A few days ago a giant passed away – Walter Brueggemann. I asked Chris Bourne who is much better qualified than me to write a post on Walter. (Above dates in European format dd/mm/yyyy.)
Born March 11, 1933, in Tilden, Neb., Walter died June 5 in Travers City, Mich. He was 92. From 1961 to 1986, Brueggemann was Professor of Old Testament at Eden Theological Seminary . He then held the William Marcellus McPheeters Professorship of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur , Georgia, where he retired in 2003. Retired being a very loose term.
Nothing quite fits. That’s the problem with Walter Breuggemann. In academic terms his status as an OT scholar was settled a very long time ago, but it is not a good fit with higher criticism, not even the more amenable progressive versions, but certainly not 19C European versions. Neither is he a traditionalist in anything except the most powerful broad narrative sense. His was a uniquely literary form of criticism (but he was not a literary critic in the technical sense, go figure!). He was digging for gold, not proof.
He was never able to be anything other than a poet of the prophetic, an advocate of allusion, master of metaphor, a seeker of transferable resistance to the principles and powers of empire. From his earliest work (The Land, for example) he drew from the text rich tapestries of understanding of male domination, female agency and the lies of the Pharaohs, even Jewish Pharaohs. Understanding of the Land led to understanding of the society of the land, their leasehold upon property, sexual ethics, marriage, social justice (if only between men), agency and its absence.
He was always as uncomfortable a writer for conservatism as for the more tawdry aspects of liberalism and was not shy about saying so. The status quo, that infinitely variable source of phony comfort and private regret, does not fare well with him whether it arises in 1000BCE or 2000CE.
But it is the way his poetic reading, weaving epic hope for the poor and broken, gives basis for the sort of resistance that, even on a good day, seems very far away from us today. To the extent that I remain Christian, some credit is due to the challenge of listening to this man. He has the most appalling and frequent knack of saying the one thing that will not allow me to give up! He has no fealty to contemporary systems of power no matter their brand. But he is equally robust in his rejection of the sort of church that, like Israel, demands a king and a king’s totalizing power. Cunningham, Schaeffer, Wagner and dominion theology be blowed, along with its illegitimate offspring Project 25!
What can I say about someone who wrote more than a hundred books, and not a dud among them. I would urge everyone to read (and that means really read, as in several times) The Prophetic Imagination, and my utter favourite, Finally Comes the Poet. These are among his most accessible, profound, beautiful and brief titles. I am presently in the middle of reading A Biblical Theology of Provocation (Ice axes for frozen seas). That’s when I am not negotiating its implications and having to dry my eyes.
As with so many, I have found that a long association with any thought-leader’s work leads to areas of divergence. For one who understood so deeply the place that emancipation stories occupied for Israel, he was remarkably quiet on the lack of critique of slavery in scripture. And for his warm embrace of the marginalised and mistreated, the lack of biblical perception on women’s history is also notable. This is not to say that Walter lacked these things, but that he rarely dealt deeply with the biblical lack. And he was not being ironic, when challenged about divinely ordained violence in the Bible, when he suggested that maybe what we see is a God who is in recovery from his violence. But as I said before, he was not that sort of critic. He was not dealing with any doctrine of the Bible, he was dealing in the stories of the Bible, the way people behaved and spoke to each other, to their overlords, to their systems and their deities.
It strikes me, in a wave of imposter anxiety, that I might not be the best person to offer commentary on his work. The best person is Walter Breuggemann.
Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Prophetic Imagination
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
Prophetic Imagination
In both his teaching and his very presence, Jesus of Nazareth presented the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness. He has, in fact, dismantled the dominant culture and nullified its claims. The way of his ultimate criticism is his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity. The only solidarity worth affirming is solidarity characterized by the same helplessness they know and experience.
Prophetic Imagination
It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits. The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.
Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture
In this interpretive tradition, Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, and acknowledgement that what is needed is given and need not be seized.
Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now
People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.
Chosen?: Reading the Bible Amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
If you want verification that God’s promises are kept, you will not find that verification among the new atheists who have reduced everything to a tight little package of reasonableness that easily explains everything away. Nor will we find verification among the fundamentalists who have God in such a box that there can be no room for inexplicable gifts. You will find verification among the daily performances of the trusting ones who live out their trust in ways that the world terms foolish: in a church ready to be venturesome into God’s future; in a church that pays attention to those disqualified by the capitalist system; in the acceptance of those who are unacceptable; in the commitment of time to neighbors when we prefer to have that time for ourselves; in the telling of hard truth about the world, and that in a culture of denial; in the slant toward justice and peacemaking in a world that loves violence and exploitation too much; in footing the bill for neighborliness and mercy when we have many other bills to pay; in lives that give testimony before the authorities who want to silence and intimidate and render others irrelevant.
A Way other than Our Own: Devotions for Lent
I wonder, sometimes, just how far back we need to reach in order to grasp today.