BRUGGEMAN(PROPHETIC IMAGINATION) Flashcards
Psalms of Orientation
- express a confident, serene settlement of faith issues
- happy settlement of life’s issues occurs because God is known to be reliable and trustworthy
- reality that God is trustworthy and reliable
Psalms of Orientation
PROBLEM W/THE ELITE
- satisfied and assured assertion of orderliness probably comes from the welloff
- creation faith, a sure sense of God’s orderliness, is not always high and noble faith
- Sometimes, it is void of such pure motive and serves only to celebrate the status quo
Psalms of Orientation
PROBLEM W/KNOWING WHEN TO SHARE
- such psalms must be used carefully or with a knowing qualification
- we must always ask whose interest is reflected and served by such psalms and by their use
Psalms of Orientation
PROBLEM W/SOCIAL CONTROL
- may also serve as a form of social control
- may induct the young into a system of obedience and rewards
Psalms of Orientation
PROBLEM W/LABELS
- may label the socially disapproved as the ones who violate God’s creation
- they may be used to justify morally the view that those who do not prosper in the world are those who live outside the parameters and priorities of God’s creation
What are “Songs of Creation”?
Orientation
The most foundational experience of orientation is the daily experience of life’s regularities, which are experienced as reliable, equitable, and generous. A proper response is one of gratitude.
What are “Songs of Torah”?
Orientation
While the creation is sustained by God’s faithfulness, it is also coherent and peaceable because of Israel’s obedient attention to the way God has ordered life i.e. the Torah.
What are “Wisdom Psalms”?
Orientation
These tend to be didactic in tone and relatively amorphous in shape. They are best identified by their subject matter.
Occasions of Well-Being
Everything is ordered and reliable. It is known firsthand in the daily and seasonal experiences of life. Confidence in creation is based on the pattern of blessings that are known especially in the family, household, and tribe. God is nowhere visible, but is discerned as the guarantor of the critical points through which life is affirmed and enhanced.
Psalms of Disorientation
Psalms to represent a life not only as one where things are well, but also one in which life is savagely marked by incoherence, a loss of balance, and unrelieved asymmetry.
WHAT ARE THE 2 DEFINING FACTORS OF DISORIENTATION PSALMS?
- The range of expressions employed here never escapes address to Yahweh.
- Though this speech is liberated and expansive, it tends to come to expression in rather consistent and rigorous forms.
5 PARTS OF THE PLEA
WESTERMANN
- Address to God The complaint is not spoken by one who is a stranger to Yahweh, but one who has a long history of trustful interaction.
- Complaint
- Petition
- Motivations Reasons for God to act.
- Imprecation
3 PARTS OF PRAISE
- Assurance of being heard.
- Payment of vows.
- Doxology and praise. The most important element of resolution is doxology and praise. The God who has been accused is now acknowledged as generous and faithful and saving.
Personal Complaint Song
Disorientation
These psalms are the voices of those who find their circumstance dangerously, and not just inconveniently, changed.
Communal Complaint Songs
Disorientation
Statement about the religious dimension of public events of loss.
NEW ORIENTATION
They give expression to that new reality of disorientation, when everything in heaven and on earth seems skewed. They hear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had been expected.
3 PARTS OF NEW ORIENTATION PSALMS
- Includes not only a statement of the problem, but resolution
- They are sung bc God hears and answers expressions of disorientation
- Speak of the intervening action of God to give life where death is imminent
Personal Thanksgiving Songs
New Orientation
The speaker is now on the other side of a lament or complaint.
Thanksgiving Songs of the Community
New Orientation
Celebrate an act of God’s power that has moved Israel’s life out of a time of disorientation.
3 Parts of Thanksgiving Songs of the Community
They suggest the community had:
- Complained
- The whole community had been saved
- Therefore the whole community had given thanks. A community forgiven and therefore ready to begin afresh.
The once and future King
New Orientation
These are the songs of new orientation par excellence. They give public liturgical articulation to the “new kingship” of’ Yahweh, which has just now been established.
2 Parts of the Victory Song
New Orientation
- The substance of the song is essentially narrative.
- The conclusion is a formula of enthronement, a conclusion to the narrative, a
verdict dict upon the historical process just reviewed.
Enthronement Psalms
Taken liturgically, eschatologically, politically, are an affirmation that all peoples Israel and other peoples as well as the whole created order, are accountable to God’s governance
5 Parts of the Enthronement Psalms
- All people are subject to Yahweh.
- Yahweh is a royal power serves to destabilize every other royal power
- Yahweh’s kingship is politically significant as a way of analyzing all human exercise of power i.e. the Davidic dynasty.
- The New Testament does not proclaim the kingdom of Jesus, but the kingdom of God.
- Our prayer life is a continued insistence on this metaphor. So Christians pray daily that God’s kingdom come on earth, so the liturgical act of the coronation is a sign and expectation.
Hymns of Praise
New Orientation
A public song that is sung with abandonment in praise to God for the character of God’s person
