Public Truth amid Private Rumors (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
This is the fourth in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the previous posts here.
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. It is my intention in this and following weekly blogs to take up each of these eight claims and to consider how we may in good faith respond to them. I have no doubt that such a careful pointed response to each of these distortions is an effort worth making. I will take up each claim in turn.
The fourth claim is each person is entitled to their own facts. This dismissal of reliable knowledge leads to unrestrained speculation. That in turn is readily open to conspiracy theories that do not need to be, or cannot be fact checked. Such an illusionary world, moreover, is fed by various media personalities and publicists that sustain an alternative universe of illusionary imagination that feeds the most destructive political impulses among us. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own private facts. This leads to the claim of alternative facts when the established facts do not serve a particular political interest.
Obviously, the church not only has a stake in resisting and refusing such claims, but a deeper stake in the claim that truth and truthfulness are grounded in the reality of creation that is itself grounded in the reliable “steadfast truth” of God’s own life. The articulation of such truth grounded in lived reality is not always easy or obvious, as it depends upon a consensus of norms for truth claims, and now even those norms are put in question.
It is not obvious to me what biblical text might offer a best response to the dismissal of science (and of reality), but I have been intrigued by the odd complex narrative of II Samuel 16:15-17:23. The big story in this text is that Absalom, son of David, is trying to seize the throne from his father David. The narrative frames the action of Absalom as a “conspiracy”:
While Absalom was offering the sacrifices, he sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David’s counselor, from his city Giloh. The conspiracy grew in strength, and the people with Absalom kept increasing (II Samuel 15:12).
This attempted usurpation ends for Absalom when Joab, David’s ever-ready hatchet man and his men kill Absalom (18:9-16). Short story: rebellion mounted and rebellion defeated!
But in between the initial insurrection of Absalom and his defeat and death we have this complex narrative of planning and negotiating the conduct of the conflict. In that complex part of the narrative the protagonists are Ahithophel and Hushai, dubbed as intimates of David:
Ahithophel was the king’s counselor, and Hushai the Archite was the king’s friend (I Chronicles 27:33).
Already in this introduction to the two of them there is a distinction between them. Ahithophel is a “counselor,” but Hushai is his “friend,” a more intimate relationship. Both of them defect to the side of Absalom. While both were easily accepted into the camp of Absalom, Hushai responds to the query of Absalom in quite ambiguous language, but he is accepted nonetheless (I Samuel 16:15-19). Both of the royal advisers propose plans for Absalom’s rebellion.
Ahithophel’s plan, given in two parts, was well received. Ahithophel counseled Absalom first to commit a public gesture of seizure of the concubines of his royal father, thus acting the part of a king (16:21-23). Second, he proposes a quick strike of 12,000 soldiers to hit David while he is “weary and discouraged” (II Samuel 17:1-4). His advice is reported by the narrator as “good counsel” (II Samuel 16:23; 17:4), wise, concise, and likely to succeed.
Hushai, by contrast, turns out to be a double-dealer who covertly continues his loyalty to David. Thus Hushai offers a wholly unrealistic proposal to Absalom (II Samuel 17:8-13). While Ahithophel has offered a limited, manageable military force readily mobilized, Hushai proposed, by contrast, the mobilization of the entire population “from Dan to Beersheba like the sand of the sea” (17:11), so that David can be hunted down wherever he hides. If David hides in a city, Hushai proposes that the entire city be dragged off into the valley by ropes until it is obliterated. Thus the pursuit of one man is by a scorched earth policy, quite a contrast to the plan of Ahithophel that had recognized that only one man was to be sought and killed. Beyond this quite bizarre plan, Hushai also warned David about how to hide and where to flee (II Samuel 17:15-16).
Thus we are able to see that Hushai refused the expertise of David’s military men and the long running wisdom of practical steps. Instead he proposed a set of alternative facts and alternative actions that had no connection to military or geographical realty. Hushai hoped that he could persuade Absalom, in his continuing loyalty to David, to disregard conventional expertise as a way to defeat Absalom.
Oddly enough, the point and counterpoint of Ahithophel and Hushai take place in a way that is disconnected from reality. The conduct of the rebellion and the defeat of Absalom take place apart from this oratorical contest between the two royal advisors. Hushai’s plan is never seriously considered. And the plan of Ahithophel is foiled because of the covert action of Hushai, so that David escaped from Absalom. Hushai, remaining loyal to David, comes out of the episode unscathed. By contrast, Ahithophel had bet on Absalom, and is disgraced. Consequently:
When Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his donkey and went off home to his own city. He set his house in order, and hanged himself; he died and was buried in the tomb of his father (17:23).
We may identify two dimensions of this narrative that do not appeal to the imaginative oration of these two royal advisors. First, the actual defeat of Absalom was accomplished otherwise, beyond the plan of either piece of advice. The fact is (a fact that is beyond both Ahithophel and Hushai) that Absalom was apprehended by Joab and killed by David’s loyal general and his men:
Joab said to the man who told him, “What, you saw him! Why did you not strike him there to the ground? I would have been glad to give you ten pieces of silver and a belt.” But the man said to Joab, “Even if I felt in my hand the weight of a thousand pieces of silver, I would not raise my hand against the king’s son; for in our hearing the king commanded you and Abishai and Ittai, saying: For my sake protect the young man Absalom! On the other hand, if I had dealt treacherously against his life (and there is nothing hidden from the king), then you yourself would have stood aloof.” Joab said, “I will not waste time like this with you.” He took three spears in his hand, and thrust them into the heart of Absalom, while he was still alive in the oak. And ten young men, Joab’s armor-bearers, surrounded Absalom and struck him, and killed him (II Samuel 18:11-15).
Joab did not need the myriad mobilization of Hushai; nor did he require the 12,000 proposed by Ahithophel. All he needed was his own “three spears,” supported by his ten young men plus his long-running experience in such violent enterprises. Joab is unimpressed and unmoved by flamboyant rhetoric, and stays close to the ground in his ruthless military reasoning. He is indeed “an expert” in such matters as killing, an expertise for which Ahithophel and Hushai exhibit no respect. Joab knew what to do and how to do it, because he was experienced in the realities of war. His expertise would not be gainsaid by the rhetorical flights of the advisors.
But consider a second fact in the narrative. The narrator allows that there is an inexplicable “slippage” in the course of the narrative concerning the rejection of the good counsel of Ahithophel. David had anticipated that the deception of Hushai would defeat the counsel of Ahithophel (15:33-34). But David had also prayed,
O Lord, I pray you, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolishness (15:31).
And then Ahithophel’s advice was rejected, even as Hushai had urged (17:7). But the rejection is not explained by ordinary reasoning or by conventional common sense. The narrator is not reluctant to acknowledge another “fact” concerning the outcome of the narrative. He reports, laconically,
For the Lord had ordained to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, so that the Lord might bring ruin on Absalom (17:14).
The verb “ordained” is a translation of the conventional word for “command.” The Lord commanded the rejection of the advice of Ahithophel! Gerhard von Rad, The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 198-201, has identified this text, along with 11:27 and 12:24, as texts that attest YHWH’s decisive action in the narrative, even if that action is hidden from the actors in the narrative. Of the rejection of the “good counsel” of Ahithophel, von Rad writes:
It is, then, at this point that David’s fortunes change radically. Hushai’s cunning advice was Absalom’s undoing. We now understand why the historian should pause at this juncture, when the fate of Absalom is sealed, to point out to the reader the theological significance of the events. This was the turning-point in the rebellion, and the change in the situation was the work of God himself, who had heard the prayer of the King in his profound humiliation (200).
In seeing God as the decisive actor in this narrative, von Rad concludes:
Rather he [the narrator] depicts a succession of occurrences in which the chain of inherent cause and effect is firmly knit up—so firmly indeed that the human eye discerns no point at which God could have put in his hand. Yet secretly it is he who has brought all to pass; all the threads are in his hands; his activity embraces the great political events no less than the hidden counsels of human hearts. All human affairs are the sphere of God’s providential working (201).
After we consider the rhetorical contest of Ahithophel and Hushai, the realistic brutality of Joab, and the hidden effectiveness of YHWH, we may return to the claim at the outset. The claim made here is for a bottom-up capacity for good knowledge. On the one hand, such a claim is a critique of any absolutism by elite experts. The experts must deal in probabilities, not certitudes. On the other hand, beyond the relativizing claim, there is a deep hidden purpose amid the human process, one we may call “providential,” that is, God’s capacity to “see beforehand.” Some among us today would make knowledge a contest between experts and conventional common sense. But that contest, convenient as it may be, is interrupted and relativized by the inscrutable holiness of God that is beyond both expertise and manipulation.
Given this remarkable claim made in the text, I reckon that it may be the church’s best witness that the human process cannot be reduced to human capacity, human power, or human knowledge. There is another very different purpose at work among us. Faith is the bold, brave process by which we seek to align our own ideas and actions with that providential purpose. Witness to this long running reality of the holy God of covenant is urgent work among us, urgent work that must be addressed. In the end, the prayer of the well-beloved David was answered (II Samuel 15:31)!
An afterthought. If one finds this narrative too complex as an answer to the right-wing claim, then one might fall back on a simpler case concerning Jeremiah and Hananiah. After the first assault by Babylon on Jerusalem in 598 BCE, Hananiah opined that all would return to normal in two years:
Thus says the Lord: This is how I will break the yoke of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two years (Jeremiah 28:11).
Hananiah lived in a wish world of royal imagination. He is immediately and brusquely countered by the prophet who sees the reality of the facts on the ground and declares:
For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put an iron yoke on the neck of all the nations so that they may serve King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, and they shall indeed serve him; I have even given him the wild animals (28:14).
We need have no doubt that Jeremiah would have resonated completely with the Yahwistic affirmation of II Samuel 17:14. There is indeed another purpose at work in the world that will not be mocked. Because of that purpose the prophet can identify even the enemy, Nebuchadnezzar, as “servant of YHWH.” God is indeed working out God’s purpose. Neither fantasy nor absolutist elitism can escape the long, slow, hidden work of holiness that will, soon or late, have its way.
God is working His purpose out
As year succeeds to year;
God is working his purpose out,
And the time is drawing near.
Nearer and nearer draws the time,
The time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.
All we can do is nothing worth
Unless God blesses the deed;
Vainly we hope for the harvest-tide
Till God gives life to the seed;
Yet near and nearer draws the time,
The time that shall surely be
When the earth shall be filled
with the glory of God
As the waters cover the sea
(The Episcopal Hymnal 412).
Walter Brueggemann
August 4, 2022
