“. . . if the foundations be destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”
Psalm 11:3
I hear this verse quoted from time to time. It goes something like this: “Culture is falling apart. The traditional family is no longer valued. Sexual immorality is rampant. No one fears God. The Bible says, ‘If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?'”
My quibbles with this line have always assumed that the Psalmist was at least being given a fair shake, that he was being quoted accurately, or at least relevantly. “Surely the Psalmist has a point,” I would want to grant. “But aren’t we being a little hasty in apply his situation to ours? And shouldn’t we figure out what the Psalmist meant, and what we mean, by ‘foundations’?” In short, shouldn’t everyone first have a conversation about what exactly we think constitutes the sine qua non of civilization before we go assuming that those things have been or are being destroyed? (Though, of course, it goes without saying that this destruction was brought about by our perceived enemies.)
It shouldn’t be very surprising that I have never had a conversation that was able to offer any firm, good, or agreeable conclusions on the topic of civilization’s foundations, destroyed or otherwise. (Though I love the conversation and wish it happened more often. And in a different essay, I’d be attempting to say why that conversation is itself a foundation.) Usually what ensues is pretty good proof that we don’t really have a clear understanding of what we mean when we flippantly talk about foundations. That lack of clarity doesn’t strike me as being a bad or surprising thing. (As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite mental images comes from a Robert Nozick quote: “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”) The problem is that we can so easily talk and act as if we do have a clear understanding.
The fact is, regardless of the uncertainty, much will be said without question. I would not be surprised if 9 out of 10 preachers could, at the drop of a hat, give a lengthy and convicting sermon on worldly wickedness and the concomitant “destruction of the foundations.” And I would not be surprised if many of those preachers could and would give a sermon on Psalm 11:3 and never once tell you why the Psalmist said it in the first place. Heck, I’ve heard it quoted, I am sure, hundreds of times in my life, probably even quoted it myself a few times, and I didn’t have any idea why he said it until just a few days ago.
As far as I can tell, everything in Psalm 11 turns on the first verse:
In the LORD I take refuge. How can you say to my soul, “Flee like a bird to your mountain…?
The Psalmist has said where he stands (with God) and whom he trusts (God). Then he asks, “How can you say to my soul…?” Perhaps the “you” is a friend, or an advisor, or simply him speaking to himself. But the question immediately places two voices in this Psalm, an “I” and a “you”: I trust in God; how can you say thus to me?
And what is the “thus” being said? This is probably a good place to quote the entire opening to the Psalm as most people read it:
Psalm 11:1-3
The LORD Is in His Holy Temple
To the choirmaster. Of David.
[1] In the LORD I take refuge;
how can you say to my soul,
“Flee like a bird to your mountain,
[2] for behold, the wicked bend the bow;
they have fitted their arrow to the string
to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;
[3] if the foundations are destroyed,
what can the righteous do?”
The placement of the quotations here is pertinent, because the one being quoted is the “you” who speaks to the Psalmist. Here’s how Robert Altar puts it:
It makes sense to view everything from “Off to the hills…” through to the end of [“what can a righteous man do?”] as the words of the fearful and despairing friends of the speaker. With the vicious and destructive enemies prevailing, they say, there is no recourse for the helpless righteous person except flight.
Hear that? These are the words of the “fearful and despairing” one. I say to trust in God; they say the foundations are being destroyed. There are two clearly opposing voices here. One is fretting, the other trusts in God. One says to run, the other trusts in God. One says that your enemies are out to get you, the other trusts in God. One says the foundations are being destroyed, the other trusts in God.
The irony could not possible be any thicker. Every… single… time… that I have heard a Christian quote the Bible about the foundations being destroyed, they have spoken as if they are the ones being faithful to God. The Psalm they quote, however, spins them on their heads. In quoting Psalm 11:3, they unwittingly display the fear that the Bible—indeed that that very same verse—is meant to speak against!
So the next time a Christian points Leftward and starts to remind you of the consequences of foundation-demolition, just tell them to trust in God. Tell them that their own book tells them, the alarm-raisers, that they are being cowards, probably contributing to the destruction they lament, and they should instead trust in God.
The conversation, the debate, about the foundations will always take place. They have never not been taking place. That is part of what civilization, and humanity, is. The call is to be faithful and good and kind always, regardless of whether you feel your side is up or down in the ongoing struggle. But all those people who say that the foundations are being destroyed, that we need to fight, or to remove and protect and defend ourselves—the Psalmist says that they are controlled by their fear, not by their faith.
This is from C. K. Williams’s poem, “Risk“:
How do we come to believe that wrenching ourselves to attention
is the most effective way for dealing with intimations of catastrophe?
Consciousness atremble: might what makes it so
not be the fear of what the future might or might not bring,
but the wish for fear, for concentration, vigilance?
As though life were more convincing resonating like a blade. . . .. . . We engorge our little sorrows,
beat our drums, perform our dances of aversion.Always, “These gigantic inconceivables.”
Always, “What will have been done to me?”
And so we don our mental armor,
flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.
A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,
though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?
At the end of the day, remember that this is not so much an accusation as it is a sympathy. A sympathy with my past and often present self, and therefore a sympathy with others, and a desire for us all to do much better than we are currently doing. And it’s not a bad idea for each of us to start by asking why it is we are so ready to be afraid.
Addendum: Perhaps we are so ready to be afraid (or angry or bitter) because it is much easier to extricate ourselves than to do the hard work of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “coresponsibility”:
We may not and do not desire to act like offended critics or opportunists. Case by case and in each moment, as victors or vanquished, we desire to be those who are coresponsible for the shaping of history. The one who allows nothing that happens to deprive him of his coresponsibility for the course of history, knowing that it is God who placed it upon him, will find a fruitful relation to the events of history, beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism. Talk of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat is basically quite nonheroic because it does not dare look into the future. The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living.
This seems to me to be exactly what the Psalmist is getting at in Psalm 11.