by Walter Brueggemann
Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Ky. 188 pages
Reviewed by Victoria L. Bethel
The Psalter has been cherished by the church since its birth. These songs yield a portrayal of the God of the Israelite people and their honest responses to their God. We find these psalms in the Reformed Common Lectionary and in our hymnals as suggestions for expressions of praise, thanksgiving and lament. Yet, as Brueggemann points out in this collection of essays, church people, on the whole, only know about six of them. The majority of the psalms are ignored. For pastors who were taught that the psalm of the day is not a preaching text; for educators who have introduced psalms of lament in class, only to note squeamish expressions of those who would prefer to forego them; for musicians who wonder why psalm hymns go mostly unsung, Brueggemann provides a warning and an antidote in a series of close readings of texts. The author’s answer for this strange state of affairs is this: we prefer to live in a world where all is comforting. The Psalter provides a counter-world that can be frightening. When we open ourselves to the whole of the psalter, we find that “the counter-world of the Psalms is a risky, raw-edged world of dispute and contestation, and that is more than we can take on … the God whom we meet in the Psalms is not the benign object of custodial religion in which we specialize, but is a Character, an Agent, and a Force who operates in free ways that disturb and interrupt.”
Our contemporary culture provides us with faulty spectacles. It is a world of greed, self-sufficiency, denial of dysfunction, despair, amnesia and normless. Its gods are those of patriotism, nationalism, capitalism and mastery of knowledge; the “gods of scholastic conservatism … the ones so tied up in formula and proposition and logic that yield certitude that they cannot save;” the gods of progressivism who “never bother anyone.” The church is not untouched by this. Worship of these gods yields a shallow form of escapism. Those who commit the sins of doubt or anger are held at arm’s length and comforted with platitudes.
In contrast, the world of the psalms is one of abundance, dependence upon God, truth telling, hope, remembering and norms for faithful living before God and with neighbor. This world is made available to us through wide use of psalms in preaching, hymnody and prayer. The psalms provide a script for honest dialogue with God for those who have forgotten how to pray. The title, “From Whom No Secrets Are Hid,” comes from a collect in the Anglican tradition reminding us that God knows and sees all before we speak it. But speak honestly we must, if we are to regain our emotional, social and spiritual health.
Brueggemann hopes that his book will lead church leaders to greatly expand their use of psalms in worship and other church practices. To the extent that the church does so, it will know the real God who forgives, transforms, creates, renews, loves and blesses. To the extent that it does not, it risks becoming indistinguishable from the contemporary culture that surrounds it: a world with no God, and therefore no gratitude.
VICTORIA L. BETHEL is pastor of Brett-Reed Memorial Presbyterian Church in West Point, Virginia.
