Subversion

My thesis is that preaching is a sub-version. You will recognize the play that I intend. Preaching is never dominant version, never has been. It is always a sub-version, always a version, a rendering of reality that lives under the dominant version. We may adopt a strategy of making our “under-version” sound closely like the dominant version, or an alternative strategy of showing our “under-version” to be in deep tension with the dominant version.

The dominant version of reality each of us would mark differently, but we likely would not disagree much on its nature. Perhaps the logo of the dominant version is swoosh, Nike, “life is for winners” of a private, individualized kind who can make it in the market or in the sports arena, who live well, are self-indulgent but who never get involved with in anything outside their own success. The Nike version of reality, deeply rooted in Western Enlightenment consumerism and in US democratic capitalism, has an old history. In the Old Testament it appears as coercive Babylonian imperial expectations looking back to Egyptian brick quotas. In the New Testament it is the endless requirements of Jewish punctiliousness or the demand of Roman emperor worship; it is Luther’s “works”, and in our day perhaps it is “the end of welfare as we know it,” the pressure to get kids into the right preschools for the sake of someday working for Intel. It is an act of dominant imagination that screens out all “neighbors”, neighbors who can be screened out if the God of all Neighborliness can be refashioned into a God who celebrates the virtues of private achievement. It is dominant, so dominant, that it is taken as a given, so dominant that it sustains both liberal and conservative ideology, so dominant that even we who critique are deeply committed to it, so dominant it is not worth criticizing—too costly.

And then we preachers are summoned to get up and utter a sub-version of reality, an alternative version of reality that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid. It is a sub-version because we must fly low, stay under the radar, and hope not to be detected too soon, a sub-version, because it does indeed intend to sub-vert the dominant version and to empower a community of sub-versives who are determined to practice their lives according to a different way of imagining.

Walter Brueggemann - Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World