NOTEBOOK
Autumn, 2003

Responding to the Secular

By Mark R. Powell

For nearly forty-two years, Dr. Walter Brueggemann was an Old Testament professor. In fact, for the last several years he was the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, from where he just recently retired.

I bring this up because, besides his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Brueggemann also authored more than sixty books and literally hundreds of articles. I also bring this up because I wish to recommend his writing to you. I would say, if I were to forced to choose, Brueggemann is my favorite writer of books.

His expertise is in the theology of the Old Testament, especially as it relates to the ancient Hebrew understanding and expression of God. Uniquely, he does not use the Old Testament as a mere tacked-on appendage to the New Testament church. Still, as he presents the Old Testament event on its own terms, he allows it to bleed over in our generation, becoming a solid mentor for the Christian church, especially through this particularly difficult period of our current social exile. That is, by solidly telling the Hebrew experience in the Old Testament, Dr. Brueggemann also deftly informs our experiences, now.

Perhaps his most important book in this regard is entitled, The Prophetic Imagination. Here, by describing the form and function of the Old Testament prophet-poets, he helps us to recognize the present assault on the Christian community from our secular, or our non-sacred and de-mystified age, as well.

To be specific, the secular age is both secularism, a philosophy of life that says reality is only what we can measure (thus, there is no mystery in life and no room for God) and secularization, the sociological processes whereby society is made to be more secular (this occurs through a variety of the carriers of modernity). Anyway, Brueggemann’s idea in this book is to show us that this secular mission of the culture’s gatekeepers has left the community of faith in a sort of complicit exile, not unlike when the children of Israel were separated from their promised land.

Similarly, his, Texts Under Negotiation, comes at this same topic from a different direction. The purpose here, he tells us in the preface, “Is to liberate the biblical text for the church in a new situation…” Specifically, what he means to do is to release the Bible for the church by offering an alternative to the severe restrictions of historical criticism, restrictions that in the end do little more than mute the Bible within the faith community (my words not his). While Brueggemann accepts the findings of historical criticism, bravely, he does not give it the last word. This stands as one of the most freeing books I have ever read. His prose is heavy lifting sometimes, but well worth the effort.

Now, with his retirement, he has published what may be his most important response to our secular situation. It is entitled, Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth, and it is a collection of public prayers from his classroom days. This compilation is stunning. As one of his students recently wrote, “In the beginning of every class there is his personal, inspired prayer to the "One Who Listens; Yahweh; Holy God; Giver of all our years; You, the God of Truth; You, You, You..."

Read out loud, for example, Brueggemann’s prayer from, 17, July, 2000 in his D. Min. Old Testament Theology class:


Before the day is out

Unwavering in your power,
Unflagging in your zeal,
Uncompromising in your position,
It is good for us – just past Sabbath again,
just past Easter again –
to awaken to your will of constancy for your world.
We pursue our projects,
depart to our private dreams
invest in our deepest hopes
They are fragile and flimsy at best,
at worst they are devious and destructive.
Either way, they pale before your constancy.
We gladly affirm – past our own inclinations –
that you will well-being among us,
that you intend justice for the vulnerable,
that you command mercy and compassion among us.
Turn us, before the day is out, from our will to yours,
Wean us, before we sleep, from our petty hopes,
Relocate us in your eternal resolve,
that the earth may be fully your realm,
that the world may wreak with your shalom,
that we ourselves may find our true freedom
in your sovereign purpose.
Yours – not ours – is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory . . .
And we are grateful. Amen. (page 18)

Standing alone as prayers to be read, words such as those above are powerful reminders that our speech should actually address the one, true and living God. But, by reading these prayers as part of Brueggemann’s overall project – assaulting the secular – they take on a compelling tone in a different way. He writes as much in the preface to this book: “I believe in an intensely secularized context the task of public prayer is to re-imagine our life in the presence of God and therefore offer direct address to God – that playfully said invites interaction with the God who has pledged to hear.” (page xvi)

This re-imagining that Brueggemann desires is the most important part of his project. You see, the secular world is like a room without windows, and the church (along with everyone else) now finds itself inhabiting this closed-off world. The question is: Should we be content to part of the secularized establishment? Or should we, as the community of faith, creatively respond to the stifling confrontation we face by the secular society, a society that declares a general belief in a Santa Claus-type god, and then lives as if there is no God and no tomorrow beyond the cemetery? Can we really live the faith, and faithfully live out our calling to be on the Jesus-way in this climate, when all we see, all we hear, all that the culture produces tells us that life is futile, that we must only live for the moment, that the edge of despair within our hearts is never answered only dulled through sex, drugs, entertainment and acting out, and that we must make out of our life what we will be, all on our own?

The brutal reality of this current culture is that secular man (both men and women) is terribly alone. This certainly is the primary descriptor of being in our day. Or, as Arthur Koestler lamented decades ago, “Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.”

Is Koestler correct? Did God move? Did God cause our alienation? Is God to blame for the widening division between rich and poor, black and white and male and female? Is God the author of wars and greed and hate and this culture of death? Those with a few non-secular brains cells still functioning know, of course, that God has not moved. Rather, it is the culture who has, and this movement is precisely his judgment on our world. God respected our freedom and let us go, and irony of ironies, in the name freedom from God (which is exactly the goal of the secular mission) we have found ourselves alone, in the razor thin air of a cold and pitiless universe. We did this to ourselves.

And we are very foolish if we think that the secular world-view has not crept into the community of faith, that the church has somehow been spared the judgment of God for our own complicity. We have not. Just look for a moment how we do outreach (segment marketing), how we measure success (the corporation), how we view possessions (mine & more), how we view the dominant culture (fearful of it but in need of its acceptance) and even how we approach prayer (do we really address the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?). The secular has moved into the church. Its views infiltrate ours. Its lifestyle becomes ours. Its hopes bleed into ours. We sold our birthright for a broken bowl of rancid stew.

So, the question is, can the church respond to the secular confinement in which we now find ourselves? Do we have the will and the ability? If so, how do we do it? Brueggemann, of course, has much to say about this response. For example, in his, Texts Under Negotiation, he describes how the church’s imagination (and this should be viewed as the same idea as that of re-imagining from the quote above), fueled by the TEXT of scripture, can give us a new, creative reply to the secular. He urges us to imagine from scripture a way we might give a stiff counter to this now official, secular version of reality.

For Brueggemann this imagining comes through the little word, as. What would the community of faith be if were to live as the people of God right in the face of the secular world, without concern for what they thought or did? What would it mean if we lived as a new community, as counter to the secular community, as open to the God of the Bible, as free from the prejudice of the culture? What if we lived as those un-willing to be kept in our place, as those un-domesticated? What if we were no longer willing to accept either the liberal or the conservative political line because neither proclaimed the view of faith from the TEXT. What if we rather we lived as those who knew that hope lies neither in Washington nor Springfield? What if we lived as those who refused to play these secular games of semantics and instead proclaimed (by our lives) the unsearchable riches of God’s utterances to us?

To live this way is to declare that the church has finally had enough of the paltry, windowless world of the secular, and it would mean that we would have declared our secession from this windowless world. It would mean we said to the culture: “We walk away. We choose to see the world differently, as from the description of the TEXT. We choose to walk a another way. We will no longer accommodate.”

Of course, we have not always suffered under such a strong cultural captivity as we do now. You do recall that ours was once the persecuted faith? Remember? We were the faith of the arrested, the martyred, the arena-ed, and the obscured and scattered in the catacombs. And it should really give us pause to know that this reality is still the norm for most of our faithful brothers and sisters in Christ around the world, who are among the most persecuted people of the earth.

All this served to remind me of something I read long ago in a now dusty essay. The piece was written by Klaus Bockmuehl, and one statement he made has stuck all these years:
“The first task [in responding to secularism & secularization] is to
strengthen…a person’s relationship to God. This is done through
prayer. Prayer is the expression of respect for, and the love of God,
clearly the extreme antithesis to secularism.” (emphasis mine)

I wonder. Is prayer actually the extreme antithesis to the secular?

We should not be surprised that Jesus had something to say about this within the context of prayer:
One day Jesus told his disciples a story to illustrate their need for constant prayer and to show them that they must never give up. "There was a judge in a certain city," he said, "who was a godless man with great contempt for everyone. A widow of that city came to him repeatedly, appealing for justice against someone who had harmed her. The judge ignored her for a while, but eventually she wore him out. 'I fear neither God nor man,' he said to himself, 'but this woman is driving me crazy. I'm going to see that she gets justice, because she is wearing me out with her constant requests!'" Then the Lord said, "Learn a lesson from this evil judge. Even he rendered a just decision in the end, so don't you think God will surely give justice to his chosen people who plead with him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly! But when I, the Son of Man, return, how many will I find who have faith?" (LK. 18:1-8) New Living Translation

Here, the main thrust of the parable is the faithfulness of God and the faithfulness of believers until the return of the Son of Man. Simply put, if even the wicked judge can finally focus on the cries of the poor widow, how much more will God be moved to action on behalf of those whom he loves?

This wonderfully important statement should also cause us to think through our preparation for the Lord’s return, especially as we contemplate our own prayer relationship.

None of them knew the time of the Lord’s return, but you can be sure that Luke and his cadre workers (including St. Paul) believed that the Son of Man would return in their lifetime. Just imagine the shock for them if they were to have learned that the Lord’s return would be delayed some two-thousand years!

But notice, the intention of the parable is to call the believer to faithfulness even in the midst of delay: “One day Jesus told his disciples a story to illustrate their need for constant prayer and to show them that they must never give up.” Those first-century followers were to, “not give-up,” even in the face of unknown gaps and pauses, and since we are still waiting, could it be that we too must heed this same calling as well?

OK. How do we heed this call to perseverance? According to the TEXT, we are to pray.

Which leads us to take special notice of Jesus’ question at the end of the TEXT: “But when I, the Son of Man, return, how many will I find who have faith?"

The question is: God is faithful, so the Son of Man will return, but when he does will he find us faithful? Will he find pray-ers? Will he find us showing our faith by our continued faithfulness in prayer closet? This is an especially poignant question now that we find ourselves immersed in this pungent quagmire of all things secular.

Do we still doubt? Could prayer actually be the extreme antithesis to the secular, or instead, do we suspicion that prayer could not carry such weight? Do we mistrust prayer’s efficacy to shatter the cruel world of our secular confinement? Do we question prayer’s potency because we sense it’s too late, and that we need something more than “just prayer”? Have we given up on prayer, for anything other than our health and the health of a loved one? Do we fear that the act of prayer is simply not enough to matter, and doesn’t this fear betray the location of our faith – both in the world and of the world? (Which may be the best definition of secularism within the “believing” community) Do we now know the world only through the lens of unbelief? Are we the ones about whom Jesus questions whether he will find any faith? Are we, then, the unfaithful of the TEXT?

But, if we were to re-imagine prayer, could it actually be the extreme antithesis to the secular? Could prayer be defiant? Resilient? Even the new resin of the sacred renewal?

Do we realize, in public prayer, in that very moment when we bow our heads and make utterance to God, we are standing in stark defiance of the culture. In prayer, the community of faith shouts its rebellion, calling into question the culture’s very foundations and reminding it that grievous errors have been committed, that it has missed the heart, the soul, and even the purpose of the universe. Each time we publicly and communally address God as his forever-people (that is, if we truly are engaged and are addressing God), we denounce the culture’s officially sanctioned view of the world! In the act of prayer we proclaim to the culture: a “NO!” and a “STOP!” and a “YOU’RE WRONG!” In the act of prayer we announce, in no uncertain terms, that: God is not dead, nor doth he sleep! And in the act of prayer we say to God, “I believe even though I have not seen, measured our fiddled with my calculator. We believe your Word. We believe your promises. We believe your faithfulness.

Is prayer actually the extreme antithesis to the secular? It just might be…

If so, this would mean that, while public prayer does not represent the only response that must come from the community of faith regarding our captivity to the secular, it may indeed be the ground of all other responses.