The Psalms (2)

The Psalms as Liberation Theology and The Unliberating Theology We North Americans Hold

“The psalms are dangerous . . . The psalms are a crash course in liberation theology.” So writes Richard Beck (http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-psalms-as-liberation-theology.html).

So used are we to reading the Psalms as “spiritual” or devotional reflections on the inner state of state of our hearts and our relationship with God. We think they deal with us (as individuals and a corporate people) and God. The spiritual/material dualism which keeps us locked within our souls (so to speak), and which we owe to Plato, causes us to miss the presence of a third party in many of the psalms of lament or disorientation.

These psalms, you might remember, are responses to times in our lives when everything has unraveled and fallen apart. It feels like life has ended so traumatic is our distress or suffering. We tend to read these laments as general expressions of mourning and grief. Yet something more particular than that is often going on in them. And the name of that particular “something more” is the enemy, the oppressor. There is a third party in the psalms. An opponent to God and to his people – “enemies, hecklers, back-stabbers, two-faced friends, violent oppressors and economic exploiters,” as Beck names them. And if you were one of these oppressors of Israel, you would likely want to ban these lament psalms from being read. He notes: “This goes to the source of lament in the psalms. Rarely is the lament about, say, the death of a loved one. The lament is generally about oppression, about the victory of the oppressor.
The lament is about the bad guys winning and the good guys being trampled underfoot.” Psalm 55:1-3, 9-11, 20-23 offers a clear example,

“Give ear to my prayer, O God;
do not hide yourself from my supplication.
Attend to me, and answer me;
I am troubled in my complaint.
I am distraught by the noise of the enemy,
because of the clamor of the wicked.
For they bring trouble upon me,
and in anger they cherish enmity against me.

“Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech;
for I see violence and strife in the city.
Day and night they go around it
on its walls,
and iniquity and trouble are within it;
ruin is in its midst;
oppression and fraud
do not depart from its marketplace.

“My companion laid hands on a friend
and violated a covenant with me
with speech smoother than butter,
but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil,
but in fact were drawn swords.

“Cast your burden on the Lord,
and he will sustain you;
he will never permit
the righteous to be moved.

“But you, O God, will cast them down
into the lowest pit;
the bloodthirsty and treacherous
shall not live out half their days.
But I will trust in you.”

The talk of the enemy here and their actions against the psalmist are not to be spiritualized into attacks of the devil against God’s people. At least not in the first place. That may be an extended sense of that this text means. But always and in the first place it means real life opposition and harm from human enemies. We might want to see behind such figures other powers and forces but we should never see them in place of them because we think we have no “real” enemies in our lives. If we cannot identify the enemies we ought to have because we live as God’s people then perhaps we are not really living as God’s people.

Israel, to the degree that it lived faithfully, found itself opposed to and contesting within and without its number those who violated God’s design for a world in which the poor, helpless, and neglected were cared for and protected. Neglect of this care and protection is a chief cause for God’s displeasure and judgment of his people and the nations.

The following themes appear repeatedly throughout the Psalter:

1) the suffering poor cry out in the laments
2) God judges those who oppress the poor
3) the righteous hear, aid, and protect the poor
4) the divine hesed (loving-kindness and justice of God toward all creation) and the way God and his people are to addresses this issue (Don Saliers http://ismreview.yale.edu/article/the-psalms-and-human-poverty/)

And our world today remains a cauldron of injustice, oppression, and violence, especially against the poor and needy. Our God remains implacably opposed to this demonic ecosystem. Therefore his people must have enemies. Yet we don’t. And church teaching and preaching does not help us here. Locked into apolitical pietism or conservative of liberal culture wars, we do not know who are enemies truly are or how the struggle against them should be waged. As Stanley Hauerwas writes:

“Rather, I need to have a sense of where the battle is, what the stakes are, and what the long-term strategy might be. But that is exactly what most preaching does not do. It does not help us locate our enemy, because it does not believe that Christians should have enemies. In the name of love and peace, Christian preaching has reinforced the “normal nihilism” that grips our lives. We have a difficult time recognizing the wars that are already occurring or the wars that should be occurring because we think it so irrational that some should kill others in the name of ‘values’” (Hauerwas, “Preaching as though We had Enemies,” First Things https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/05/003-preaching-as-though-we-had-enemies).

Yes, Richard Beck is right, “The psalms are liberation theology.”

The Unliberating Theology We North Americans Hold

To embrace and practice the liberating theology of the Psalms requires us to first identify the viewpoints we as North Americans tend to hold and to acknowledge that they are unliberating. Unacknowledged and not dealt with these views inevitably distort our understanding of scripture. We have bigger picture views about our nation as a whole and of those dynamics that move us personally and hold fast our loyalty.

Richard T. Hughes describes our nation in terms of a grounding myth and five further myths derived from it. gives us a picture of the larger identity that animates our national existence.

-the grounding myth is white supremacy,

-the first myth is that we are a chosen nation – God’s special people for a special, redemptive mission in the world that only we can fulfill,

-the second myth is that we are nature’s nation – we are the model for how people ought to live,

-the third myth is that of the Christian nation – the American way is grounded in core Christian values.

-the fourth myth is that we are the millennial nation – the US will usher in a golden age for all humankind, and

-the fifth is the idea of the innocent nation – the US always preserves its innocence in even the bloodiest of conflicts by virtue of its altruism and its righteous intentions.

As white people we are God’s chosen, exemplary, Christian, millennial, innocent nation that by virtue of God’s choosing us, he now depends on in such a way that our destiny and God’s are inextricably intertwined. It’s hard to be humble when you think you’re this good – and we haven’t been humble. Obvious theological distortions await as we take up the Psalms.

On a more personal level, and in some tension with our national image, Brueggemann outlines the “Not-Enough” view of the world based on a conviction that the world is constituted by scarcity. He writes,

“We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity -- a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity” (“The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity,” Christian Century, March 24-31, l999).

The chart below captures Brueggemann’s analysis of this scarcity mindset contrasted with the abundance mindset of the Psalms with my annotations. We will see these dynamics at work throughout the Psalms.

Not-Enough World	More-Than-Enough World
anxiety – I am not in control enough	divine faithfulness – God is in sovereign control
greed – I do not have enough	generosity – I have more than enough
self-sufficiency – I am not enough	ultimate dependence – God is more than enough
denial – my life does not fulfill my expectations enough	abrasive truth-telling – truth is more than enough to face the contradictions of our lives
despair – my world is not satisfying enough	hope -  life will finally be more than enough
amnesia – my world has not meaning enough to live by	lively remembering – my world has hints and examples of meaning more than enough to discern and live by
normlessness – nothing is enough/everything is permitted	a normed world – God’s way is more than enough to generate freedom and joy