The two worlds of the Cold War have become three worlds, with much fear and poverty. It is the biblical belief in creation that we are charged with responsible care for the earth. Most of us who knew John Fry and recognized the whole context of the event were willing to attribute to his word from the earth the presence of the Word of God.
There is always talk of the loss of verticality in church life due to the supposedly increasing preoccupation with horizontal issues. In the second scene of the chapter, the circumstances for prophetic ministerial survival and advancement hardly improve. This is the god of the poor, the oppressed, the abused, the exploited, not the god of the mighty.
Napier says that the word earth is crisis, that is, that there is a new day of Third World claims and that things will never be the same; moreover, that the earth's resources are being exhausted and that we are entering a time of drought.
Word Of God - Word of Earth by B
Davie Napier
The Altars
All of us on earth press in numbers close to four billion. But we who have our walk in the earth are only about 30 percent of the total number who live in North America, Europe, the. We consume 92 percent of the world's energy (the United States alone takes a third), and most of the earth's other mineral wealth.
The day of long-term preservation of conditions on the comfortable, safe, developed plateau is over. Part of the definition of our own state of crisis – US crisis – lies right here. It is emphatically not my intention to provide solutions to these overwhelming problems of the earth from the ancient stories about them.
What about the Word of God and the word of the earth -- which is the Brute Word. Prophet/Minister, to the people and the nation: Not I (or maybe even I?) but you and your father's ways are troublers of the earth. Baal in the name of God, or the enterprises of the system in the name of Jesus Christ.
If Eli's drought ends now, it seems that our essential crisis will continue into our future. A radical break, a radical separation of the two altars and a radical renewal of biblical faith is required. The point of the model for us is the urgency of the imperative: to break, completely and radically, with Baal.
They try to shape the deity in a form that sanctifies the royal nature of the earth. He is a minister of the United Church of Christ and the author of several books on the Old Testament.
The Cave
When Elijah heard this, he covered his face with his cloak and went out to take his place at the entrance of the cave. And Jezebel's message is as preserved in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures completed in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era. Of course, it predates the 1954 Supreme Court decision and the Martin Luther King era of the 1960s.
I am on the faculty of Yale Divinity School and am working with a colleague at another seminary on what should be a jointly written introduction to the Old Testament. Suddenly in the midst of the enterprise he writes, in effect, Your stuff is too inferior to mine to be published with it. It is to autobiographically illustrate something of the variety of the form of the trauma, Elijah/Jezebel, which can send us, as it were, for life, through the desert to the cave.
Just as the flight to the cave is undertaken by large numbers for various reasons, so the nature of the cave varies greatly and appropriately. Although the Word of Yahweh seems to have been absent and silent in the cave, the experience of the cave, the recapitulation of the womb, the distance and perspective that the cave provided from and to Baalism and... Jezebel and Israel – all this was and is a legitimate gift of the legitimate and essential cave journey.
For all the legitimacy of the cave trip, the Word that comes when we come out of the cave, where alone the Word is available to us - the Word that comes is always the same: "What are you doing here?. Be that as it may. , these lines give a sharply fitting climax to the story of the Cave. It is now that we know, in the Word of God and the word of the earth, that we are not alone, that we are indeed surrounded by clouds of living witnesses, that there is kingdom work to be done, and disciples and colleagues, intimates of Elisha, with whom they are to do the work.
On our way, always on our way through the earth, we will bring Elisha with us to the work of the word of God and the word of the earth; if we can do no more - it is enough - we will create islands of authentic Christian life and we will leave the future radiation to the Holy Spirit, satisfied in faith. Napier says, “For all the legitimacy of the cave trip, the word that comes when we come out of the cave, where the only Word is accessible to us -- the Word is always the same: What are you doing here.
The Inheritance
These are not times in which comfort is easily achieved; or, if it is, it may be irrelevant, or it may be bought in a corrupt transaction of exchanging the Word of God and the word of the earth for the obsessive word of the trivial, encapsulated world, in which man is himself the undisputed center . Two golden shafts rise sharply from the sea and fade into the morning sky. In the classic expression of the proximity problem, of which the story before us is an excellent example, the ensuing conflict of interest between A and B turns out to be irreconcilable, and the weaker B is effectively eliminated as a contender.
This is to secure the crucial support supposedly of God himself (suspectedly A always knows best), but, failing that, at least the consent of the rank and file of God's potential worshippers. Olive Schreiner, an Englishwoman from South Africa, born in the mid-nineteenth century and surviving into the twentieth century, was in many ways very perceptive well ahead of her time. Like the claim of the old British Empire, we too can say that the sun never sets on fields and lands, on kingdoms and.
And so a myth grew up, a myth not necessarily supported by the facts, of the very special relationship between the US and China. In all the laws of the Old Testament it is absolutely taken for granted that no one sells. It is not us who in any direct sense perform the act of stealing the heritage.
And however acquired he was, he hoped that once occupied the whole affair of the vineyard might be forgotten. It is my simple and direct contention that in the common practice of organized religion in the United States we have allowed our Jezebels to set the stage for an effective disinheritance of earth. Question: Who are we church people in the USA, with whom are we predominantly more analogous, Elijah or Ahab.
For only by being completely found by God's Word can we be saved, so that we can hear, understand and heed the painful, bitter, harsh and critical word of the earth and that the inheritance of all can be preserved and strengthened for the glory of God and for the service of God's children on earth. Barnet and Ronald Muller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p.
The Question and the Question
Davie Napier, at the time of this writing, was the Holmes Professor of Old Testament Criticism and Interpretation at Yale Divinity School. Word of God -- Word of Earth is copyright United Church Press, 1976, and published by A Pilgrim Press, a division of United Church Press. Question: Which is the most influential altar among us, that of Yahweh or Baal, God or mammon, Christ or possessions.
Question: Is it not true that throughout our history we as a people have repeatedly killed in order to possess, in body but also spirit and psyche. Question: Is it not true that we of the church were generally in agreement, if not always by our ballots, then by our silence. Question: Whose inheritance now sustains the life of relative wealth and abundance that is ours, our own (which we have spent and overspent) or that of a multitude of Nabots.
Question: Can we yet reverse the judgment that we too shall die in our own blood where and because we have shed the innocent blood and usurped the cherished human inheritance of countless, innumerable, unsung, powerless and dispossessed Naboths? , black, brown, yellow and white. Question: Can we revive and recreate Elijah among us; Can the church, and we of the church, be both prophet and priest to king, nation and world.
