'He stood in a high-minded tradition that went back to Keir Hardie, co-founder of the Labour party, George Lansbury, its leader in the early 1930s, and the historian RH Tawney, its most important intellectual influence in the early 20th century. It went still further back to Victorian figures such as Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, and even to the Old Testament. "For Benn," David Powell, an early biographer wrote, "the entire socialist venture is rooted in history, a continuum reaching back in time to its biblical roots".'
Giles Fraser writes: 'His big thing was that the Bible was the story of the battle between the kings (and their priestly lackeys) and the prophets – the priests, in his book, being the establishment baddies and the prophets being the social-justice-seeking goodies. And it's not a bad interpretive lens through which to understand a lot of the Biblical action.
For Benn, the priests were the theological justifiers of monarchy. They cemented the conservative relationship between an eternal and unchanging God and a static social order. The prophets, on the other hand, were a total pain in the arse, forever railing against those who thought that the ceremonies of the temple were more important than the purposes for which the temple existed. He was a bit like Amos: "I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!"'
Benn's understanding is one that Walter Brueggemann has unpacked in greater depth. For example, Sam Norton highlights Brueggemann writing that: “… in 1 Samuel 8, Samuel is in deep dispute with
The people of
But that is not all that this passage or the Bible, as a whole, says on the subject because God and Samuel, despite their misgivings and predictions, all the people of
Brueggemann notes that the kind of kingship that we see David and initially Solomon exercise: “had the establishment and maintenance of justice as its primary obligation to Yahweh and to Israelite society. This justice, moreover, is distributive justice, congruent with
This is what Brueggemann thinks the Bible sees as key
to any form of public leadership: “The claim made is that power – political,
economic, military – cannot survive or give prosperity or security, unless
public power is administered according to the requirement of justice, justice
being understood as attention to the well-being of all members of the
community.”
Brueggemann writes about this in terms of the core testimony and the counter testimony. The core testimony is structure
legitimating; that is to say it is about order and control – everything in its
rightful place and a rightful place for everything. The counter testimony is
pain embracing; that is to say it is about hearing and responding to the pain
and suffering which is found in existence. The core testimony is “above the
fray” while the counter testimony is “in the fray”.
The wonderful thing, it seems to me, about the Christian scriptures is that this debate and dialogue is resolved in favour of the counter testimony. René Girard writes that, in the Gospels, “God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim … The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”
Similarly, Gerd Theissen writes that in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth:
“religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutation which spell death for the weak and powerless.”
Finally, Rowan Williams says that:
“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”
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Billy Bragg - Upfield.
