CAPÍTULO III MARCO
3.9. Técnicas de procesamiento y análisis de datos
In the years leading up to 8(6)&.9($ -6)2(&, an inversion seems to occur in the theological trajectory which characterized Brueggemann’s initial Psalms scholarship. Rather than examining how faith functions to transform human experience amidst suffering, Brueggemann now appears to be pursuing how human experience amidst suffering functions to constitute faith’s transforming power. Such a change in course alters the theological results: increasingly, !"#$ scriptural expressions of human experience are rhetorically deployed and then sociologically actualized becomes the basis for determining #!" is behind Brueggemann’s understanding of faith.
The evidence of this change emerges as Brueggemann’s concern over the function of lament psalm form evolves. In “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: Embrace of Pain” Brueggemann asserts the following function of lament for faith: “Such an act of embrace means to articulate the pain fully, to insist on God’s reception
118 Op. cit.
of the speech and the pain, and to wait hopefully for God’s resolution.”120 Yet, he later adds, “Israel’s laments force God to recharacterization. This act of forcing God to
recharacterization is not an unproblematic venture, theologically. It is in deep tension with the reality of God’s sovereign freedom to be whom God chooses to be.”121 The evocative power of language seems most powerful here but also raises the question of how the human response of hope “for God’s resolution” can come about if Israel’s laments so forcefully recharacterize God? Terence Fretheim writes:
Brueggemann claims that Israel's laments and acts of protest to God stand "in deep tension with the reality of God's sovereign freedom to be who God 3!""(&( to be." But if God's choosing to be, which must include God's willing, already moves beyond a commitment to structure before any lament is heard, then it seems incongruous to speak of incongruity. In other words, there is within God a leaning toward Israel and being for Israel by virtue of the divine purpose and promise...God's decision-making and actions toward Israel and the world will always be informed by that loving purpose and those promises.122
Brueggemann proposes an understanding of God which rests on the tension and incongruity he finds in the biblical text, but his articulation of this rhetorical understanding seems to tend toward theological incoherence. Does humanity respond to the “loving purpose” and “promises” of God or does human response constitute the meaningful character of that love? Granted Brueggemann is wrestling with the difficult hermeneutical issues of such a question, and he seemingly wants to hold both possibilities together even when he risks incoherence. Yet as an interpretive norm he now seems much more ready to go with the latter possibility than the former.
Such is the case in Brueggemann’s construal of God in “The Costly Loss of Lament.” Brueggemann worries that by losing lament as a practice of faith “we may unwittingly endorse a ‘False Self’ that can take no initiative toward an omnipotent God.”123 Via an analogy between lament form and D. W. Winnicott’s theory of object- relations psychology, Brueggemann reasons that God, like a mother ceding initiative to an infant, risks experiencing the power ceded to those who lament. The immanence of this risk derived rhetorically from the form of the text, "@&6$ )5;$ )*)25(, recourse to
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 29. See op. cit.
122 Terence E. Fretheim, “Some Reflections on Brueggemann’s God” in G";$25$,!&$N6)70$1$%62B?,&$,"$
P).,&6$O6?&**&/)55 (ed. Tod Linafelt and Timothy K. Beal; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998, 24-37), 30, italics Fretheim. For Fretheim’s own views on the nature and reality of God see Fretheim, %!&$ D?++&625*$"+$G"; (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), especially Ch. 5, “God and World: Presence and Power.”
divine transcendence, becomes that which psychologically and sociologically reshapes his understanding of the omnipotence of God.
Reconceiving divine power in reference to human social realities continues to develop substantially in 8(6)&.9($ -6)2(&. “‘World-Making’ is done by God. That is foundational to Israel’s faith,” writes Brueggemann, “But it is done through human activity which God has authorized and in which God is known to be present.”124 Divine “authorization” here appears to happen through the evocative power of the language of the text which impinges on all reality, divine or human, through rhetoric deployed sociologically. “Because, and "5.7 B&3)?(&, the trouble of the psalmist is brought to speech, it is injected into the ongoing life of Israel and Yahweh.”125 He still retains an inclination towards divine transcendence through circumspection about any transformation to which faith attests; “There is something inscrutable and hidden about the ways in which God transforms. God's people are not able to give explanations. But they are capable of testimony about the possibility of new life.”126 Thus Brueggemann still celebrates the move into new orientation, the move “from hurt to joy.” However, if )57 divine transformation can become “abiding order”127 and so just another form of structure legitimation or ideology, then can such testimony ever joyfully express )57,!25*$ 5&#? Can we really ever come to expect that God is a God who finally responds to human suffering?
In the coming chapter we will see how rhetorical conflict in scriptural testimony becomes the locus of not only Brueggemann’s mature biblical theology but also his understanding of the divine reality at work in faith. Such an approach would never be possible without the growing influence of the social sciences on how he understands the lament psalm to function through faith amidst suffering. Through the self-declared methodological transitions of 1985, Brueggemann writes about his overall organization of Old Testament theology, “The model proposed here does not embrace von Rad’s conclusion that there is no organizing principle, but it asserts that the organizing principle must be found at the interface between theological affirmation and social
124 Ibid., 11.
125 Ibid., 144, italics mine. 126 Ibid., 145.
vision.”128 As Brueggemann’s concept of biblical faith develops at this interface, with the question of human suffering ever in view, sociology appears to cast a vision which theology must increasingly affirm. 129
128 Brueggemann,$“Old Testament Theology as a Particular Conversation: Adjudication of Israel’s
Sociotheological Alternatives,” in :.;$%&(,)/&5,$%!&"."*70$E(()7($"5$D,6?3,?6&<$%!&/&<$)5;$%&S, (ed. Patrick D. Miller; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 143; repr. from %!&"."*7$=2*&(,$32 (1985): 303-25.
129 This despite Miller’s conclusion in “Introduction,” :.;$%&(,)/&5,$%!&"."*7, xiv, “What is crucial at
this point is that literary and rhetorical study is, in Brueggemann’s approach, a tool for a theological reading of the text and not a replacement of it, which it is in some contemporary literary studies of the bible.”