Walter Brueggemann and Peter Brown: Materiality

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In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:12-14

“In the Early Church, Christian congregations and their bishops paid generous and deliberate attention to the plight of the poor and managed to give relief. In the sixth century (long after the much-maligned Constantine) there was a rather abrupt turn away from this attentiveness, as the church became private about wealth and otherworldly in its hope. The cause of this abrupt turn, Peter Brown has shown, was that the wealthy population became dominant in the church and did not want its wealth subject to the needs of the poor in the church. This turn toward the private and otherworldly is evident, as Brown documents, first of all in the erection of grand mausoleums as hope for another life and as an ostentatious exhibit of wealth. And second, there was an “othering” of the clergy, so that priests and bishops were distanced from “the real world” and assigned to be representatives of the sacred.

Brown writes: “Hence we witness a progressive “othering” of the clergy. They became a sacral class. Their dress, hair style, and sexual behavior were increasingly expected to be sharply different from that of the laity. Religious dress became sharply distinguished from lay dress. The tonsure was taken on as a sine qua non of both the clerical and the monastic state. It is notable that the origins of the tonsure did not lie in any clerical regulations. It came from the ground up. The cutting of hair (both of beards and of the top of the head) had long been treated by Romans as a sign of special dedication. The tonsure emerged as a response to lay demand for such a sign. Those who interceded for the laity, as a sacral class, were to be clearly designated by means of a ritual of shaving the crown of the head that had deep roots in the ancient folklore of hair.”

In effect the church gave up its preoccupation with material matters and became busy with spiritual matters of “soul-making” for the next world. That turn away from the material has continued in wealthy churches to this day, as is evidenced by the gentle admonition often made to pastors, “Don’t become political.” This familiar mantra of course is not against being “political,” but only against the type of “political” that disturbs the comfort zone of the parishioner. It is much preferable to have the pastor confined to matters “sacral.” (Shades of the sixth century!) The matter is very different in the churches of the poor that do not hesitate to address matters of materiality.

In the Epistle to the Hebrews, the writer generally appeals to the addressees of the letter with positive encouragement to greater faith and bolder testimony. In 5:12–14, however, the writer chides the addressees because they “refuse to grow up.” They continue to rely on “baby food” of the gospel and so wish to remain “infants” who lack skills to address urgent matters of good and evil. It is my thought that in the contemporary wealthy church (most of the Western church!), by happenstance or by intention many members remain “infants” in faith about matters of materiality. They prefer the “milk” and pabulum of a convenient, private, otherworldly gospel about “souls” rather than the solid food of informed critical thought about the materiality of our faith. As a consequence, much of the church is resistant to engagement in real-life material issues of faith and is quite content to settle for “innocent religion.” And in much of this the pastors of the church collude because it often too hard and too risky to do otherwise. The result is a church that is weak or lacking in moral passion about the great issues of the day.”

Walter Brueggemann and Peter Brown in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), Introduction.

I head to India and Nepal tomorrow. I got a new book to read on my trip. Enjoy the journey with me.

From the introduction we note that the Church today looks nothing like the Early Church. Brueggemann and Brown highlight a key difference: care for the poor.

Christianity has become private and otherworldly and lost connection with the granular nature of the gospel.

Let’s learn from Brueggemann, a prolific Old Testament scholar who went home to be with the Lord back in June. He ranks among of the most influential Christian writers of the last century.

Track with me if you want the Church to grow up, to go beyond baby food.

To live, give, serve, and love generously means exercising our Christian faith with materiality. And today I want to shout out happy birthday to my sister Heather. I thank God for the materiality of her faith.

As we start this journey, be prepared to care more about more than souls. Our sacred faith should permeate all corners of our lives and society. Let’s aspire not to be a rich church but a global Church rich in good works.

Praying for materiality. And Happy Birthday Heather.