lifeasmission

This is a bit old by now, but I am just running across it.  Taken from the 2004 Emergent Theolgical Conversation, these are 19 theses from Dr. Walter Brueggemann which, in concise fashion, sum up the grand scope of the “cultural problem” for the church in the United States.  These 19 theses, especially number 12, also pertain to the short comings of systematic theology, and the importance of narrative theology. You can find the audio of the talk as well as some great Q&A here, but I will reprint the theses below.  I hope to say more about some of the points he is making here in conjunction with the idea of a missiology of the midwest, so I hope we can get some conversation going here.  Enjoy.

1.     Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or
explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a
script.

2.     We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process
of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us
without our knowing it.

3.      The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4.     That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism)
enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on
the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us
happy.

5.     That script has failed. That script of military consumerism
cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the
unhappiest society in the world.

6.     Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and
relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a
disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which
we are profoundly ambiguous.

7.     It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us.
That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists
and indeed never did exist.

8.     The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is
accomplished by a steady, patient, intentional articulation of an
alternative script that we say can make us happy and make us safe.

9.     The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and is enacted
through the tradition of the Church. It is an offer of a
counter-narrative, counter to the script of technological, therapeutic,
consumer militarism.

10.  That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature,
its key character – the God of the Bible whom we name as Father, Son,
and Spirit.

11.  That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It
is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and
disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by
many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent
because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in
sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence
– [a] huge problem for us.

12.  The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the
counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless.
[I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make
it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and
domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The
script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of
the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the
dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about
certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about
certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must betaken to let
this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible
self.

13.  The ragged, disjunctive character of the counter-script to
which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel among themselves –
liberals and conservatives – in ways that detract from the main claims
of the script and so too debilitate the focus of the script.

14.  The entry point into the counter-script is baptism. Whereby we
say in the old liturgies, “do you renounce the dominant script?”

15.  The nurture, formation, and socialization into the
counter-script with this illusive, irascible character is the work of
ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation, and socialization by
the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action,
spirituality, and neighboring of all kinds.

16.  Most of us are ambiguous about the script; those with whom we
minister and I dare say, those of us who minister. Most of us are not
at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and
the counter-script. Most of us in the deep places are vacillating and
mumbling in ambivalence.

17.  This ambivalence between scripts is precisely the primary venue
for the Spirit. So that ministry is to name and enhance the ambivalence
that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in
crisis and consequently that invokes resistance and hostility.

18.  Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is crucially
present among liberals and conservatives in generative faithful ways in
order to permit relinquishment of [the] old script and embrace of the
new script.

19.  The work of ministry is crucial and pivotal and indispensable
in our society precisely because there is no one [see if that’s an
overstatement]; there is no one except the church and the synagogue to
name and evoke the ambivalence and too manage a way through it. I think
often; I see the mundane day-to-day stuff ministers have to do and I
think, my God, what would happen if you talk all the ministers out. The
role of ministry then is as urgent as it is wondrous and difficult.