The theological story of the Bible – a Jewish story, a Christian story – begins at creation but a decisive moment of “salvation” is a liberation from slavery in the Exodus story, which becomes the paradigm of redemption in the Bible. The exodus resonates and reverberates throughout the entire Bible.
Liberation theology taps into the Bible’s most paradigmatic story of redemption. It is a pity that many English translations fail to recognize the liberation tone of so many redemption words.
We are now working our way through Miroslav Volf’s and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s new book, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything, which is their telling of the “story of everything” and, at the same time, is a systematic theology in a new key – a biblical kind of systematic theology. Their first chapter expounds themes in the exodus story. Read slowly for lots is packed into the short sections.
Affliction and Deliverance
The powers of this world afflict with oppression, not least in the Pharaohs of Egypt. “Their inhumane despotism is but the crown on a system in which many participate as administrators, supervisors, and soldiers, and which is legitimized by an ideology.”
They speak of a “centralized and exploitive political power,” suggesting at the final layer of the text we are looking at Solomon as well. And they point out the incongruity between a conscripting king building a temple to God, which varies with the voluntariness and freedom of the children of Israel when they build their mobile temple, the tabernacle – in which God chooses to dwell.
Israel’s strength emerges in the context of Joseph in a “turning of the tables,” but a turning that does not eradicate the inhumane despotism. It too oppressed in the turning of the tables. The Bible’s vision will be for joint flourishing.
God, who seems to have been in some sense absent with a kind of “unsettling distance,” comes down to deliver Israel (Exod 3:7-8). The goal of the exodus is God dwelling with God’s people.
Seeing and Believing
God sees their suffering because the God of love perceives the pain of suffering, and God does something about it (again Exod 3:7-8). God’s first contact with human suffering here is “auditory and visual perception.” God’s seeing trigger God’s memory of the covenant promises (Exod 2:24).
Thus, the God of the exodus is a God of both “empathy and sympathy” (Exod 2:25). A woman, too, sees and empathizes by rescuing Moses, without whom there was no exodus and no redemption and no home-going for God’s children.
And there is faith, a “necessary condition of liberation.” Moses both resists and doubts, but Moses turns from resistance to trust. The sign for Moses was that the people would worship on a mountain after liberation. Moses trusts because he learns the character of God, all expressed in a name: “I am (who I am).” In this God promises to be present and not to alter his character.
But doubt does not disappear in the story of the exodus as the children of Israel continue to struggle in their faith.
Question: how much of this kind of substance is found in most systematic theologies?
The God Who Delivers
God calls Moses to lead into the home-making project of God in this world. The meaning of I AM will unfold “by observing what God does within the story of everything.” Not name, no title, nothing formulaic will say enough. We must watch God to know God and to know what God is like.
I love when they speak of “transcendent liveliness” as God reveals God in the flame of fire that does not burn up. It’s a “dancing flame.” “A play of continually changing shapes.” I AM is a living God. And God can occupy space while the people occupy the same space.
This God enters into the realities of history and time, a time that makes space for “the fulfillment of promises.” This God is a person, though even that term is analogous. This “YHWH is neither impersonal power nor numinous presence but person” or “something like a person.” After all, God sees and hears and speaks and remembers and knows and waits and responds. Thus God is a “personal agent.”
“The unmanipulable, totally self-consistent personal God of self-generating and inextinguishable liveliness who hears and sees, who calls and speaks and listens, who acts in history, who comes to overcome all obstacles to fulfilling the promise to be with the people in a ‘good and broad’ place and to setting up a home with them.”
This God journeys with the people of God.
God’s naming of God “signals a willingness to have a relationship, to be spoken to.” Such naming means reciprocal relationship. This exodus leads to a “monotheism of loyalty” which is not the same as an “exclusive monotheism.” This God cannot be controlled because God will be who God will be, and yet this God is reliable and trustworthy.
So here’s a quote for your commonplace book:
“The unmanipulable, totally self-consistent personal God of self-generating and inextinguishable liveliness who hears and sees, who calls and speaks and listens, who acts in history, who comes to overcome all obstacles to fulfilling the promise to be with the people in a ‘good and broad’ place and to setting up a home with them.”
Critique and Ambiguity
At this point Volf and McAnnally-Linz go where many theologies do not and will not go. They critique this vision because the practice of the liberated became the practice of the oppressor as they subdue, subjugate, and slaughter people in order to gain their land. Instead of condemning the dysoikic form of life in Egypt, they will at times imitate it. The ways of Egypt become their ways. Slavery resumes.
Violence resumes.
“Liberation and conquest are two sides of one story, and they both depend on violence.” And this violence “presents one of the great moral challenges in the founding story of Israel and the Christian story of redemption in which Exodus is so central.”
That’s what we need to hear in a genuinely biblical systematic theology.
Next chapter: Life in God’s Household
I just watched The Chosen and it depicted Simon the Zealot as a rebel involved in a group that believed the Messiah would overthrow Roman tyranny who resorted to violence. Is that historically correct? Obviously Simon left that life behind to follow Jesus but I thought it was interesting Jesus was the "home" of a zealot and a tax collector for Rome.