costly loss of praise, The

1Walter Brueggemann, "The Costly Loss of Lament," in The Psalms and the Life of Faith, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 98-111.

2Ibid., 104.

3Ibid.

4Ibid., 105.

5Ibid., 106.

6Ibid., 98.

7Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981). "The petition [of the lament] that has been heard leads to declarative praise" (p. 105).

8A clear exposition of this form can be found in Patrick Miller, They Cried to the Lord (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 184-98.

9Westermann, Praise and Lament, 87-8.

10I do not mean to suggest that some worldly orders are pristine and are not undone by praise. All earthly orders are subject to sin and are the target of this polemical and political aspect of praise. Nor is the church insulated from this impact of praise. The church is not a godly kingdom on earth, but is a fully political and fully human institution, in which sin manifests itself. Praise targets the church just as much as it does secular organizations.

11Some might attempt the argument that the etymological roots of congratulations point to the meaning of giving "thanks with." Etymology, however, is often misleading and this is surely such a case. Words mean what they mean in the contexts in which they occur. The dominant use of "congratulations" is used to praise or commend a human subject, not to give thanks with a human subject to God.

12One of the clearest theological expositions of the modern emphasis on the self can be found in Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).

13Brueggemann, "Impossibility' and the Epistemology in the Faith Tradition of Abraham and Sarah (Gen 18:1-15)," in The Psalms and the Life of Faith, 167-88.

14Or if not the sick, then the parent of the sick must be responsible for the sickness. When I was ill with cancer as a teenager, some well-intentioned soul asked my mother if she felt guilty that she had not fed me the proper diet of fruits and vegetables, the lack of which resulted in my cancer. As my mother correctly responded, "You can't pin that one on me." But the myth of the autonomous self must hold someone responsible for everything, including things for which no one can be responsible.

15 Jon L. Berquist, Judaism in Persia's Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 195. Berquist understands "the priesthood" to be the dominant group in Persian-period Yehud. He understands the praise psalms as functioning to create social solidarity in order to legitimize the priesthood's control of society and to "legitimate violence committed in service of the social order" (p. 197). "In general, the psalms of praise legitimate the social order and at times will allow a rhetoric of violence against those who oppress the society's status quo" (p. 198).

16God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 20.

17Ibid., 21-2.

18Wiesel, Legends of our Time (New York: Avon, 1978), 31-8.