[The the first of three posts this week on Michael Walzer’s “In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible.”] Michael Walzer occupies a distinctive place in political interpretation. He is a distinguished political scientist who continues to have a significant investment in the Hebrew Bible. His writing thus permits a convergence of the agility of his Jewish perspective on the Bible and his engagement with contemporary questions of power. He has authored an important book on the Exodus narrative and the continuing influence of that narrative upon revolutionary thought and action. His paper, “The Prophets as Social Critics,” moreover, recognized the prophets of ancient Israel as serious social critics and analysts who exposited Israel’s “core values” of justice and righteousness and who were alert to oppressions that impeded social solidarity…
We live in a hyper-ideologized age. The inner circles of both “us” and “them” are getting smaller and smaller. The world is increasingly polarized, partisan, fundamentalist. Or at least it seems so. There are forces—including algorithms—at work, teaching us to think in “us” versus “them” frames.
If God reconciled us while we were still enemies, how should Christians view and speak about those they consider their enemies?
Like the humble talk in the psalm, this hand-wringing fear about a loss of Christian identity in the US masks the devastating power that white Christians wield against others in this country and elsewhere. It is a rhetorical humility in the service of actual power and dominance.
The world of extractavism must end, whether by our own agency or by the collapse of the system it unsustainably supports. “Transition is inevitable, justice is not.”
Retelling of a story/text in the Word of God demonstrates the dynamic nature of the event of the God of the word. The God of the Bible is a God who reappears, reveals, re-presents, reimagines and repeats Godself to the creation in God’s own ways to each time and context.
Sometimes referred to as “population control,” other times “better breeding,” eugenics has been seen as a religious solution to social ills, and sometimes a new religion unto itself.
