in a settled community. Most settled communities would rather teach docility and respect for authority. To be docile, submissive, and passive, to refrain from rage, is a way to maintain order and to nurture obedience, respect. and conformity. But Israel's tradition is "an-iconic" in extreme form. It understands that the holiness of God demands acute seriousness from the human side. This education nurtures Israel's young into freedom at the throne which spins off in freedom in the face of every illegitimate oppressor (cf. Dan. 3:16-18).

(4) This passion in Israel authorizes Israel to hope. God will work an unextrapolated, underived newness, wrought ex nihilo, only out of God's power and purposes. One of the major gains of recent Scripture study is the rediscovery of the promissory character of the biblical God. This God makes promises and sojourns with this people to watch over the promises to bring them to fulfillment. We arrive in the narrative at the irreducible self-disclosure of God who is "on the way" with God's people. This people, conversely, is summoned to be "on the way" with this God to a new land, a new family, a new home, a new kingdom (cf. Heb. 11).

The capacity to hope, grounded in the very character of God, is the assertion of a critical principle. Keeping the future open to God's newness (which hope does) serves inevitably to keep the present open and under review, to preclude absolutizing the present. It is that tradition which causes Torah-nurtured people to be so impatient, so problematic, so energized, so difficult to administer.

Education in ancient Israel is education in urbane and reflective perspective "Perspective" is the element paired with passion in Weber's programmatic statement. Education consists in the older generation communicating its deposit of tested perspective to the younger generation, and, hopefully, having that generation appropriate that perspective with respect and discipline. The wisdom teaching of Israel makes such perspective available.

In both contexts of clan and court, the instruction of the young is fundamentally consolidating and conservative. It is done by those who have been able to "tame" life to their advantage. They have learned the secrets of economics, power, domestic life, speech, work, and all of the social operations which can enhance or endanger life. The test of such "secrets" is that they have produced a stable, well-ordered, reasonably prosperous, and secure social existence. Wisdom literature intends that the young should share this perspective in order that the well-being,

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prosperity, and security of the community can be sustained, so that the next generation can enjoy the social advantage now in hand which should not be risked.

At the very center of wisdom instruction is a buoyant, confident affirmation of God who presides over this orderly social process that produces well-being. It is the link between pragmatic benefit and theological affirmation that makes wisdom instruction so powerful and so convincing. Such teachers are not merely shrewd operators, but they spend their time trying to discern how God presides over the creation and human life.

A number of contemporary biblical scholars have in various ways argued that the wisdom instruction reflects a class orientation. It is the voice, experience, and perspective of the propertied class, that very group which takes responsibility for society, which generates security and well-being for the entire populace. In contrast to the awkwardness of the tales of passion and the sense that Israel is something of an oddity, there is no such awkwardness or sense of oddity in the wisdom perspective. The appeal is to common experience which is shared by non-Israelite tradition. Where the God of Israel is mentioned, that God is linked to and aligned with the truth that all could arrive at through reflection on experience. Education must equip the next generation of prosperous believers with a perspective on ethics and epistemology that will withstand the scrutiny of a pluralistic culture. "Perspective" permits one to function in public places and to make sense of general human interaction without recourse to obscurantist or sectarian claims.

This tradition of education can be seen in the notion of deed-consequence, the studied reflection on the coherence of human conduct with social and "natural" outcomes. This construct (identified by Koch and now commonly cited by scholars) seems to be an overarching conviction of wisdom teachers. To make sense of human experience through the deed-consequence construct is to educate the young so that they may appropriate and honor the modes of coherence and continuity practiced in this community. Thus the deed-consequence construct is a way of speaking to the young about how social power, social goods, and social access are distributed in this community and the criteria by which they are distributed. It is a statement of theodicy. Like every theodicy, this is, in part, a reflection of theological conviction. There are some givens that are ordained in the world and are known to be the will of God. The young must learn these and learn to respect and honor them, for their own well-being. In part, every theodicy is, however, also a reflection of social interest, a statement of the kind of behavior which this community approves and rewards and the kind of behavior which this community disapproves and punishes. Both elements must be learned in order to succeed in the community. Wisdom instruction imparts to the young both its best theological judgment about God's will

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and the community's best defense of its preferred social arrangement, which is also taught as sanctioned by God.

Four dimensions of nurture in perspective, typified in the deedconsequence construct, may be suggested.

(1) This perspective affirms that life in its many parts is coherently interrelated. The social process does not consist of discrete, isolated acts, each of which can be taken on its own terms. It is the self-deception of powerful people that one can mock the interrelatedness of life by being smart, quick, powerful, or ruthless, so that one can commit deeds and avoid consequences. It is thus assumed that one's actions are unfettered and one may do what one pleases.

The wisdom teachers, however, teach against such a conclusion and seek to mobilize every kind of evidence available to support their teaching. The simplest examples include: pride brings disgrace (Prov. 11:2); crookedness destroys ( 11:3); righteousness delivers from death ( 11:4); security for a stranger causes pain ( 11: 15). These examples. in their various forms, hold to the central conviction that things hang together in a moral coherence which cannot be outflanked, mocked, or escaped.

In our social context, we are now in an amorphous way trying to discern the connections between greed and order, between selfishness and justice, between permissiveness and happiness, between oppressiveness and humaneness. This tradition of perspective affirms that there are quite concrete and specific connections which are quite reliable. Close study will lead to their discernment. They are not finally hidden.

(2) This perspective acknowledges that there is transcendent mystery in the midst of the interrelatedness. It is the business of kings (and all those who have a monopoly on knowledge) to try to figure out the connections (Prov. 25:2), but the connections are beyond their control. There is a holy mystery at work in the coherence of life that cannot be penetrated or dissolved. If that is not so, life could be programmed to produce the desired results. That, of course. is the deception of all technical reason and scientific positivism.

The affirmation of the wisdom perspective is, therefore, twofold. It affirms that life's connections are discernible and every effort must be made to master those connections. There is a deep human yearning to know, and it is a proper yearning that is at the heart of nurture in perspective. But at the same time, wisdom teaching affirms the mystery and the recognition that God is not readily available and that life cannot be tightly managed. Indeed, such a tight management, were it possible, would surely lead to oppression and totalitarianism, not only political but epistemological as well. The wisdom tradition, as a whole, knows that such a reductionism is bad theology and a bad reading of experience.

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There are two kinds of fools: those who mock the order and pretend that it does not exist, and those who think they know too much and seek to control the order.

(3) The sapiential perspective, as expressed in Job and Ecclesiastes, not only knows but practices a critical unmasking of its own claims to knowledge. Education in this perspective requires the practice of critical unmasking, or, in the language of Paul Ricoeur, the practice of suspicion. It is not the case, as is often suggested, that Job and Ecclesiastes reflect the disintegration of the sapiential tradition. Rather, those literatures are the on-going practice and construction of that very tradition. Proverbs by itself is inclined to know too much and to believe too much in a naive way. Job and Ecclesiastes practice the other pole of sapiential reflection, in which the settled consensus is exposed as being at variance from the facts of experience. Job and Ecclesiastes are conversations about the reality of experience in the face of formulae which have grown cold and hard.

The capacity for suspicion, unmasking, and criticism is exceedingly important for the well-being of a community, though largely lacking in our own educational enterprise. It is important theologically, for without it one is unable to distinguish the true God from a variety of idols. It is important for social practice, because without it one is readily taken in by the claims of ideology and propaganda in which vested interest is only thinly disguised. The current intrusion of sectarian religion into public life in a most ideological fashion is a measure of the naivete and gullibility of a community which believes all of the Proverbs, but has never noticed the realities of Job and Ecclesiastes.

(4) This nurture in perspective does not, however, end in suspicion. Public life cannot finally be based on skepticism. Faith cannot be reduced simply to healthy doubt. Thus, at the end, this perspective arrives at trustful submission and yielding. That is, when the idols have been exposed and rejected, true wisdom ends in the fear of the Lord. One must state this carefully, as it comes only at the end of the process of education. If it comes earlier, it will short-circuit the suspicion, and then trustful obedience becomes the kind embodied in Job's friends and perhaps even in Proverbs. But at the end of the process, such trustful submission is offered even in Job (28:28) and Ecclesiastes (12:13). This perspective guards against an arrogant legalism and a mocking autonomy, and finally concludes that life consists in faithful obedience.

VII

The statement by Weber with which this essay opens contains another dialectic statement I want to pursue with regard to education: "Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth-that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for

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the impossible." I suggest that education in the Bible concerns both the possible and the impossible.

The wisdom tradition is stone cold sober about the possible. The wisdom teachers are voices of realism, shapers of policy, responsible participants in public life. They are not excessively given to flights of fantasy, wish, dream, or vision. They study how human and social processes work and how they can be made to work better. They study how creation processes work and how the human creature can be allied with them. There is, for this tradition, an enormous stake in being faithful, obedient people, in being voices of realism and responsible participants in public life. The wisdom teachers are the ones who thought intensely about the distribution of goods and management of social power. Some of the wisdom teachers surely lived close to the throne, and they knew that policy issues had to be addressed. They were committed to the processes of the possible.

But such a perspective taken by itself, Weber warns, is hazardous. It may reduce policy formation to technical reason, so that options are limited to a narrow range of perceptions and interests. Weber's shrewd judgment is that it is only, in reaching out for the impossible that the possible is attainable. In a thematic way, I suggest that Torah education in passion is precisely education in impossibility. That is what makes Torah such an attractive, maddening, dangerous literature. It is not excessively committed to being reasonable. Its appeal is not to common sense, but to imagination that invariably violates common sense. It invites the listener not to realism but to amazement.

Torah tells tales of babies born to old women (Gen. 18:1-15), of water held back for freedom only to drown the empire (Ex. 14), of bread strangely, given but not to be hoarded (Ex. 16), of water flowing from rocks (Ex. 17:1-7), of cities falling before trumpets (Josh. 6). Impossible claims pervade this narrative rendition of reality: slaves are freed, empires are brought low, poor become rich, empty become full, dead come to life, last become first. None of that could be turned directly into policy. But this narrative presentation of a counter-reality lives in the community to redescribe reality, to assault imagination, to open the horizons of what may be hoped and trusted.

When one is deeply nurtured in this tradition of impossibility and then returns stone cold sober to policy, questions of policy look very different. In Torah, the theme of impossibilty occurs not only in the narrative, but also occurs in what we call "law": protection of runaway, slaves (Deut. 23:15-16); cancellation of debts (15:1-6); sanctuary for murderers (19:1-10): loans without interest (23:19); limit of public beatings (25:1-3). The impossibility of narrative began to move into actual policy formation.

Both in narrative and in policy proposal, Israel's Torah playfully lives at the brink of impossibility. From this brink, Israel is invited to the perspective and shrewdness of wisdom, to think with hard-nosed realism

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about what is possible and what will work. But when one moves from the playground of Torah to the laboratory of wisdom, one sees the interplay between possibility and impossibility differently. One sees all old technical reason in jeopardy, all old priorities made porous, all old presuppositions kept under review.

The educated Israelite moves back and forth between passion and perspective, between impossibility and possibility, between free imagination and sober realism. It is never known ahead of time which will triumph in a particular situation. But the tradition consistently claims that the impossibilities of passion will eventually prevail over the more disciplined perspective. That is why, theologically as well as historically, the canon gives prior authority to Torah. The realism and cunning of wisdom must ultimately yield to this memory of impossibility.

VII

The programmatic statement by Weber concerns politics, not education in the Bible. What is striking is that a statement on politics can serve so well as a statement on education. The reason, of course, is that the Bible is a statement about public life. In both Testaments, the dominant metaphor of Kingdom is a political metaphor. Biblical education, then, concerns public life, the use of power, the management of resources, and the shaping of policy. In the best. most comprehensive sense, this education is for political life. The passions of Torah education are public passions concerning freedom and justice. The perspectives of wisdom education have to do with convictions and mystery as they operate in interpersonal relations and around such public issues as sexuality, money, power, and work. The passions and impossibilities of Torah are public. The perspectives and possibilities of wisdom are public.

Perhaps the primary issue in education, in relation to the Bible, is to break the grip on church education which tends to be privatistic, idealistic, and spiritual. The crucial question before us is whether, for the difficult decades to come, we shall have men and women in public life who have a passion for justice and a perspective of mystery, awe, and amazement. Without such passion and perspective, we are left with the worst forms of pragmatism, technical reason, and utilitarianism which uncritically practice self-interest of a brutal kind. Israel's alternative education insists that life in this world requires glad obedience to the coming Kingdom in which the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news preached to them (Luke 7:22). Without this education in passionate impossibility, the blind, lame, lepers, dead, and poor go unnoticed, and all the others are fated then to live in anxiety and despair until we destroy each other. Without this education in a perspective on the possible, there will be no concrete context for the impossible.