Psalms of Rage: Ellen Davis’s Provocative Interpretations
Publication Date
2-27-2002
Publication
The Christian Century
Document Type
Article
Abstract
"She must be wrong about saying you can get angry at God. That goes against everything I’ve been taught about God. That would suggest that God has done something wrong.” A layperson was responding to Ellen Davis’s provocative new book Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. I had chosen the book as a focus for a seminar that draws clergy and laity together several times a year to read and discuss matters of faith and life.
Davis does a superb job of writing, as she puts it, “about getting, and staying, involved with God—what it takes, what it costs, what it looks and feels like, why anyone would want to do it anyway.” We get involved with God because, as the Old Testament communicates over and over again, “God is involved with us, deeply and irrevocably so.”
Davis shows how human involvement with God in the Old Testament is expressed through voices and moods that range from grief to joy, from complaint to thanksgiving, from “uncontained rage to dumbfounded gratitude.” It was this last pairing that troubled the layperson, who found the notion of speaking to God in “uncontained rage” to be deeply problematic.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Gregory, "Psalms of Rage: Ellen Davis’s Provocative Interpretations" (2002). Public Intellectual Writing. 132.
https://repository.belmont.edu/gregoryjones_public/132
