wfn.org | Love of Neighbor Is Key to Transformation

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19-August-1997 
97313 
 
    Love of Neighbor Is Key to Transformation, 
    Brueggemann Says 
 
    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
    World Alliance of Reformed Churches Newsroom 
 
DEBRECEN, Hungary--Drawing striking parallels between the situations facing 
the Old Testament prophets and those facing the contemporary Christian 
church, United States biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann said today that 
the key to the world's future is obedience to Jesus' command to "love your 
neighbor." 
 
    Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological 
Seminary in Decatur, Ga., told participants in the 23rd General Council of 
the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) that "true faith is the 
transformation of the world for the sake of the neighbor."  He referred to 
the commandment in Luke 10:27 -- an echo of such prophets as Isaiah, 
Nehemiah and Ezra -- as "a concrete summons in a crisis situation." 
 
    Crisis situations, whether the destruction of Jerusalem and Babylonian 
captivity of Isaiah's day or the collapse of American inner cities today, 
Brueggemann said, are characterized by four themes: 
 
    *  collapse of what is old 
    *  vision of what is new 
    *  dispute about the future 
    *  action for newness. 
 
    When societies, Babylonian or Soviet, collapse, "we are given a 
community with no fixed reference points, not even with sure enemies [or a] 
public context in which to celebrate a faith identity," Brueggemann 
explained.  In such circumstances, he continued, faith communities "think 
they have only a choice between nostalgia for a faith that could be no more 
or despair in which nothing seems possible." 
 
    But there is a third alternative, exemplified in the prophets, 
Brueggemann said, in which God "seizes them in freedom and in imagination 
to hope a future for this community in despair, to conjure a future well 
beyond the hopelessness of exile, to evoke a grand, glorious homecoming," 
which Isaiah describes in Chapter 40: "Every valley shall be lifted up, and 
every mountain and hill be made low. ... Then the glory of the Lord shall 
be revealed, and all people shall see it together. ..." 
 
    The biblical word for this alternative vision, Brueggemann said, is 
"gospel." 
 
    But faith communities, he quickly added, invariably engage in "deep 
conflict and dispute ... about who will control the future, who will have 
the authority to state orthodoxy, who can say what is legitimate and who 
can say what is possible."  Early Judaism, early Christianity and 
contemporary churches have all been caught up in this conflict, with some 
advocating for a "community of purity, guarded at its borders, sure of its 
membership, under tight discipline, punctilious in its ethics, certain in 
its worship, clear, managed, beyond debate" and those, faithful to Isaiah 
and Jesus, "who understood from the outset that serious faith in Yahweh is 
an open faith reaching out for the well-being of the world." 
 
    The church is in conflict and lives in a world of conflict, Brueggemann 
acknowledged.  "But our dispute is not finally with church brothers and 
sisters," he said.  "That's a smokescreen."  The faith community's dispute, 
Brueggemann insisted, "is with the gods of the economy who want to 
obliterate the neighbor for the wealth and domination of the few."  The 
global economic system, he continued, "aims to control all resources, 
damage the earth, disregard the poor and evaporate the weak and powerless." 
 
    The church's task, if it is to be obedient to Jesus' command of 
"neighbor love," is "critical engagement that exposes sweet, pious, private 
religion as the handmaid of abusive economics."  Brueggemann said the 
church is called to "an Easter fast ... a fast for the sake of the hungry, 
the poor, the homeless and the naked."  Such action by the church, he said, 
"is powered by the self-giving love of God and invites us to self-give as 
did the One who became obedient unto death." 
 
    Such love, Brueggemann concluded, "is not maudlin romanticism.  It is a 
public act of letting the rich blessing of God be the offer of social goods 
that God has given, that we have no right to withhold."  True, biblical 
economics, he said, are reflected in 2 Corinthians 8:15 -- "`The one who 
had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too 
little.'" 
 
    Brueggemann's address was one of four presentations on the 23rd WARC 
General Council's theme, "Break the Chains of Injustice." 

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