So we’ve had our crash course in the story handed to us. We now can bravely try to play the part of “biblical pottery expert”, as we begin to examine little pieces of the current story, the little shards of incidents in the rubble of our institutions. What shape might the story we find ourselves in now, what shape might it take in relation to the known experiences, mindsets, and theologies of tabernacle, temple, and New Jerusalem?
I’d like to propose this working hypothesis: The institutions in American Evangelicalism bear a striking resemblance to the temple, with all its dangers—God as object, God in the service of institutional power, and human power and passion bent on preserving institutions, security, and comfort at all costs. Yet a return to the rescuing, thundering God of tabernacle and Exodus may keep us in a cycle of oppression, a cycle which our spirituality and theology drives like an unstoppable engine.
“Hope,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk.” (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 65)
Comments