128 - Rethinking Church Models Through Scripture

Rethinking Church Models Through Scripture
By Walter Brueggemann

"There is no one single or normative model of church life. It is dangerous and distorting for the church to opt for an absolutist model that it insists upon in every circumstance. Moreover, we are more prone to engage in such reductionism, if we do not keep alive a conversation concerning competing and conflicting models. Or to put it positively, models of the church must not be dictated by cultural reality, but they must be voiced and practiced in ways that take careful account of the particular time and circumstance into which God's people are called. Every model of the church must be critically contextual. "

To pose afresh the question of "models of the church" suggests a self-critical awareness that we are practitioners of a particular model that may not be the only one or the best one and that other models of the church are indeed thinkable. Such acknowledgment is a necessary awareness if we are to do any "re-choosing" of our notion of the church. Two significant books have dealt with this theme. One is the influential work of Avery Dulles, Models of the Church, a thoughtful reflection on the theme from a more systematic perspective. In the other, Images of the Church in the New Testament, Paul Mineara has provided a shrewd summary of models of the church in the New Testament.¹ Both the work of Dulles and of Minear have come from their sustained involvement in ecumenism, Dulles in a series of bi-lateral conversations and Minear from his work in Faith and Order. Undoubtedly the most influential grid of models is that of Richard

Walter Brueggemann is Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Power, Providence, and Personality (1990); I and II Samuel (1990); Interpretation and Obedience (1991); and Finally Comes the Poet (1989). This paper was originally presented to the Council of Conference Ministers of the United Church of Christ. It is offered in thanks to Paul H. Sherry, President.

¹Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1974); Paul S. Minear, Images of the Church in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960).

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Niebuhr in Christ and Culture.² That presentation in my judgment, however, has been severely distorted by its many users. Niebuhr's book is an historical study that reflects on the way in which the church, in many different times and circumstances, has had to posture its life in various and different ways. In common usage, however, Niebuhr's typology has been taken as normative and has been dehistoricized. The result is that being less historically critical than Niebuhr himself, we are all agreed that "Christ Transforming Culture" is everywhere and always the normative mode of the life of the church. This amounts to a reductionism that fails to note that both in the Bible and in the history of the church, many other models and postures have been deemed not only necessary but required.

There is no one single or normative model of church life. It is dangerous and distorting for the church to opt for an absolutist model that it insists upon in every circumstance. Moreover, we are more prone to engage in such reductionism if we do not keep alive a conversation concerning competing and conflicting models. Or, to put it positively, models of the church must not be dictated by cultural reality, but they must be voiced and practiced in ways that take careful account of the particular time and circumstance into which God's people are called. Every model of the church must be critically contextual.

Posing the question about models in this way at this time requires us to think about "Christ and culture," to think about the place where God has put us and what is an appropriate modeling for our time and circumstance. It is my intention and hope that my exploration in the Old Testament will suggest larger lines of reflection and other characterization of the church far beyond the Old Testament.

I

In the center of the Old Testament-in the center literarily, historically, and theologically-is the Jerusalem establishment of monarchy and dynasty. It is the royal mode of Israel from David in 1000 B.C.E. to 587 B.C.E. that gives us the core model for the people of God in the Old Testament. This model dominates our thinking even as it dominates the text itself. It is this phase of Israel's life that provides the core of the time-line around which we organize all of our thinking about the Old Testament. The test of that reality for me as an Old Testament teacher is that people regularly say, "Well, of course, the Old Testament model of faith and culture does not apply to us because Israel is both state and church." That statement can only refer to the monarchic period, but it is thought to be "the model." In fact, that convergence of "state and church" holds true for only a small part of the Old Testament, but it is the part that we take for granted and the part that dominates our interpretive imagination.

²H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1951).

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As this model dominates our reading of the Old Testament, it has served well the interests of an established, culturally legitimated church.³ We can identify four features of that model for the people of God:

(1) There were visible, legitimated, acceptable, stable, well financed religious structures with recognized, funded leadership. That is, the temple and its priesthood played a legitimated role in the ordering of civil imagination. The role of the stable temple for this model of church can hardly be overaccented.

(2) There was civic leadership in the role of the kings that was at least publicly committed to the same theological discernment as was the stable religious structure of the temple. Indeed, the temple functioned as the "royal chapel." To be sure, the kings of Jerusalem were not so zealous to enact that theological discernment in concrete ways, except for Hezekiah and Josiah; but they were at least pledged to it, so that a critical two-way conversation was formally possible. It did not seem odd for the priest to be in the palace, and it did not seem odd that the king should respond seriously to the finding of a temple scroll (cf. II Kings 22).

(3) There arose in this model of the people of God an intelligentsia that was part civic bureaucracy and part the lobby of higher education. The sapiential tradition, the sages of the Book of Proverbs who permeate and pervade the literature of the Old Testament, likely were influential in establishment thought in this period. This intellectual opinion accepted the formal presuppositions of temple religion. That is, the rule of Yahweh and the moral coherence of the world were assumptions of this community of reflection. This intelligentsia, however, exercised considerable freedom and imagination that drifted toward (a) autonomous reason and (b) support of state ideology.⁴ Established religion served well the stabilization of power and knowledge for some at the expense of others.⁵

(4) Exactly coterminal with stable temple leadership (priesthood) and with civic government that accepted the presuppositions of temple religion (king and sages) was the witness of the prophets, who regularly voice a more passionate, more radical, and more "pure" vision of Israelite faith. It may indeed give us pause that the career of the prophets lasts only during the monarchy. This voice of passion is viable only in a social circumstance where established powers are in principle committed to the same conversation.

This pattern of stable religious institution, sympathetic civic leader

³An analogue exists between the royal-temple establishment in ancient Israel and the Constantinian establishment of the church. Thus, the "end of the Constantiniana period" in the church is congenial to my argument

⁴For one possible rendering of the social function of the sages, see George C. Mendenhall, "The Shady Side of Wisdom: The Date and Purpose of Genesis 3," A Light Unto My Path ed. by Howard N. Bream et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), pp. 319-334.

⁵See J. David Pleins, "Poverty in the Social World of the Wise," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 37 (1987), pp. 61-78.

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ship, secularizing intelligentsia, and passionate prophecy all come, to us as a cultural package. (I dare suggest that this is, mutatis mutandis, the governing model of modern, established Christianity in the West.) As is well known, this entire model in ancient Israel was swept way in a cultural-geo-political upheaval. Moreover, the reason given for its being swept away is that the model had defaulted in its God-given vocation and was no longer acceptable to God.⁶ We are in a moment of like cultural geo-political upheaval that undoes us personally and institutionally. That upheaval in our own time is jarring and displacing, and may be why we now reflect on alternative "models." It is worth noting that the collapse and failure of this model in 587 B.C.E. generated in ancient Israel enormous pluralism and vitality, as the community searched about for new and viable models of life and faith.

II

Happily, the temple-royal-prophetic model of the people of God is not the only model evident in the Old Testament. That mode was fitting and appropriate for a time of stable, established power. Israel as the people of God in the Old Testament, however, is not normatively a body of established power. Indeed, one can argue that such power as the Davidic monarchy had was a brief (400 years) passing episode, not to be replicated ever again in the life of this people of God.

Israel, prior to the time of David, did very well with another model of its life. If Moses is dated to 1250 B.C.E., then we may say that for the period from Moses to David, 1250-1000, Israel ordered its life and its faith very differently. Five characteristics may be identified for this model:

(1) The life and faith Israel lived was nurtured and shaped by the Exodus liturgy that confessed that God called for moral, urgent, concrete disengagement from the power structures and perceptual patterns of the day (in this case Pharaoh, but later the Canaanitea city-states), in order to be an alternative community. That liturgy regularly battled for the imagination of the community that was vulnerable to seduction by the dominant social reality and often succumbed. (Thus the perennial attraction of going back to the flesh-pots of Egypt.) There is no way to soften or accommodate the sharp break that stands at the heart of Israel's self-identity, which must always be "re-nerved" for new situations of domestication. The community understands itself, so the liturgy attests, to be a community birthed in a radical and costly break.

(2) The meeting at Sinai and the endless process of reinterpretation of torah is an enterprise whereby Israel continues to think and rethink and rearticulate its faith and practice in light of its liberation. That practice required endless adjudication among conflicting opinions. If

⁶This argument is made with greatest clarity and passion in the traditions of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

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we take Leviticus to be more or less conservative and Deuteronomy to be more or less radical, then the on-going tension between Leviticus and Deuteronomy already sets the guidelines and perimeters for policy adjudication that is still required of us.⁷ This continued torah interpretation exhibits the church seeking to discern the mind and heart of God. It is only agreed that this community (a) is shaped in something like a holy covenant, (b) is a community liberated by God for new life in the world, and (c) refuses the sustenance of Pharoah. All else remained and remains to be decided.

(3) Early Israel from 1250 to 1000 had none of the features outlined above for the period of the establishment. It had no stable institutions; it had no sympathetic, stable civic leadership; it had no secularizing intelligentsia; and it had no prophetic voice. Imagine Israel without temple, without king, without sages, without prophets! That is how it was. Early Israel had much more modest means and modes. Indeed, Israel in this period had to make up everything as it went along. It was a community that had to improvise. Its daring, risky improvisation can, on the one hand, be seen as a practice of enormous borrowing from the culture around it. On the other hand, this was a process of deep transformation of what was borrowed, transformed according to its central passion for liberation and for covenant.

(4) Unlike Israel in the monarchic period, Israel in this early period was not unified, or we may say, not rigorously "connectional." It was, as the sociologists say, a segmented community of extended family units and tribes. These units had no central authority or treasury, nor were they blood units. They were communities bound by a common commitment to a central story and a distinctive social passion. It is fair to say that the story of liberation and covenant was inordinately important, but became much less important in the period of establishment when the temple made the story less palpable and less urgent. In the early period, lacking visible props, the community depended on the story being regularly heard and told.⁸

(5) The community of early Israel was a community that was socio-economically marginal. Its central metaphor is either the wilderness or the occupation of marginal land that no one else wanted. In the wilderness, the community lived by bread from heaven and water from rock, without guaranteed or managed resources. In its marginal land, it depended in its times of threat on the movement of the Spirit to give energy, courage, and power sufficient for the crisis. This was a community that lacked the capacity (or perhaps the will) for more stable resources, but managed by a different posture of faith and witness.

⁷Such a juxtaposition of Leviticus and Deuteronomy is shrewdly rendered by Fernando Belo, A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1981), pp. 1-86 and passim.el.

⁸George Lindbeck, "The Church," Keeping the Faith; Essays to Mark the Centenary of Lux Mundi, ed. by Geoffrey Wainwright (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), pp. 179-208, has argued that "storied community" is the primary identifying mark of Christian ecclesiology.

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In the most radical way possible, Israel was indeed "a new church start. " A new church start here entails the planting of an alternative community among people who were ready for risk and who shunned established social relations because such resources and patterns inevitably led to domestication and to bondage. It is a new church start that specialized in neighbor priorities and had at its center the powerful voices of Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, whose main work was voicing and revoicing and voicing again the liturgy of liberation and the covenant of reshaping communal life, power, and vision.

It may give us pause that the temple model grew increasingly impatient with the voice of Moses, whose leadership was kept in endless jeopardy and under abrasive challenge. It is likely that the narrative of the Golden Calf (Exod. 32), wherein Moses rebukes Aaron, is a partisan assault made by the "new church start" model against the established church model that is too busy generating structure and icon.

III

At the other end of the Old Testament, we may identify yet another model for the community of faith. The temple model came to an abrupt end in 587 B.C.E. To be sure, there was a second temple built after 520, but it never came to exercise a dominant place in the community, nor to capture the imagination of subsequent interpreters. Clearly with the events of 587, the symbiotic relation of king and prophet collapsed. This new circumstance began in exile under the Babylonians, then continued under the patronage of the Persians, and finally faced the coming of Hellenization. It is worth noting that, characteristically, Christians know very little about this period, pay little attention to it, and care little for it. Very likely this lack of interest reflects our stereotypes of "post-exilic Judaism" that go back at least to the caricatures of Wellhausen. That is, our systemic neglect reflects the anti-Semitic tendency of our interpretive categories. There is at the present time great attention to this period among scholars that requires us to move well beyond our dismissive stereotypes. Recent scholarship suggests that there was a greatly variegated practice of Judaism bespeaking pluralism in this period. It was a pluralism that was theologically serious, with enormous imagination in its practice of faith and vitality in its literary inventiveness.

This exilic, post-exilic period after the collapse of the temple hegemony is one to which we must pay considerable attention for it may, mutatis mutandis, be echoed in our own time and circumstance. Five facets of this model may be noted:

(1) The community of faith had to live in a context where it exercised little influence over public policy. It is debatable the extent to which the imperial overlords exercised benign neglect so long as they received tax payments, and the extent to which they were hostile in an attempt to nullify the scandalous particularity of the Jews. The

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stereotype we have is that the Babylonians were hostile and the Persians were benign, but that may be an ideological construct put together by those indentured to the Persians government. In any case, after one considers the drama of Elijah versus Ahab, Amos versus Amaziah, and Jeremiah versus Zedekiah, one notices that there is no such confrontation model now available. The reason appears to be that there is no one on the side of power interested in such a confrontation, for this community of faith had become politically innocuous and irrelevant.

(2) The temptations to cultural syncretism and the disappearance of a distinct identity were acute, particularly in the Hellenistic period. The Maccabean period offers us an example of Jewish boys who were embarrassed about their circumcision and who tried to "pass." In the monarchic period, while there was indeed syncretism, there was no danger of losing an Israelite identity, because public institutions supported that identity, and one could afford to be indolent about it. Now, because such institutions are lacking, and because the pattern of social pay-outs tended to invite people away from this community of peculiar identity and passion, the deliberate maintenance of a distinctive identity required great intentionality.

(3) In the face of political irrelevance and social syncretism, a main task of the community was to work very hard and intentionally at the cultural-linguistic infrastructure of the community.⁹ D. L. Smith has called that work the development of strategies and mechanisms for survival, because the threat was in fact the disappearance of the community of faith into a universalizing culture that was partly hostile to any particularity and that was partly indifferent.¹⁰ Among these strategies for survival, three seem crucial for our reflection.

First, this community, in the face of socio-political marginality, worked at the recovery of memory and rootage and connectedness. The primary evidence of this in the Old Testament is the extended genealogies, most of which were articulated in this later period. The purpose of genealogy is to connect the threatened present generation with the horizon of reference points from the past. That is, a studied recovery of the past intends to combat the "now generation" and the disease of autonomy and individualism that imagines we live in an historical vacuum.

A second strategy for survival in a community at the brink of despair is the intense practice of hope. The rhetoric of the community filled its imagination with the quite concrete promises of God. In its extreme form, this rhetoric of hope issues in apocalyptic. In our study of apocalyptic, there is much for us to learn about the sociology of our

⁹I deliberately use the phrasing of George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984). The categories of Lindbeck's argument greatly illumine the practice of ancient Israel when it lacked cultural institutions of support.

¹⁰Daniel L. Smith, The Religion of the Landless: The Social Context of the Babylonian Exile (Bloomington, Ind.: Meyer Stone, 1989).

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knowledge. When the church is safe and settled and allied with the status quo, it is impatient with apocalyptic. Indeed, most critical scholarship has dismissed apocalyptic as "bizarre." Among the communities of the marginal, however, who find the present laden with hopelessness, apocalyptic is a rhetorical act of power. Thus, this literature and this rhetoric belong rightly on the lips of the "world weary" who see this rhetoric as critically subversive of every status quo. It is telling, now, that apocalyptic rhetoric in our culture appeals to apparently well-off people who are beset by despair.

I believe this is important because satiated young people in the U.S. (including some of our own children) mostly do not know that something else is yet promised by God. That future is not to be wrought by our busy, educated hands, but by the faithfulness of God. The community at the margin, when it functions at all, is a community of intense, trustful waiting.

The third strategy of survival worth noting is that the post-exilic community became an intensely textual community. It was busy formulating the text; so it is widely believed that the period around the exile is precisely the period of canonization, the making of normative literature. It was also busy interpreting the text. This is the period of the emergence of the synagogue, which is the place of the text, the formation of the Beth Midrash, "house of study," and eventually, the appearance of the rabbis who are teachers of the tradition. Textual study was focused on the imaginative construal of a normative text. This imaginative construal of the text, which so characterizes Judaism, did not drive toward theological settlement or moral consensus, but believed that the act of construal of this text itself is a quintessential Jewish act. Such an act in the midst of marginality did not need a controlled outcome.

With a high and passionate view of Scripture, we must not miss the point concerning social power. The point of sustained textual study is not objective erudition, information, or conclusion. The point is rather to enter into and engage with a tradition of speech, reflection, discernment, and imagination that will prevail over the textual constraints of Persian power and Hellenistic hostility. A textless Jew is no Jew at all, sure to be co-opted and sure to disappear into the woodwork. And my sense is that a textless church is increasingly no church at all.

The New Yorker, of all places, has suggested that the U.S. has had as its organizing story "The Cold War."¹¹ That story has now failed and our civil community, says The New Yorker, is essentially "storyless. " So it has always been; the story offered by the dominant empire turns out to be no story at all. These besieged Jews knew that. They not only knew that to keep their young they had to engage the text on its own terms, they also dared to imagine that their particular text was the

¹¹"Notes and Comments," The New Yorker (May 21, 1990), pp. 27-28.

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voice of God among them and the voice of a true story that would persist in the face of empire and cultural hegemony. This community developed a deep and vibrant confidence in its text, which is what the process of canonization is all about.

Circumstance, therefore, required a shift from a temple-royal-prophetic community to a textual community, which struggled with the text in all its truth and in all its dangerous subversiveness, continually witnessing to another mode of reality.

IV

I have suggested three models that are intensely reflective of social crisis and historical circumstance:

(a) pre-monarchic model as "new church start,"
(b) monarchic model as temple community,
(c) post-exilic model as a textual community.

It is readily clear that the early pre-monarchic and the late postmonarchic have more in common, and both are easily contrasted with the security and stability of the monarchic model. Finally then, we may reflect on the dialectic relation of early and late models that had so much in common.

There is no doubt, on the one hand, that the late community went back to the early community. That is, it in fact jumped over the monarchic period to find resources in the early sources that could sustain it. It did not find in the period of the establishment what it needed, but was driven back to more primitive and less stable models. This is poignantly evident in Ezra, the founder of Judaism, who is the second Moses and who replicated the first Moses.

On the other hand, and much more delicately, the late community not only used the early materials but intruded upon those materials, preempted and reshaped the early traditions for its own use. In the documentary hypothesis concerning the Pentateuch, the Priestly tradition represents a later recasting of early tradition. That is, the late material is not all in the late part of the Bible, but some of the later material is cast as early material. The P tradition is conventionally dated to the sixth or fifth century, either exilic or early post-exilic. When, therefore, we read the pre-David texts, if we pay attention, many of those texts are post-exilic and show not only the needs but also the faith of the later community. Four examples demonstrate late material cast as early material:

(1) Gen. 1:1-2:4a, on the creation as a P statement that culminates in Sabbath as a sacrament. It is in the late period that Sabbath emerges as a mark of Jewishness, when the Jews in an alien environment had to assert that Jews (and others) were not cogs in any imperial machine, but creatures made in God's image, destined for dignity. Thus, the late liturgy responded to a social situation of despair by generating a sacrament of dignity and liberation.

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(2) Gen. 17, in which Abraham circumcises his offspring, is a Priestly document, asserting in the late period that the community must have a visible discipline of identity. Circumcision, albeit sexist, is a visible mark whereby insiders can be distinguished from outsiders, so that members of the community know who is marked by God's promise and who stands under God's commandment. Circumcision emerged in the post-exilic period as a decisive mark of Jewishness. Such a text in such a community invites a rethinking of the marking of baptism in a context that is either hostile or neglectful.

(3) Exodus 16, the story of manna in the wilderness, contains Priestly elements. The wilderness becomes, in such a story, a cipher for exile, so that the exiles, marginated faithful people, live by the gifts of God and not by their managed surplus. It is striking that the text warns against surplus, the kind of surplus that made the temple possible. Moreover, the text relentlessly culminates in Sabbath, the occasion when an abundance of food is given (See Isa. 55:1-3 and Daniel 1).

(4) Exodus 26 is a design for the tabernacle in a Priestly tradition. While the model for the tabernacle no doubt reflects the temple, the intent of the text is to permit God mobility, capability of being on the way with God's displaced people. This is a God who has a portable shrine and who will travel.

The point of this linkage of late and early is to suggest that, in doing textual work (which became a primary activity of the marginated community), the late community must recast what the early community had done for the sake of its own crisis. This means that after the establishment, as before the establishment, this was essentially a new church start. Post-exilic Judaism is a vibrant act of new generativity, not enslaved to its oldest memories, and not immobilized by its recent memory of establishment power. Ezra is the great new church start leader. A new church start means reformulating the faith in radical ways in the midst of a community that has to begin again. For Ezra as for Moses, new church starts do not aim at strategies for success, but at strategies for survival of an alternative community. What must survive is not simply the physical community; what must survive is an alternative community with an alternative memory and an alternative social perception rooted in a peculiar text, identified by a peculiar genealogy, signed by peculiar sacraments, peculiar people not excessively beholden to the empire, and not lusting after domestication into the empire.

V

Whether this grid is pertinent to our present rethinking partly depends on the cogency of the analysis offered of these traditions. It also depends partly on a judgment about whether we are in a time when our alliance with the dominant culture is being broken, whether the power of the temple is broken, whether the empire is indifferent or hostile, whether the prophets lack a partner in confrontation. This

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argument receives support from three sources at least:

(1) The collapse of modernity is a crucial theme in much contemporary social analysis.¹² We have to face the fact that our dominant models of church have been fashioned for modernity and depend on its presuppositions, presuppositions that no longer prevail.

(2) It is clear that conventional kinds of theological speech are no longer accepted as "public speech." That is, civic leadership is not in any serious way any longer formally committed to established church rhetoric, so that appeals from our tradition are less and less significant politically.

(3) Many of our young (particularly the young of good liberals, but not only the children of liberals) have only the vaguest idea of what we intend in our faith.

A move from temple to text, requires a reconsideration of our social location, of the resources on which we can and must count, and of the work we have to do about the infrastructure that has largely collapsed. While we may find "wilderness-exile" models less congenial, there is no biblical evidence that the God of the Bible cringes at the prospect of this community being one of wilderness and exile, Indeed, this God resisted the temple in any case (cf. IISam. 7:4-7). In the end, it is God and not the Babylonians who terminated the temple project. In the face of that possible eventuality in our own time and circumstance, the ways for the survival of an alternative imagination in an alternative community call for new strategies.¹³

¹²I have found most helpful Stephen Toulmina, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990), but there is a growing literature on the subject.

¹³See my suggestions in "Disciplines of Readiness," [Occasional Paper No. 1; Louisville: Theology and Worship Unit, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 1988].