Ralph Luker, aka the Blogfather*, has a post up at Cliopatria about Rev. Wright’s sermons. Luker, a historian of American religion and civil rights (and also an Obama partisan), places Wright’s sermons in a particuar context: the jeremiad.

Here’s a sample:

But Wright’s and Obama’s critics are too far removed from biblical study to recognize that Jeremiah Wright is following in the footpath of the biblical prophet, Jeremiah, whose oracles read the sufferings of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as punishment for their failure to live up to their covenant with God. To be in covenant with God, to be “under God,” is to be blessed by the divine when we are faithful. But woe betide us when we have failed “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.”

As someone who is — as I’ve admitted repeatedly — “far removed from biblical study,” I found Luker’s intervention into this ongoing debate very interesting.

[Update: David Carlton, in the comments, had this to say:

“The words are certainly condemnable.” Condemnable for what? Ralph [He’s an old friend] is right; this is classic prophetic language, and it definitely outrages those who refuse to accept the proposition that this nation is under judgment. That’s OK to a point; Wright’s speaking out of a tradition that not everybody shares in modern America. But the above statement declares that a long tradition of American discourse that hearkens back to the Puritans, and whose practitioners have included Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., is to be condemned. Prophets aren’t nice people; they come in from the wilderness [In this case, the black church, which might as well be Outer Space to the white guys who dominate the chattersphere] and say disquieting things, usually prefaced with obnoxious lines like “Thus saith the Lord.” But while Wright may be extreme, is he being unjust? Was Lincoln unjust when he declared the Civil War to be the just deserts of all Americans for having protected slavery? Was Douglass unjust when he compared the good people of Rochester, NY to the sneering conquerors of “By the rivers of Babylon”? Those who denounce the prophetic tradition would gut American culture of much that has made it worth celebrating.

Again, more historical context for Wright’s rhetoric.]

* It may be that only I know him by this name.