The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality - International Voices in ...

68 The Old Testament and Christian Spirituality
phase (with Gunkel and Mowinckel most influential), 83 to the
latest, that is, the literary-oriented phase. Firth argues that the latter
approach is the most productive, exegetically, because it replaces
the uncertainties of historical reconstructions with the greater
certainties of thematic-compositional activities of the Psalms’
compilers, and spiritually, because it holds the greatest promise for
modern-day application. However, in practice Firth is not averse to
considering historical possibilities. 84
Firth credits Brueggemann as the leading light of this literaryoriented
approach, and draws strongly on the latter’s orientationdisorientation-new
orientation matrix of Psalm analysis, noted
above, but renames them as order, disorder, and reorder. However,
Firth adds greater emphasis to the Royal Psalms than
Brueggemann does, 85 because he takes as his primary binary stance
the cooperative distinction between pain and praise that one
encounters in the Psalms, 86 which translates as experience and
eschatology in the Royal Psalms. 87
The Psalms of the ordered world, with which Firth starts his
analysis, 88 reflect God’s nature as orderly, which thus characterises
creation, to which the faithful should orient their lives in prayer. 89
The Torah Psalms (1, 19, 119) and those that invite entering the
community of faith (Pss 15 and 24) are, within this scheme,
complementary, combining respectively the internal and the
external; alternatively, the individual and the context. A faith
ordered to God’s presence will seek to impart that presence to the
world, since creation is ordered, something Pss 8 and 147–48
83 For their works, see footnotes 35 and 36 respectively.
84 See e.g. Firth, Hear, o Lord, 24, 56, 74.
85 Ibid., 11, 101–22, 128; cf. Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms, x.
86 Firth, Hear, o Lord, 3.
87 Ibid., 11, 128.
88 Ibid., 15–38.
89 Ibid., 17–24.