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costly loss of praise, The

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Jacobson, Rolf

In his 1986 article, "The Costly Loss of Lament," Walter Brueggemann argues that when the lament psalms are no longer used for their "specific social function," losses are incurred in faith and in life.1 Brueggemann emphasizes two losses for the life of faith. First, he points to a loss in covenantal interaction between the believer and God that occurs "when there is no lament through which the believer can take initiative" with God. Brueggemann draws heuristically upon object-relations theory to argue that lament is a form of prayer through which the believer can hold God accountable for God's covenantal responsibilities.2 Lament is necessary to covenantal faith because without it, faith loses the ability to take initiative with God. "The absence of lament makes a religion of coercive obedience the only possibility." Second, Brueggemann points to a diminished capacity to "raise legitimate questions of justice in terms of social goods, social access, and social power."3 Brueggemann argues that fundamental to all lament prayers is the believer's assertion that "life is not right.114 By confronting God with the charge that all is not right, "Israel kept the justice question visible and legitimate."5 When lament is lost, however, the ability to raise justice questions is diminished.

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My thesis is quite simple: We also have suffered a loss of praise, a loss that has corresponding cultural costs. From the start, some might object that praise has not been lost, pointing out that songs of praise abound in worship sanctuaries. I do not dispute that the vocabulary and language of praise is heard and sung regularly in the worship of many communities of faith. Rather, my contention is that in our society as a whole, worship is the only place in which praise is heard; praise no longer is heard in daily life. It is as if praise has been quarantined both temporally and spatially to those one or two hours when communities of faith meet for official worship. By confining praise to worship, our society has lost certain vital aspects of the function of praise. Here I want to recall a caveat of Brueggemann's analysis of the loss of lament. It is the loss of the "specific social function" of lament to which Brueggemann calls our attention? Although the vocabulary of praise survives in fossilized form in official worship, to a large extent the "specific social function" of praise has been lost.

BASIC ASPECTS OF THE FUNCTION OF PRAISE

In order to evaluate the specific social function of praise, it is first necessary to review some basic aspects of the function of praise in the Bible.

Praise is Response

There are two main ways in which praise is response. The first of these ways can be seen in the formal structure of the hymns. As is well-known, the structure of the hymns is two-fold: an imperative call to praise followed by indicative reasons for praise. In the structure of the hymn, praise is response in the sense of being a congregational response to a call to worship. See, for example, Ps 136:1-3:

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. O give thanks to the God of gods, for his steadfast love endures forever. O give thanks to the Lord of lords, for his steadfast love endures forever. The first phrase in each verse contains the imperative call to praise; the second phrase contains the reason why such praise should be spoken. It should be noted that the implied setting for the hymns is a cultic setting.

A second way that praise is response can be seen in the songs of thanksgiving. Claus Westermann in particular emphasizes that the song of thanksgiving, which he calls the psalm of declarative praise, is related to the individual lament psalm.7 The lament is prayed from a situation of crisis; the song of thanksgiving is sung in response to God's deliverance of the psalmist from that crisis. In the lament, a recurring element is the vow to praise (the promise that if God will answer the prayer, the psalmist will praise God for that deliverance); in the song of thanksgiving, a recurring element is a recollection of the crisis through which the psalmist has passed.8 For example, in Psalm 116, the psalmist recalls a crisis from which God granted deliverance:

I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he has inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the Lord: "O Lord, I pray, save my life!" (vv. 14)

Here, praise is response in the sense that it is the thankful response of one whom God has delivered from a situation of crisis. It should be noted that unlike the hymn, the implied life-setting for the song of thanksgiving is not cultic: "Here we recognize the point at which the praise of God in its simplest form is to be found in the midst of the history of God's people as reported in the historical books.... For this form of the praise of God we can say in any case that its origin is not the cult."9 Thus, praise is responsive in two ways-as congregational response to a call to praise and as individual response to help received from God.

costly loss of praise, The

Theology Today, Oct 2000 by Jacobson, Rolf

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