Response to Walter Brueggemann,

"Holiness Become Generosity"

FREDERICK W. W E I D M A N N

TIME AFTER TIME Professor Brueggemann's "Vision" kept reinforcing and

building on its own lines of thought in interesting, full, and suggestive
ways. In the few minutes allotted me I want to take up his challenge to do
some "homework." I want to do it in a way consistent, but not fully con-
sistent, with what I have heard stated; and so, on one level, perhaps chal-
lenge certain things I heard Professor Brueggemann say, and on another
level, challenge along with him the kind of thing or things that we have
been calling "liberal Protestantism" or "progressive Christianity."
Let me get into it this way.
Toward the end of the discussion that followed his formal presenta-
tion, Professor Brueggemann referenced the first article of the Creed,
about God the Creator—a God, a Creation, that keeps giving. He also
suggested, in striking terms, that so many of our churches so often move
from "atheism": that is, they move from a zero-sum notion, or a limited
orfiniteresources notion. We have what we have. Period. At best we can
move things around to meet some needs that perhaps might not other-
wise be met.
I want to start from both those points (God and Creation, "atheism")
and move toward a working notion of Jesus as Christ, and toward a
notion of Christ, or King, or Lord as something other than triumphalist,
and as something fully compatible with active, engaged, fully opera-
tional truck with alterity and with defined, meaningful, distinct holiness.
What most people in most churches have never figured out is that
the Second Person of the Trinity, who is talked about in the second article
of the Creed, is the agent of creation. Remember the line? For the sake of
simplicity I'll recite the line traditionally, maintaining the male pronoun
and such: "through him all things were made."
65
 66 FREDERICK W. WEIDMANN

That "him" must be the Second Person of the Trinity: the Christ, the
agent through whom God's desire for, call for, word of Creation is carried
out. At least in the Greek of the Christian writers, there is no other possi-
bility. God cannot dirty God's hands. But the godly agent, the Christ, the
Logos, can. God as Creator is Christ, includes Christ. In Christian
thought, no Christ, no creation—at least not as we know it. Christ is all
wrapped up in creation (and vice versa). That holds significant implica-
tions, and possibilities, for Christians7 relationships with the cosmos, the
earth, and all peoples.
Secondly, this notion of Christian churches moving from a posture of
"atheism," as Professor Brueggemann so strikingly and challengingly put
it, fascinates me. I want to push us further on it. Toward the close of
today's presentation it is stated: "Not by magical christological formula
but by a daily counter-ethic the baptismal community matters to the life
of the world."
"Not by magical christological formula but by a daily counter-ethic."
Why the contrast, I wonder? And why the seemingly pejorative notion of
"magic"? Protestant scholars have for centuries dismissed things that
they find to be too Catholic or too Jewish with such words as "magic" or
"superstition."
Earlier in the presentation Professor Brueggemann alluded to the
first part of Hebrews 12:2: "looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of
our faith." I like the reference. But I'm left wondering, why not include,
too, the second part of that marvelous, densely packed verse? It bursts
with potential for informing our "homework": "... pioneer and perfecter
of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured
the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at therighthand
of the throne of God" (NRSV).1
Here,rightat this crux (pun, I suppose, intended) or fulcrum of Bult-
mann's redeemer myth,2 but more importantly at the top of the parabola
formed by Bultmann's redeemer myth as paired with a Pauline eschatol-
ogy—here is the (and now I paraphrase from yesterday's presentation)
source, structure, and foundation of the hard assumptions and premises
and basic commitments that were so operative in the literature of early
Christianity; a literature that, by the way, is literature of the oppressed (for
example, Hebrews, from which we've already quoted, references a partic-

1. Cf. very similar language in the "Christ Hymn" that Paul quotes in Phil. 2:5-11,
which is possibly the earliest Christian hymn, or earliest Christian composition of any kind,
that we have.
2. Itself based, to a significant degree, on the "Christ Hymn" of Phil. 2:5-11.
RESPONSE TO WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: PART II 67

ular early Christian community's "hard struggle with sufferings/' as those

within it are "sometimes publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and
[are] sometimes . . . partners with those so treated"; it goes on to recount
imprisonments and "plundering of possessions," and such [Heb. 10:32ff]).
Let me just follow one short, definable, local tradition which models
the source, structure, and foundation of hard assumptions and premises
and basic commitments. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul, writing
from prison, having just thought out loud about suicide (in Phil. 1:20-26),
first trots out the "Christ Hymn" (in Phil. 2:5-11) and then writes: "But
our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a
Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ" (Phil 3:20, NRSV). This is dense prose,
kinetic with suggestions of separation, difference, alterity, opposing
worldview—even fightin' words. Why?
For one, because Caesar is "Lord." Nero, for example, was referred
to as both Neron ho kurios and Neron kurios; that is, "Nero the Lord."
Christians who read and heard Paul "must have heard in the solemn con-
fession that Jesus Christ is 'Lord' an implicit protest against other 'Lords'
and against 'the Lord' as people were beginning to call the Roman
Caesar."3 On this score, the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament, which
nobody bothers to read anymore, makes the point even clearer. Listen to
Jude 4: "our only ruler and Lord, Jesus Christ."
Then there's that word Savior. Caesar is Savior, no? Well, yes. In
Horace's Ode 1.2, for example, Caesar Augustus is portrayed as "the Sav-
ior" who came down from heaven. And how about this monument set
up in Ephesus in honor of Julius Caesar? It decrees, "The cities in Asia
[Western Turkey on today's map]... honor Gaius Julius Caesar . . . , our
God Manifest and common Savior of all human life."4
Paul lived in Ephesus in the shadows of that very monument for two
or three years; a good bit of it, perhaps, in prison. But, says Paul, "our cit-
izenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior,
the Lord Jesus Christ." That's our power base. That's our identity as the
church, the assembly of God's chosen. And let us—today—not forget
what "church," the Greek word ekklesia, is and means: the ekklesia is
the "regularly assembled political body" in a given time and place.5

3. John S. Pobee, Persecution and Martyrdom in the Theology of Paul, JSNT Supplement
Series 6 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1985), 80.
4. Frederick W. Danker, Benefactor: Epigraphic Study of a Graeco-Roman and New Testa-
ment Semantic Field (St. Louis: Clayton Publishing House, Inc., 1982), 213-14.
5. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, revised and augmented by F. Wilbur
Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other
Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 240a.
 68 FREDERICK W. WEIDMANN

Remember that in Ephesus itself, according to Acts 19:39, it is the ekklesia,

the city's "regular assembly" (NRSV), which is to consider Paul's fate. The
church—this Christian "church"—is, quite literally, a political alternative.
And now, particularly, what about this phrase: "Our citizenship is in
heaven." The Greek word is politeuma (you can see in it our word
political). In an ancient hellenistic city certain peoples, Jews among them,
were consigned to a politeuma. Not unlike our word church it had both a
locative and a meta-locative sense. It secondarily meant that quarter of
town in which a group lived; it primarily referred to that political man­
date by which that group lived in the city (that is, it referred to their spe­
cific identity in the city). So notice Paul to the reader: our politeuma is in
heaven; our status and identity, our political mandate is in heaven.
The question for Paul is not, What would Jesus do? The question is,
What has Jesus done? And the answer is, turned the world upside down.
It is Jesus Christ who is Lord.
Liberal Protestants haven't figured out how to connect all that with
their "kingdom now" or "kingdom already" ethic. We haven't yet fig­
ured out how that vertical, "high" Christology supports and undergirds a
horizontal and radical ethic of concern for, and engagement of, other.
Well, let me close with just one example of someone who had figured
that out. It is one who stands directly in Paul's line in the local tradition
of Christianity at Philippi. The Christian teacher and bishop Polycarp,
who was executed in 156 CE., lived and died about sixteen miles north of
where Paul had been at Ephesus. He too wrote to the Philippians, using
words and concepts similar to Paul's own.
Listen to how Polycarp frames this teaching in his own letter To the
Philippians:
. . . serve God .. ., who raised up our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead
and gave [that one] glory and a throne . . . , remembering what the Lord
taught... : "Judge not that you not be judged," "forgive and it shall be for­
given you," "be merciful that you might obtain mercy/' "with what measure
you do your measuring, it will in turn be measured to you," and "blessed are
the poor, and they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is
the kingdom of God."
6
These things, my siblings, I write to you concerning justice.
Notice that Polycarp is concerned with "justice." And notice too that
his point of reference is "our Lord Jesus Christ," risen and on the throne.
6. Polycarp, To the Philippians, Π.1-3, III.l; trans. Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers,
Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library [1914]; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) 285-287;
adapted by Weidmann.
RESPONSE TO WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: PART II 69

But this is no basis for triumphalism or detachment. Quite the opposite.

Here is a very crisp and clear christological formula that itself generates
and supports and informs a "daily counter-ethic" (that's Brueggemann's
language) of "justice" (that's Polycarp language, and, I hope and trust, all
of ours).
Maybe such a christological formula and such an understanding of a
christological formula is "magic." It led such folk as Paul, Polycarp and
so many others whom we don't have the time now to remember—the
slave woman Blandina in Southern France in the late second century;7 her
contemporary Speratus, the first martyr on record in the African
church8—staunchly and unstintingly through their meaningful lives and
deaths, it served as source, structure, and foundation of their churches,
and it changed the world.

7. See the "Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne," recorded in Eusebius' Church History Book
V (and available in editions of that work or in Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian
Martyrs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972]).
8. See the "Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs" (available in Musurillo, The Acts of the Christ-
ian Martyrs).
 ^ s
Copyright and Use:

As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use
according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as
otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement.

No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the
copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling,
reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a
violation of copyright law.

This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission
from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal
typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However,
for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article.
Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific
work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered
by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the
copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available,
or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s).

About ATLAS:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS®) collection contains electronic versions of previously

published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS
collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association
(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.

The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American
Theological Library Association.