Voice as Counter to Violencel
Walter Brueggemann
Professor Bosma
suggested in our correspondence that what I should do
this
afternoon is to try to take up a particular psalm and then talk about some
of
the practical, pastoral implications. That is what I will try to do. Before I
do
that,
I want to make some comments about why I deal with this psalm under the
rubric
of voice as an alternative to violence, and I think you will see the direc-
tion of my thinking.
I tried to argue this morning that the
lament psalms insist upon
ing voice, a voice that tends to be
abrasive and insistent. The lament psalm is a
Jewish
refusal of silence before God. This Jewish refusal of silence is not cul-
tural, sociological,
or psychological, but it is in the end, theological. It is a Jewish
understanding
that an adequate relationship with God permits and requires a
human
voice that will speak out against every wrong perpetrated either on
earth
or by heaven. That is where I left it in our earlier reflection together.
This
afternoon I want to talk about imposed coercive silence. I assume that
the
verse in Habakkuk 2:20b, "Let all the earth be silent" (NIV), was
written by
a
librarian. Coercive silence is always a transaction between a powerful agent
and
a weaker subordinate. That is, it is an unequal transaction between the
powerful
and the powerless, and such silence (this is my thesis sentence) gen-
erates and legitimates
violence on the part of both. The silencer thinks he
(I
use that pronoun advisedly; it is generic) is free to do whatever he wants; the
silenced
who is reduced to docility by the silencer eventually will break out in
violence
either against self or against the silencer. I do not need to cite exam-
ples. I consider
this matter of voice and violence not to be a theoretical issue but
a
concrete, practical, pastoral issue because we live in a violent, abusive
society
in
which there is a terrible conspiracy in violence that can only be broken when
the
silence is broken by the lesser party.
The lament psalms, I propose,
constitute either the breaking of silence
against
the enemy by summoning God or the breaking of silence against God
when
God is perceived to be unjust or fickle. It is clear in these psalms, more-
over,
that finding voice from underneath to speak against the hegemony of
1 A lecture delivered at Calvin Theological
Seminary on April 22, 1993.
23 VOICE AS COUNTER TO
VIOLENCE
God
or the hegemony of the enemy does indeed cause things to change. It is
simply
astonishing that when the powerless find voice, done at great risk, things
must
happen differently among the powerful, including God. I do not know, as
Claus
Westermann does not know,2 how one
characteristically moves from plea
to
praise in the Psalms. But I have no doubt that the plea with all of its compo-
nent parts is a
necessary prologue and preamble to praise, and that the situa-
tion would never
have gotten to be one of praise had there not been this protest
and
petition/complaint at the outset.
Before I consider the Psalm that I have
selected, I want simply to catalog for
you
a number of studies about silence and speech. I will do this rather quickly.
First,
I want to mention Job. Job's friends encourage submissiveness but Job
refuses;
the entire drama of the book, including the whirlwind speeches,
depends
upon Job's refusal.
Second, in 1985, Elaine Scarry wrote a book entitled The Body in Pain: The
Making and
Unmaking of the World.3 The book is in
two parts. The first long part
is
a description of torture. Her thesis is that when governments or movements
torture
people they never do it in order to obtain information. They do it to
unmake
persons so that they cease to exist as identifiable agents. The most
remarkable
thing about Scarry's book is that the second half,
partly informed
by
the Bible and partly informed by Marx, claims that the only counter to tor-
ture is speech. As
torture unmakes persons, so speech makes persons.
Third, Judith Lewis Hermann has recently
written a book titled Trauma and
Recovery4 that is
enormously important. She studies a number of cases of people
who
have suffered the violence of war (including soldiers) , and she studies vio-
lated women. The
title of the book, Trauma and Recovery,
is a statement that all
of
these people have experienced trauma; recovery from trauma has to do, in
case
after case, with speech in a safe context, which is the only way to get past
brutality.
Fourth, Carol Gilligan, in a series of
studies beginning, as you know, with In
a Different
Voice,5 has now
documented the way in which twelve-year-old, thir-
teen-year-old,
and fourteen-year-old girls grow silent because they have figured
out
that in a male world the only safe role is to cover over your competence and
withdraw
and be silent. Her study recognizes that such imposed silence is dev-
2 Claus Westermann,
Praise and Lament in the Psalms,
trans. Keith R. Crim and Richard N. Soulen (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981).
3 Elaine Scarry, The Body in
Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987). More recently see William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), who develops Scarry's
general thesis in quite concrete ways.
4 Judith Lewis
Hermann, Trauma and Recovery (New
York: Basic Books, 1992) .
5 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theology
and Women's Development (
CALVIN
THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 24
astating, She considers
how older women can find the voice that at twelve years
of
age they surrendered to survive. It is an astonishing study!
Fifth, Alice Miller, in a series of
books of which I mention the one titled Thou
Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child,6 has studied the
way in which
powerful
institutions, by which she particularly means the church and the psy-
chotherapeutic community, have
crushed children to insensitivity and have
taught
them not to notice or to value self. Thus, her title, Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware. It is clear in
Alice Miller that one antidote for the recovery of a sense of
self
is the speech that is necessary to selfing.
Sixth, I simply mention and will not comment
on a book by Rebecca S.
Chopp titled The Power to Speak.7 This book is a
study of biblical texts in which
women
gain speech.
And finally, I dare to mention alongside
these important studies my own lit-
tle piece in my book Praying the Psalms.8 It is an
attempt to study the lament
psalms,
in which I have asked the question: What do you think we ought to do
with
the anger and the yearning for vengeance that is so powerful among us?
I
proposed in that study that what the lament psalms do is show
three
things. First, you must voice the rage. Everybody knows that. Everybody
in
the therapeutic society knows that you must voice it, but therapeutic society
stops
there. Second, you must submit it to another, meaning God in this con-
text.
Third, you then must relinquish it and say, "I entrust my rage to
you."
I do not want to make too much of my own
little scheme except to say to you
that
all of these books, one way or another, propose the same grid of speech.
Observe
about these studies that I have named, first of all, that they all have to
do
with the brutalized powerless gaining enough speech to make a claim for
themselves
against a power that is seen to be ruthless and indifferent. And
notice
second (I only noticed this after I had written all of this down, but you
noticed
it) that the great preponderance of authors are women who are speak-
ing out of a world that is silenced
by the hegemony of male power. This fact is
immensely
important because you know that there are now feminist inter-
preters who say that in
much prophetic metaphor Yahweh is portrayed as a sex
abuser.
I mention particularly that odd text in Jeremiah 20:7 where Jeremiah
says,
"0 LORD, you have seduced me," and, as you know, htAPA (patah) is capable
of
being translated "to rape" (Ex. 22:15).9
6
Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum (London:
Pluto, 1998).
7 Rebecca S. Chopp, The Power to
Speak: Feminism, Language, God (
1989)
.
8 Walter Brueggemann, Praying
the Psalms (Winona Lake, Ind.: Saint Mary's Press, 1982) , 67-80.
9 See Renita J. Weems, Battered
Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets,
Overtures to
Biblical Theology (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1995), and Carol J. Dempsey, The
Prophets: A
Liberation-Critical
25 VOICE AS COUNTER
TO VIOLENCE
I once put that comment about Jeremiah
20:7 into a little exegetical study,
and
I had a wonderful Roman Catholic secretary who cared about things.
When
I did not give her enough to do, she helped me do my work. She was a
very
pious lady, and she typed in the margin of that manuscript, "God may
deceive
and God may seduce but God does not rape." Well, it is a hard question.
I
do not want to pursue that, except to say that, as these studies are about a
voice
of
self against hegemony, they suggest that pastoral work must be enormously
attentive
to power relations and the ways in which hegemony is imposed and
what
it costs to break out of that hegemony.10
In this regard, I should insist that
the theological breaking of God's hege-
mony, that the
sociological breaking of the hegemony of the power class, and the
psychological
breaking of deformed ego structure are all of a piece. All require
the
daring assertion of the lesser party, which is done at great risk. I simply
mean
to suggest that in these lament psalms we have a script for how the com-
munity
has practiced that subversive activity of finding voice. I suggest, more-
over,
that in a society that is increasingly shut down in terms of public speech,
the
church in all of its pastoral practices may be the community where the
silenced
are authorized to voice.
The Psalm that I want to talk about is
Psalm 39. I have no shrewd suggestion
to
make about this psalm, except to walk you through it.
I have selected this psalm because it is
generically a lament psalm, but this
classification
is not easy or obvious. It is one of the few psalms—Westermann
says
that there are none but that is not quite right—along with Psalm 88 that
seems
to have no positive resolution and that seems to leave things dangling.
This
psalm is in a general way always listed as a lament psalm, except that it
does
not follow the usual grid that you will find in every introductory book on
the
Psalms.11 Psalm 39 seems to be more reflective and
perhaps reflects some
sapiential influence. It
is close enough to the general genre of lament psalms,
however,
for our purposes, and we can, if we want to, then extrapolate from it
to
other psalms.
Verses 1-3 [2-4]12 are a
retrospective on what the speaker had done. It is look-
ing back on a longstanding piety. In
verse la[2a] the speaker says, "I said." It is
a
soliloquy in which he says aloud, "I said," and then reports on what
he had
said,
"I will keep silent. It is a sin to speak out." Just listen to that!
"It is a sin, to
speak
out in front of the wicked." One ought not to express pressure against
God
among the nonbelievers because you will sound like a nonbeliever.
Perhaps
such speech, where you dare to utter it, would expose doubt or anger
10 See David R.
Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A
Theology of Protest (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993).
11 Cf. Westermann, Praise
and Lament, 64.
12 The numbers in
square brackets refer to the verses of the Hebrew text.
CALVIN
THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 26
or
give the appearance of diminished faith. Calvin says that such speech would
be
an occasion for blasphemy.13
However, the speaker's intention to keep
silent turns out to be too costly. In
verses
2-3 [3-4] he says, "My distress grew worse and I got a hot heart. And when
I
thought about it, the fire burned so I spoke. I tried to be silent but then I
worked
my tongue because I couldn't do otherwise."
Verses 4-6 [5-8] contain a unique
combination of speech forms. Verse 4 [5]
seems
like a more reflective statement because it does not seem to follow from
verse
3 [4]. Verse 3 [4] really is hot, whereas verse 4 [5] is rather cool. Verse 4
[5]
is
in a deferential tone, saying to God, "LORD, why don't you tell me what I
don't
know
about the limits of my life?"
In verse 4 [5], the speaker names Yahweh
for the first time. In that moment
of
bold address, things already begin to change. The cause of trouble has now
become
an open question in the relationship.14
The NIV and NRSV have a colon at the end
of verse 3 [4], suggesting that
verse
4 [5] is what this speaker said when he finally got his tongue. I do not
know
if that is right. Artur Weiser thinks not.15 Verse 4 [5] is
quite reflective.
Verse
5 [6], which continues this speech, is of a different kind. This verse
begins
with the Hebrew word hn.ehi ( hinneh), "behold,"
which the NIV and NRSV
have
left out. Then notice that in verse 5b [6b] the speaker claims that God has
nullified
him. He says, "My lifetime is as nothing (Nyixa, ayin) in your
sight." This
claim
is followed by three clauses, each of which begin with j`xa (‘ak) , "surely":
5cSurely every man
stands as a mere breath! bcA.ni
MdAxA-lKA lb,h,-lKA j~xa 6c
6aSurely man goes
about as a shadow! wyxi-j`l,.hat;yi Ml,c,B;-jxa 7a
bSurely for nought are they in turmoil.... NUymAh<y, lb,h,-j`xa b
It
is important to note that in verse 5c [6c] and in verse 6b [7b] the psalmist
employs
the Hebrew word lb,h,
(hebel), which
means "vanity," "zero," "bubble."
It
is the same word as in Ecclesiastes: "mere breath,"
"shadow," "nothing."
Most interesting about verses 5-6 [6-7] is
their dissimilarity from verse 4 [5].
Verse
4 [5] is kind of a serene, trustful petition. However, verses 5-6 [7-8] are in
fact an accusation. And if my life is lb,h,
and
lb,h, and shadow, it
is, claims the
psalmist
in verse 5bc [6bc], "because you have made it so."
Observe about verses 4 [5], 5, and 6 [6-7]
that they are a strange combination
of
deference and accusation, saying to God, "You have reduced all human life
and
my
human life to meaninglessness."
13 John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans.
James Anderson (
Eerdmans, 1949) , 2:73.
14 Walter Brueggemann,
"The Costly Loss of Lament," in The
Psalms and the Life of Faith, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress,
1995),109.
15 Artur
Weiser, The Psalms: A Commentary,
trans. Herbert Hartwell, OTL (London: SCM Press, 1962), 328-29.
27 VOICE AS COUNTER TO VIOLENCE
tion that to speak
seriously about meaninglessness is to render meaning.
Speech
turns meaninglessness into meaningfulness!
Verse 7 [8] marks a major turning point
that is introduced by the conjunc-
tion hTAfav; (we’attah),
"and now" (Ps. 2:10). This verse signals a crucial rhetori-
cal
move from past reflection to present intensity, from meditation to active,
insistent
hope:16
7a And now, what do I wait for, 0 LORD, ynAdoxE
ytiyUiqi.-hma hTAfav; 8a
b My hope is in you. :xyhi j~l; yTil;HaOT
b
The
speech in this verse grows bolder. Remarkably, through the course of
Psalm
39 this silent speaker gets more and more voice. Calvin says predictably
about
verse 7 that now begins right prayer.17 This means that the first six verses
are
not so hot.
In verse 7a [8a] the speaker first asks
about his hope, "for what do I wait?"
Significantly,
he addresses this protesting question directly to Yahweh.18 This is
only
the second time that the speaker names Yahweh. The focus on Yahweh is
an
insistence that things need not and will not stay as they are, for the very
utterance
of the divine name constitutes an act of hope.19
Strikingly, the
psalmist
answers his own question, "My hope is in you" (vs. 7b [8b]). This is
a
statement
of incredible trust, even though uttered by the one who has recently
accused!
After this remarkable expression of trust
in Yahweh, there follows a series of
powerful
imperatives addressed to Yahweh in verses 8-10a [9-11a]. We grow so
accustomed
to these stylized imperatives that we do not notice their rhetorical
force
or their theological daring. However, think what it means for a petitioner
to
address an imperative to "the maker of heaven and earth." In much of
our
rather
conventional prayer, we trivialize prayer imperatives. You know: "Help
us,
0 Lord, to care about each other, and remind the elders that we meet
Tuesday
night in room 206 and all this kind of business." Characteristically, in
the
lament psalms these are big imperatives. They are life-and-death impera-
tives. They voice an
urgency to God because everything is at stake for the peti-
tioner. The urgency of
imperatives matches the helplessness and need of the
speaker.
The innocent looking statement in verse
7b [8b], "My hope is in you," is a
strategy
for leveraging Yahweh about the imperatives: "It's all up to you and
you
better fulfill my hope." You can see whether you think that is an
over-read-
ing of the text.
16 Brueggemann,
"The Costly Loss of Lament," 109.
17 Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, 2:81.
18 The Hebrew text reads ynAdoxA but some
evidence suggests a second reading of Yahweh.
19 Brueggemann,
"The Costly Loss of Lament," 109.
CALVIN
THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 28
At any rate, with powerful imperatives the
psalmist pleads in verse 8 [9]:
8a Deliver me from all my transgressions. ynileyci.ha
yfawAP;-lKAmi 9a
b Make me not the scorn of the fool! :ynimeyWiT;-lxa lbAnA tPar;H, b
There
is, as you may know, a growing literature about the power of shame,
about
being embarrassed and therefore wanting to conceal self. One of the
things
we are discovering in light of attention to shame is that the church is all
tooled
up to deal with guilt and now we are discovering that guilt is a secondary
kind
of phenomenon that is built on top of shame and we do not know how to
deal
with it very well.
power
that makes one crawl into a hole and become invisible.
tection from God
against the negating power of humiliation.
Verse 9ab [10ab] is an odd statement of
deference that looks back to verses
1-2
[3-4]:
9a I am silent. yTim;lax<n,
10a
b I do not open my mouth.... yPi-HTap;x, xlo
b
But
then it is as though the audacious yKi clause of verse
9c [10c] reverses the
feeling:
9c because [it is] you, you have done it
[to me]. :tAyWifA hTAxa yKi
10c
Hans
Joachim Kraus' comments on the tension in this verse are very percep-
tive.20 One can see the
tension without Kraus: This psalmist is voicing an incred-
ible contradiction
in vs. 7b [8b] and vs. 9c [10c]: "My trust is in you" (vs. 7b
[8b]
and,
"You, you have done it to me" (vs. 9c [10c]). The prayer voices a
terrible
ambiguity.
On the one hand, this psalm reflects a kind of conventional defer-
ence and piety, but,
on the other hand, the speaker is beginning to discover
that
the very God upon whom one must rely is the great problem in one's life:
"Because
you have done it" (vs. 9c [10c] ) .
When I read this psalm, it occurred to me
that this situation of the speaker
is
very much like the situation of a small child who gets very angry at mother
but
who has nowhere to go to get succor and embrace, except to mother. When
that
happens a good-enough mother embraces the child, even while the child
is
still beating on the breast of mother in anger. This psalm, so it seems to me,
voices
a situation of faith that is fraught with incredible ambivalence. The very
God
upon whom we must rely is identified as the very God who really has done
us
in.
Verse 10a [11 a] issues one more forceful
imperative. The psalmist just said in
verse
9c [10c], "you have done it to me." In verse 10a [ 11 a] he says,
"Remove
your
stroke from me! Why don't you stop it now? It is enough." The speaker is
a
jumble of conflicted emotions, all of which are voiced in trusting candor to
God.
20 HansJoachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59: A Commentary, trans. Hilton
C. Oswald (
29 VOICE AS COUNTER TO VIOLENCE
Verse 11 [12] returns to a more reflective
tone. It seems like a distancing
statement,
not so particular and personal. Instead, it offers generalizing
dom: "you chastise mortals in
punishment for sin." This verse sounds like verse
4
[5], which, as we noted above, is also reflective. The last clause of verse 11
[12],
MdAxA-lKA
lb,h, j`xa ("surely
every man is a mere breath!"), looks back to verse
5c
[6c] with another j`xa ('ak),
"surely," and another use of the word lb,h,
(hebel). This
psalm uses the word hebel
three times, a primary accent on this
"conversation
of the heart addressed to God." When a therapist says, "Did you
notice
in the last three minutes you used this one word seven times? Do you
think
it's important?" "No," you reply, "I just have a limited
vocabulary."
This reiteration of the term lb,h, (hebel) sounds to
me like somebody who is
at
the brink of ceasing to be. The speaker can just barely get the words uttered.
When
one finally speaks, there is such desperation that it comes out as frantic
anger.
I must speak to you, because you are my only hope. There is a double
mindedness
of scolding and trust. This dread-filled ambivalence is about where
this
speaker is positioned in front of God.
Verse 12abc [13abc] is the most
conventional part of the psalm. It is a pas-
sionate plea for a
hearing that sounds much more like a regular lament and
consists
of vigorous imperatives that name Yahweh for the third time:
12 Hear my prayer, 0 LORD; hvAhy; ytilA.pit;-hfAm;wi 13a
b give ear to my cry. hnAyzixEha
ytifAvwav; b
c Do not hold your peace at my tears. wriH<T,-lxa ytifAm;Di-lx, c
The
problem in this verse is not that I have kept silent, but the problem is that
God
has kept silent. "Hold your peace (wraH<T,)" means,
"You don't say any-
thing."
At the beginning of the psalm, the speaker noticed what has happened
to
him because he has kept silent too long. Now, at the end, he is noticing that
what
happens to him is because God kept silent too long.
The last clause of verse 12 [13] offers a
motivation to God. Very often in the
lament
psalms when there is an imperative issued to God, it is as though God
says,
"Why should I do that?" And then one gives a reason why God should
hear
prayer
and speak out.
The NRSV translates the last clause of
verse 12 [13] as follows: "For I am your
passing
guest, a sojourner, like all my fathers." The NRSV's translation of verse
12d
[13d], "I am your passing guest" (j`m.Afi
ykinoxA rge yKi21), is very weak.
Together
with the Hebrew noun bwAOt, rGe forms the word pair "resident alien-
sojourner."22 This word pair
is a social category for an alien who is given per-
mission
to live in another people's land without the rights of citizens (Gen.
23:4)
. In other words, "I am your problem. I am exposed and dependent and vul-
21 Cf. Ps. 119:19.
22 Cf. Gen. 23:4; Lev. 25:23; and 1
Chron. 29:15.
CALVIN THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 30
nerable and you are
responsible for me." The NRSV's translation of the Hebrew
noun
rge as
"passing guest" is too sweet.
The concluding verse, verse 13 [14],
ends in a strange petition: "Look away
from
me, that I may know gladness, before I depart and be no more!" This clos-
ing entreaty sounds like Job.23
Calvin has a wonderful phrase for this
unusual plea. He says that the
speaker's
despair is forced to exceed the proper limits of grief.24 There are, to
be
sure, conventions for grief. This psalmist, however, is in such deep despair
that
he violates the conventions of grief. In this last verse he says, "Quit
staring
at
me, quit watching me in order that I can have peace and exist. Because if you
keep
watching me, I am going to cease to exist."25 It is a very
odd ending in
which
the prayer asks for distance from God, weary of endless surveillance.
The
most poignant point about this psalm is, as Kraus writes, that "Psalm 39
is
permeated by two sensations that are at war with each other"26 and
"therefore
it
is wrong to neutralize the tension by means of text corrections or transposi-
tions. "27 Just let the
tension persist.
In a society that is increasingly
silenced, this terrible ambivalence about
more
silence and some speech is enormously important. There are of course
people
in marriages in which the silent member cannot bear the relationship
anymore.
The silenced knows she must speak, but she also knows that if she
speaks
everything will all fall apart. Indeed, we all know about social situations
in
which the silenced and marginalized dare not speak out, but they must or
they
will continue to be lb,h,. The amazing thing about this psalm and about
as
a theological transaction. In a world that is unjust, where Yahweh is one of
the
workers of injustice, Yahweh's serious devotees who hope in Yahweh must
ponder
when it is time to wait, when it is time to hope, when it is time to
knuckle
under, and when it is time to issue a loud imperative in order that I
shall
not pass away in nonbeing. The same writer who famously celebrated hebel
(vanity;
Eccl. 1:2) also knows there are many different times (Eccl. 3:1-8). It
matters
what time it is, for one who prays must know when to say what. . . and
when
to keep silent.
I want to conclude with some reflective
comments. The first comment is to
question:
Does a lament psalm do anything? Or, is it simply cathartic activity?
We
know of course that we cannot answer that from inside the psalm. We
23 Cf., Job 7:19; 10:20-21;
14:6.
24 Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, 2:88.
25 This concluding petition
ends with the terse yn.in,yxe
(cf.
Nyixak;, vs. 6).
26 Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 419.
27 Ibid.
31 VOICE AS COUNTER TO VIOLENCE
answer
that according to our theological presuppositions. I simply want to cite
for
you two answers that I think are deeply important.
The first answer is found in Harold Fisch's wonderful book, Poetry
with a
Purpose.28 In this book, Fisch claims that the psalms are not monologues but
insistently
at all times dialogue poems. He writes, "We are not speaking of an
encounter
merely for the sake of discovering the existence of the other and the
self
in the relationship to the other. The ‘thou’ answers the plea of the ‘I’ and
that
answer signals a change in the opening situation."29
He is saying this really does compel God
to act; except, of course, in Psalm
39
there is not any hint of that. I want to suggest to you that Psalms 39 and 88
pose
for a pastor the acute problem of theodicy, the problem of the justice of
God.
Of course, I know all of that discussion about speculative answers to the
problem
of theodicy. But I suspect that
apocalyptic
or creation or life after death. Instead,
theodicy
is to pray the psalm again and again and again.
not
a cognitive operation, but it is a dialogue in which this voiced partner
insists
that
the too-long silent partner in heaven must come to voice. It is possible, for
example,
to conclude that the whirlwind speech crushed Job; but the truth of
the
matter is that Job got an answer. If faith is essentially conversation, what
There is a second, alternative answer to
the question: Do these psalms do
anything?
Gerald T. Sheppard is an evangelical scholar who teaches at the
first
wrote about it in the journal Interpretation30 and then expanded
this alter-
native
answer in the Gottwald Festschrift.31 He suggests
that the lament psalms
that
are ostensibly addressed to God are, in fact, designed for the overhearing
by
the human oppressor. That may strike you as reductionist. Sheppard wants
to
say that these speeches are always political and that they are always aimed at
the
rearrangement of earthly power.
One could of course say of Sheppard's
claim, "That's a very interesting way
to
handle the psalm if you do not believe in God," except that Sheppard is an
evangelical
scholar. My own judgment is that it is not an either/or but proba-
bly a both/and: the prayer is
serious theological discourse engaging God but at
the
same time serious political discourse as well.
28 Harold Fisch,
Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics
and Interpretation (
29 Ibid., 109.
30 Gerald T. Sheppard,
"Theology and the Book of Psalms," Interpretation 46 (1992): 143-55.
31 Gerald T. Sheppard, "Enemies
and the Politics of Prayer in the Book of Psalms," in The Politics of Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Norman Gottwald,
ed. D. Jobling, P. Days, and Gerald T. Sheppard (New
York: Pilgrim Press, 1991), 61-82.
CALVIN
THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL 32
By way of consolidation, I want to make
some obvious, quick reflections of a
theological
kind. The first one is this:
speech,
and if you do not have a voice in the community, you do not exist. Every
silenced
part of a community knows this fact deeply and painfully.
Second, behind the rather obvious
phenomenon of speech and power there
is
also the deep problem of covenantal monotheism. That is,
fulness has nowhere to
go except to Yahweh.
Yahweh.
If
ing about people who are not
prepared to give up. I heard Elie Wiesel once
asked
whether he believed in God. He said, "No." He could not believe in
God
after
the holocaust. "But," he said, "Yes, I'm aJew,
I must believe in God, so what
I
do is believe against God." That is taking God with utmost seriousness. I
think
that
that is what these psalms of complaint characteristically do in highly styl-
ized form.
Third, I cite Terrence W. Tilley's book
called The Evils of Theodicy.32 The argu-
ment of this book is
that all the speculative theodicies are evil because
they talk
people
out of their legitimate pain by way of explanation. Pain does not need
to
be explained. It needs to be honored and answered. One of the cases that is
cited
in Tilley's book is George Eliot's Adam
Bede (London: J. M. Dent, 1906).33
You
recall the story of this peasant woman who falls in love with the son of the
manor.
She must run away in humiliation and finally ends up in a prison where
she
will rot, forgotten. Her good friend hunts her down, visits her in prison, and
urges
her to cry out. It will not get her out of prison, it will not save her from
execution,
but the last neighborly act is to get a voice.
We now understand in sophisticated
sociological and psychological and all
kinds
of social-scientific ways about these psalms. But, in fact, our faith-family
knew
long ago about the transformative processes intrinsic to these psalms; we
are
the ones with the best script! Is it not strange that this best script has
become
awkward
to us, so awkward that the church mostly disregards these vehicles for
transformation.
Fourth, it may be that these psalms do indeed
move Yahweh to new speech.
In
Isaiah 42:14 Yahweh says, "I have kept silent long enough, I will speak
for my
people
that is in the Exile." And, in Isaiah 62:1 Yahweh says, "For Zion's
sake I
will
not keep silent." The end of the exile happens because Yahweh breaks
Yahweh's
silence. Moreover, that break in the silence is a response to
demanding
utterance.
Fifth, I propose that Psalm 39 makes
available to us the terrible ambiguity of
life
with God. To legitimate the ambiguity,
32 Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington:
Georgetown University Press, 1991) . See more recently Zachary Braiterman, (God)
after
Post-Holocaust
Jewish Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
33 Tilley, "Giving Voice to
the Victim," in The Evils of
Theodicy, 189-216.
33 VOICE AS COUNTER TO VIOLENCE
trust
and having to speak. When one has long been silenced, the first speech
one
speaks is likely to be anger. I dare imagine that Psalm 39 affirms that both
sides
of the ambiguity voiced here are acts of faith. The trusting affirmation is
an
act of faith; but so is the abrasive accusation an act of faith. I understand
that
such
a tension does not fit the kind of preaching that announces that every-
thing
is settled. But then, biblical faith is not and never intends to be a state-
ment of outcomes. It
is, rather, a dip into the drama of life and death that
continues
to be underway.
Sixth, I suggest (your experience may tell
you otherwise) that very much
pastoral
care and pastoral counseling has to do with helping the silenced find
a
voice. I hypothesize that it is principally the silenced who seek help. It may
be
the
loud mouths who have learned to be silent about the precious things in
their
lives or it may be the timid who have never dared speak. In either case, it
is
a very hard thing in habituated silence to gain speech. But I imagine that very
many
people seek out this kind of help when they become aware in their gut
that,
if they don't speak soon, they are going to cease to exist. Hebel (lb,h,)!
Hebel (lb,h,)! Hebel (lb,h,)!
Seventh, I think that the question before
the liturgy of the church, if my gen-
eral extrapolations
have merit, is that we must recover the sense that worship is
a
covenantal drama in which both parties are at risk. I do not insist that the
two
parties
are fully commensurate. However, both parties are to some extent at
risk
and that matrix of shared risk is the context for reselfing
in the presence of
God.
This is contrary to any enlightenment notion that the self is an
autonomous
agent; it is also to oppose a one-dimensional deference that cedes
everything
to God.
Finally, theologically, where there is not
speech from below, pain is charac-
teristically reduced to
guilt. Psychologically, without speech the self is charac-
teristically reduced to lb,h, (hebel).
Sociologically, without speech established
power
goes unchecked. What this psalmist knows is that speech is indispensable
to
survival and it is inordinately risky. The good news is there is an alternative
listener
who characteristically—but not always—heeds and honors such abra-
sive petition.
:
Calvin Theological Seminary
Grand Rapids
www.calvinseminary.edu
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