Abstract
This book is many things. It is an introduction to the particular political trauma experienced by the Indigenous populations in Australia, yet also a proposed theology of healing directed at similar traumas in wider postcolonial lands. It is an engagement with Habermas’s ethics of public discourse, yet also a deeply researched commentary on an alternative narrative of sovereignty in the Hebrew Bible. It is, to this reviewer, a biblical ethics with many surprises.
When a book’s title includes ‘biblical ethics’, those of us who are both ethicists and biblical scholars always wonder with anticipation how the author has chosen to use such a phrase. There are typically two camps in this scenario. First, there are those using biblical ethics in the singular form, often with a heavy dependency on ideas around canon as authoritative and a meta-narrative of salvation or, at times, revelation. The second camp employs the phrase in a plural form and, as one might expect, eschews meta-narratives for a preferred presentation of the Bible as a collection of texts which represent differing moral voices as part of a great cacophony at worst, or discussion at best. The beauty of Brett’s book is that it manages to situate itself firmly in the second camp whilst also somehow maintaining the sense of grand meaning which typically defines the first. I would suggest that this is owed to Brett’s ability to bring together his own ‘applied ethics’ work in the negotiations about Indigenous land claims in Victoria, his history as a biblical scholar, and his academic specialty in postcolonial theory.
Ethicists and theologians might be tempted to skim through the formidable second section of Brett’s work, the one which digs deeply into the priestly tradition of the Hebrew Bible. That such a temptation exists is telling of the book’s major weakness: Brett conducts this discussion in the ‘house-style’ of biblical studies and this will prove alienating to those not deeply familiar with the discipline. In contrast, Brett’s efforts in the first section include an accessible critique of Habermas that those new to the concepts can follow. Moreover, Brett’s critical engagement with Vanhoozer’s idea of a ‘biblical worldview’ (p. 72) is consciously cross-disciplinary. The problem for readers who are not biblical scholars is that it is only by reading Brett’s work with the priestly ideas of the biblical texts that one can fully appreciate the radical nature of the postcolonial critique and decidedly Christian ethics he presents in the last section of the book.
From a biblical scholar’s point of view, the framework of the argument concerning the nationalist impulses of the Bible is commendable in that Brett maintains the crucial distinction between what a text intends and how it has been used. Yes, Deuteronomy as well as Ezra-Nehemiah have a nationalistic flair all on their own, but it was their distorted presentation under the papal doctrine of discovery that truly co-opted these texts’ ideology into modern colonialist thought (pp. 75–90). Brett’s subsequent presentation—of the priestly tradition as an alternative narrative to the texts just mentioned—is a clever one, leading him to suggest that ‘any plausible invocation of biblical norms today would need to take account of the fate of the national imaginary after the Babylonian exile’ (p. 90). This in turn sets up his transition to the biblical thinking which takes stock of that tragedy: ‘the quite different theological imagination emerging from the Priestly and wisdom writers’ (p. 90). The three chapters following this set-up address this differing ‘social imaginary’, to borrow from Charles Taylor (which Brett does). The texts on which he focuses in these chapters represent a priestly approach to public theological engagement that is, crucially, located after ‘the trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE’ (p. 91).
The beauty of working within the priestly tradition in the Hebrew Bible is the reader’s discovery that the trauma of Jerusalem’s destruction gives rise to a universal account of existence—one of both creation and creator, both humanity and the environment. This account then gives a thicker meaning to biblically informed ideas of justice, inclusion, and peace. Brett does not miss this point, as laid out in the third section of the book, ‘Engaging with the Present’. For example, when addressing the territory-related questions raised by ‘Indigenous assertions of self-determination’ (p. 151) in his own Australian context, it is the priestly imaginary which underlies his critique of the nationalist impulse to establish exclusive jurisdictions of land. The alternative, he suggests, is one that draws on notions of a larger web of created order (p. 154). In the following chapter’s treatment of the increasingly complex issues surrounding the freedoms and rights due to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, Brett uses the Holiness School’s manoeuvres to establish ‘graded hospitality’ as well as more porous social borders (pp. 91–109) and to call for a Christian commitment to the hospitality of asylum seekers, ‘whatever the status of their documentation’ (p. 78). It is a similar case in Brett’s exploration of environmental justice: he is able to avoid the tempting saviour-complex that characterises the newest face of anthropocentric environmentalism because he grounds his vision in the priestly-rooted notion of the earth actually having a role in ‘redemptive imagination’ (p. 193).
In the final pages of the book, Brett makes the statement that Israel’s prophets called on their communities to ‘hold justice and holiness together in practice’ (p. 212). I believe this phrase captures what Brett is attempting to do with this book at its base level and it is also what he envisions as the way forward in a postcolonial world. He has certainly done the first part, as this book is masterfully held in tension.