In Memory of Sam Balentine
Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash
Sam Balentine has died, much too soon at 73! Sam was among my best friends, my confidant, a reliable source of support for me, and an honest conversation partner. I grieve his death greatly, though he had suffered bravely for long enough. One of the reliable delights of my life was Sam and I having dinner together every year on the evening before the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. It was a time of great joy for me, as we shared so much about our common work and common life, and gossiped about the guild. I give thanks to God for his life and for his generous friendship with me. Sam called me the day before he died to say goodbye, a most generous act given how badly he was feeling. Beyond our friendship, Sam was a towering force in Old Testament study who went his own venturesome way in his research and used his immense gifts to advance our common work.
The public facts of Sam’s life are quickly and readily summarized. He was educated at Furman University, Southeastern Baptist Seminary, and then Oxford. He completed his doctorate under James Barr. He promptly began his teaching career with a brief stint at Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City before he returned to his Alma Mater at Southeastern Baptist Seminary. It is likely that his faculty slot at Southeastern would have been his home for the course of scholarly career. Except that he, along with his seminary, was caught in the vicious takeover by right-wing zealots in the Southern Baptist Convention who eventually drove out almost all of the good teachers and scholars. Along with many of his colleagues, Sam was forced out of his faculty position, after which Sam became something of a displaced nomad. All the while he continued his generative scholarly work. He taught for a time at the start-up Baptist Seminary in Richmond, and eventually joined the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond. There he completed his teaching career that ended much too soon. At Union Seminary Sam, as a Baptist, was something of an outsider, partly imposed on him by circumstance, and partly of his own choosing. In his years at Union Seminary he became stunningly generative and profound in his scholarship and his publication, emerging as perhaps the most generative, most insightful, and most learned Old Testament of his generation. His erudition was expansive, as he had read everything, and he made the most insightful connections in the wide field of the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern Culture. His death took him away while he was still at the top of his game with plans to go farther, deeper, and more broadly in his research.
He published broadly across the spectrum of Old Testament subjects and books, even so far as to produce a commentary on the Book of Leviticus. Here I will focus on the subject that most preoccupied him and greatly interested me, namely, his steady insistent attentiveness to the reality and practice of prayer in the Bible and in the life of faith. He was passionately propelled in his eagerness to probe the deepest places in the faith of ancient Israel and to discern, as best he could, the elusive character of the God attested in the Old Testament. He took “prayer” as a subject that situated God in the life of the world, and in the enigmatic demands of faith that required energetic engagement, both for God and for human counterparts to God in ancient Israel.
I suggest that we may discern in Sam’s work on prayer something of an arc that stretches from his earliest research to his last, most mature and most judicious discernments.
-At the outset under Barr at Oxford he wrote his dissertation on the “hiddenness of God” a theme that pivots on Isaiah 45:15, and that before him preoccupied Martin Luther in his theological reasoning and polemics. After the manner of Luther, Sam understood that it was indeed God’s hiddenness that precluded the easy, facile worship and spirituality too much practiced among us. This feature of God’s own life requires that a life of serious faith and prayer would of necessity evoke risk, doubt, and uncertainty alongside profound trust that an easier spirituality cannot approach. This early study is filled, as a dissertation must, with much textual and lexical detail that provided the basis for Sam’s later work.
-After his dissertation Sam published three books on prayer that exhibited not only his great intense commitment to the subject, but his deep personal, existential engagement with the question that he understood to be a life or death matter. This trilogy of books featured two that I was privileged to edit for the “Overtures” series of Fortress Press: Prayer in the Hebrew Bible: The Drama of Divine-Human Dialogue (1993), and The Torah’s Vision of Worship (1999). In these books Sam ventured to push deeper into the hidden God’s own life, and into the disciplines required for engagement with this God so that, as he understood so well, there was much at stake for God in prayer and worship, even as there was much at stake for the human community in the engagement of prayer. It is impossible to overstate the gravitas of Sam’s work, as he eschewed easy conventional practices in his passionate readiness to follow honestly where the text led him.
The third of his books on prayer, entitled The Lure of Transcendence and the Audacity of Prayer (2022), offers fifteen of Sam’s most probing articles on the subject of prayer. I am so pleased and proud to report that Sam dedicated his most mature book to me; it is a book that I most treasure in my library. I linger over this marvelous book because it offers some of Sam’s most daring and penetrating insights into the speech and practice of prayer. Of prayer Sam writes:
What is at stake in the prayers for justice to be examined below, for example, is the pray-er’s sense of the trustworthiness of God in the face of defeat and hurt and pain that seems unjustified (p. 159).
Of the prayers of Moses, Elijah, and Joshua he writes:
Where else in the OT does one find such bold presentations of individuals standing tete a tete with God, challenging, interrogating, petitioning and being taken seriously? Not only do they assault God; at times they even prevail…In a tradition where prayer is advocated as both meaningful and effective, one’s self-esteem is lifted to new levels, for to pray is to become a partner with God (p. 172).
Following Peter Berger, Sam judges that the loss of serious prayer would result in
alienation where one loses all sense of mutuality and reciprocity with the shaping powers of the world. All activity is replaced by notions of destiny and fate. With the loss of the dialectical relationship there is, to quote Berger, “an imposition of a fictitious inexorability upon the humanly constructed world” (p, 172).
Following my own work, Sam writes:
Prayer becomes a means of maintaining a balance of power in the divine-human relationship and, if necessary, a means of redistributing power so that the human partner is not squeezed out of the process (p. 173).
This accent on the dialogic quality of prayer engages both partners, divine and human, puts both partners at risk, and calls both partners to accountability:
The pedagogical dividend of focusing on Psalm 22 is this prayer’s assertion, in keeping with the larger biblical story which it reflects, that both lament and praise define the journey towards God.; The journey is not marked exclusively by the one or the other, but rather reaches it most critical and important juncture at the pained yet expectant intersection of lament and praise. Neither lamentation that cannot persist in hope, nor hope that is uniformed by despair sufficiently embody [sic] the biblical witness to life in relationship with God (202).
The daring edge of Sam’s work is to notice the way in which God is deeply implicated in the practice of prayer. He writes of Exodus 32:
Moses does not yield to God’s directive. He does not leave God alone. Israel’s future is at stake, so Moses prays for them. Moses believes that the decision God has announced will have important consequences for God, so Moses also prays, in a very real sense, for God (p. 209).
He pushes on farther from the text:
If God is to be true to God’s own self, then repentance must be an option not only for Israel, but also for God (p. 209).
He goes even farther, quoting Rabbi Yohanan:
The Almighty Himself prays: may it be My will that My compassion may conquer My anger, and that My compassion may prevail over My other attributes, so that I may deal mercifully with My children and act toward them with charity that goes beyond the strict requirements of the law (p. 221).
And then Sam adds:
Imagine that—God praying “May it be My Will”! Imagine human prayers intersecting with, reinforcing, and influencing divine prayers. The rabbis dared to imagine that when people pray, they somehow enter into the very heart and mind of God, there to lend their voices to the Almighty’s vexed and ever vexing deliberations about what do with this world that, by its own decision, limps along east of Eden (p. 221).
Thus Sam shows that prayer is the active risky engagement in a dialogue in which the future is at stake for God, for Israel, and for the world. He contrasts this daring work with our easy, undemanding assumptions:
We are conditioned to adjust our prayers, if indeed we pray at all, to anemic words that do not really ask anything, expect anything, effect anything, save, perhaps a self-referential catharsis that makes us feel better (221).
-Third, it is inescapable, in retrospect, that the depth of Sam’s study of prayer would lead him to the prayers of Job. Indeed he published his daring, passionate, erudite commentary on Job in 2006, a brilliant achievement of his life. He entered into the pathos and anguish of Job as a man of prayer who was relentless in his integrity:
I suggest that Job’s new vision [in Job 42:5] is informed by a new understanding of what it means to be fully and dangerously human. He has learned that human beings may image God not by acquiescing to innocent suffering but by protesting it, contending with the powers that permit or sustain it, and, when necessary, taking the fight directly to God (Lure 107).
In his quiet insistent way, Sam has in his own life carried “the fight directly to God.” As a consequence, he would not settle for conventional resolution, but insists always again to go deeper into the irascible reality of life with God, life before God, and life against God. His restless faith that refuses easy resolve is a match for his sober mind of brilliance. Thus I dare to conclude that Sam himself has taken on the role of Job. He refuses the cover-ups of excessively confident faith, even as Job refused the comfort of his friends. But he also refuses a dismissal of the issues that kept summoning him. It is for good reason that in this third book on prayer, he affirms two fundamental observations without tilting to either one of them:
1) In the ancient world a deeply rooted pessimism—both ontological and epistemological—accentuates an essentially unbridgeable divide between the divine and the human: and 2) embedded within this pessimistic perspective there is a persistent hope, indeed, expectation, that mortal minded human beings can close this gap (Lure vii).
He adds;
Prayer is an asylum for the imagination of what is, what can be, and what should be the relationship between God, world, and humankind. It is the wager that God is vulnerable to human thinking. It is the audacity to believe that belief itself has a performative force unbounded by status quo certainties (Lure viii).
His conclusion is breath-taking, as Sam contended all his life with “status quo certainties” that are too easy and quite unreliable.
Sam was my friend; he was a stalwart scholar. But finally he was “a man before God,” even as he insisted that God should be a “God before him,” and eventually answerable to him.
-We may give thanks to God for Sam’s brilliant intellect. He had read and digested everything. He was the most knowledgeable scholar across the disciplines that I could imagine. And he mustered all of that brilliance in his life-or-death engagement that defined his life.
-Sam was a person of immense moral courage who refused every easy answer, every facile formulation, and excuse for giving God a pass on the mess of creation.
-Sam was marked by the kind of honesty that was featured in the character of Job. In his utterance, Job refused all chances to cut corners or to settle for conventions or any too-ready dismissal of God’s evident moral failures. Sam was like that. He was calm and disciplined and did not seek to call attention to his questioning. But he was nevertheless relentless and insistent that the truth must be told. It must be told even if it violates our usual habits or when it gives affront to the pious or runs up against a God who seems unresponsive and irresponsible. He kept pushing and digging deeper into the mystery of life with God, of course knowing that in the end our relationship with God cannot be decoded or explained away.
Given all of this, Sam’s brilliant intellect, his moral courage, and his unflinching honesty, he was a man of faith. His was not any conventional church faith. It was not the eager passion of his Baptist heritage. Nor was it the reasoned certitude of his Presbyterian hosts at Union Seminary. But it was a God-given, most blessed, endlessly problematic stance that lived with contentious energy in a refusal to accept any claim of faith that did not ring true in his life.
Sam’s life evokes our dazzled gratitude. His life and his work constitute a continuing summons to us to resist any faith that lets the Holy One off the hook for a creation gone amuck. He allowed God no free pass, even as he was hard on himself in his insistent commitment to truth-telling in the deepest ways he could muster. He is a dazzling gift for our life, a gift that through his published legacy will keep on giving to us as we have the courage to receive what he offers. He will not relent in his conviction that he was summoned by the wonder of reality to exercise bold agency for his life. Indeed, it is his agency that butts up against the rule of God. He lived that agency in daring ways. We can imagine him cast in the role of Job, all dressed in his turban, standing before the Holy Throne and saying with expectant defiance, “You sent for me!” (Job 31: 35-37). He would hold that stance until he was caught up by the whirlwind, when he would take a deep breath and at the last embrace his portion of “dust and ashes” (42:5-6).
Walter Brueggemann
June 28, 2024
