Walter Brueggemann Quotes & Sayings

People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done. — Walter Brueggemann

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God. — Walter Brueggemann

Anomie is not a danger only for the young; it may surface in what is now conventionally called the "crisis of mid-life" or anywhere else. — Walter Brueggemann

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power. — Walter Brueggemann

Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go. — Walter Brueggemann

We have nearly lost our capacity to think ihcologicafly about public issues and public problems. — Walter Brueggemann

This denying and deceiving kind of numbness is broken only by the embrace of negativity,16 by the public articulation that we are fearful and ashamed of the future we have chosen. The pain and regret denied only immobilizes. In the time of Jeremiah the pain and regret denied prevented any new movement either from God or toward God in Judah. The covenant was frozen and there was no possibility of newness until the numbness was broken. Jeremiah understood that the criticism must be faced and embraced, for then comes liberation from incurable disease, from broken covenant, and from failed energy. — Walter Brueggemann

It is there within and among us, for we are ordained of God to be people of hope. It is there by virtue of our being in the image of the promissory God. It is sealed there in the sacrament of baptism. It is dramatized in the Eucharist - "until he come." It is the structure of every creed that ends by trusting in God's promises. Hope is the decision to which God invites Israel, a decision against despair, against permanent consignment to chaos (Isa 45:18), oppression, barrenness, and exile. — Walter Brueggemann

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. — Walter Brueggemann

Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the "empire of force," he reappears in many different personae.9 — Walter Brueggemann

4. There is a text that looms in resilient power. There is a waiting congregation, perhaps not tired out, but too sure of self, pretending buoyancy where there might have been transformation. There is the voice that takes the old script and renders it to evoke a new world we had not yet witnessed (cf. Isa. 43:19). The fourth and final partner is this better world given as fresh revelation. — Walter Brueggemann

When we live according to our fears and our hates, our lives become small and defensive, lacking the deep, joyous generosity of God. If you find some part of your life where your daily round has grown thin and controlling and resentful, life with God is much, much larger, shattering our little categories of control, permitting us to say that God's purposes led us well beyond ourselves to live and to forgive, to create life we would not have imagined — Walter Brueggemann

We know about your presence that fills the world, that occupies our life, that makes our life in the world true and good. We notice your powerful transformative presence in word and in sacrament, in food and in water, in gestures of mercy and practices of justice, in gentle neighbors and daring gratitude. We count so on your presence and then plunge - without intending - into your absence. We find ourselves alone, abandoned, without resources remembering your goodness, hoping your future, but mired in anxiety and threat and risk beyond our coping. In your absence we bid your presence, come again, come soon, come here: Come to every garden become a jungle Come to every community become joyless sad and numb. We acknowledge your dreadful absence and insist on your presence. Come again, come soon. Come here. — Walter Brueggemann

As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering. — Walter Brueggemann

Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So — Walter Brueggemann

(paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13 — Walter Brueggemann

In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion. — Walter Brueggemann

I intend to focus on the question of truth. That means I do not inquire about facticity-what happened-but what is
claimed, what is asserted here about reality. — Walter Brueggemann

We used to sing the hymn "Take Time to Be Holy." But perhaps we should be singing, "Take time to be human." Or finally, "Take time." Sabbath is taking time ... time to be holy ... time to be human. — Walter Brueggemann

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. — Walter Brueggemann

Restitution costs: "He shall restore it in full, and shall add a fifth to it." Restitution costs twenty percent according to Leviticus. Guilt requires not simply equity and an even balance, but gift beyond affront. It requires surplus compensation. Such a rule is both economically shrewd and psychologically sound. Israel is required to move beyond grudging restoration, until it is "pressed down and running over. — Walter Brueggemann

If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life. — Walter Brueggemann

Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition. — Walter Brueggemann

The two commandments go beneath social performance and social appearance to the deep, elemental, defining issue of God versus the gods. — Walter Brueggemann

There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, "finally comes the poet"-finally. — Walter Brueggemann

Our public life is largely premised on an exploitation of our common anxiety. The advertising of consumerism and the drives of the acquisitive society, like he serpent, seduce into believing there are securities apart from the reality of God. — Walter Brueggemann

Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity. — Walter Brueggemann

The Exile In July 587 BCE, Babylonian soldiers broke through Jerusalem's walls, ending a starvation siege that had lasted well over a year. They burned the city and Solomon's temple and took its king and many other leaders to Babylon as captives, leaving others to fend for themselves in the destroyed land. Many surrounding countries disappeared altogether when similar disasters befell them. But Judah did not. Instead, the period scholars most often call the "Babylonian exile" inspired religious leaders to revise parts of Scripture that had been passed down to them. It also sparked the writing of entirely new Scriptures and the revision of ideas about God, creation, and history. Much of what is called the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament was written, edited, and compiled during and after this national tragedy. — Walter Brueggemann

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood. — Walter Brueggemann

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon. — Walter Brueggemann

The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence; the outcome is a "colonized imagination" that is drained of dangerous hope. — Walter Brueggemann

3. There is a text in its boldness. There is a congregation, perhaps reduced and diminished by fatigue. Third, there is this specific occasion for speech. — Walter Brueggemann

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. — Walter Brueggemann

One Way to think of the market ideology and the empire is that it produces alienation and loss of human vitality. The culture flows from the assumption that the accumulation of commodities will make us safe and happy. — Walter Brueggemann

Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way? — Walter Brueggemann

Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham — Walter Brueggemann

We live our lives before the wild, dangerous, unfettered and free character of the living God. — Walter Brueggemann

A concrete embodiment of the jubilee commandment was evidenced in a rural church in Iowa during the "farm crisis." The banker in the town held mortgages on many farms. The banker and the farmers belonged to the same church. The banker could have foreclosed. He did not because, he said, "These are my neighbors and I want to live here a long time." He extended the loans and did not collect the interest that was rightly his. The pastor concluded, "He was practicing the law of the Jubilee year, and he did not even know it." The pastor might also have noted that the reason the banker could take such action is that his bank was a rare exception. It was locally and independently owned, not controlled by a larger Chicago banking system. — Walter Brueggemann

It is my hope that the Christian community in the United States will cease to appeal to the Bible as a direct support for the state of Israel and will have the courage to deal with the political realities without being cowed by accusations of anti-Semitism. — Walter Brueggemann

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life. — Walter Brueggemann

It occurs to me that the situation of the church in our society, perhaps the church everywhere always, is entrusted with a truth that is inimical to present power arrangements. The theological crisis in the church - that shows up in preaching and in worship as elsewhere - is that the church has largely colluded with the totalism of the National Security State. Or more broadly, has uncritically colluded with Enlightenment reason that stands behind the National Security State that makes preaching Easter an epistemological impossibility. — Walter Brueggemann

It is of great importance for a student of Old Testament theology to notice that in every period of the discipline, the questions, methods, and possibilities in which study is cast arise from the sociointellectual climate in which the work must be done.
(p. 11) — Walter Brueggemann

Along with anger, God makes a second response to our guilt. Anger at the throne is compounded by God's utter anguish at having hoped and been betrayed, at having yearned and failed. The — Walter Brueggemann

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved until the human rights of the other are recognized and guaranteed. — Walter Brueggemann

Hans Walter Wolff has suggested that the Sabbath is the great equalizer, for that day is a foretaste of the kingdom when all-great and small-are reckoned to be exactly equal .2' All-masters and slaves-are to engage in this most godlike activity of being at peace. — Walter Brueggemann

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. — Walter Brueggemann

We may consider the sabbath as an alternative to the endless demands of economic reality, more specifically the demands of market ideology that depend, as Adam Smith had already seen, on the generation of needs and desires that will leave us endlessly "rest-less," inadequate, unfulfilled, and in pursuit of that which may satiate desire. — Walter Brueggemann

When we suffer from amnesia, every form of serious authority for faith is in question, and we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice unauthorized ministries. — Walter Brueggemann

History consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place. — Walter Brueggemann

Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath! — Walter Brueggemann

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made. — Walter Brueggemann

The entire future of Israel depends, in each generation, on the capacity and resolve of YHWH to make a way out of no way. This reiterated miracle of new life in a context of hopelessness evokes in Israel a due sense of awe that issues in doxology. Well, it issues in laughter: "Now Sarah said, 'God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me' " (Gen. 21:6). In subsequent Christian tradition, that laugh has become an "Easter laugh," a deep sweep of elation that looks death and despair in the face and mocks them. The ancestral narratives attest to the power of YHWH to create new historical possibilities where there is no ground for expectation. IV — Walter Brueggemann

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised. — Walter Brueggemann

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel. — Walter Brueggemann

One notices immediately that the First Book of Samuel is mostly ignored by the Chronicler. This truth of the assembly does not want to go back to the rawness of the tribe. It is content to live from the state, and it is glad for the lid that state truth has put upon the tribal versions that might contain embarrassments. The beginning point is only to give a favorable version of the transition. The first narrative disposes of Saul by telling of the suicide. The narrative is crafted so that David is not mentioned, and therefore could not be blamed, until v. 14. — Walter Brueggemann

The alternative to the free market consumer culture is a set of covenants that supports neighborly disciplines, rather than market disciplines, as a producer of culture. These non-market disciplines have to do with the common good and abundance as opposed to self-interest and scarcity. This neighborly culture is held together by its depth of relatedness, its capacity to hold mystery, its willingness to stretch time and endure silence. — Walter Brueggemann

The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God's people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as "hands" in the service of a command economy. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest. — Walter Brueggemann

Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question. — Walter Brueggemann

2. After God notices the truth about us (voiced by the poet), God responds to that truth. The poem of Jeremiah 5 continues with a presentation of God's response. The taxonomy of guilt and healing includes two dimensions of God's response to the reality of sin and guilt. First there is God's wrath, indignation, and anger. — Walter Brueggemann

When we think "prophetic" we need not always think grandly about public tasks. The prophetic task needs to be done wherever there are men and women who will yield to the managed prose future offered them by the king. So, we may ask, if we are to do that alternative constructive task of imagination, if we are to reach more than the most surface group prepared to be "religious," where do we begin? What I propose is this: The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death. — Walter Brueggemann

Prophecy in this context may be understood as a redescription of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given in human utterance. — Walter Brueggemann

In sharp contrast, the blessings are speeches of new energy, for they promise future well-being to those who are without hope. In the deathly world of riches, fullness, and uncritical laughter, those who now live in poverty, hunger, and grief are hopeless. They are indeed nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. They have no public existence, and so the public well-being can never extend to them. But the blessings open a new possibility. So the speech of Jesus, like the speech of the entire prophetic tradition, moves from woe to blessing, from judgment to hope, from criticism to energy. The alternative community to be shaped from the poor, hungry, and grieving is called to disengage from the woe pattern of life to end its fascination with that other ordering, and to embrace the blessing pattern. — Walter Brueggemann

Every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry, — Walter Brueggemann

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath. Jesus taught his disciples that they could not have it both ways. — Walter Brueggemann

While the Passover narrative [in Exodus] energizes Israel's imagination toward justice, Israel's hard work of implementation of that imaginative scenario was done at Mt. Sinai ... Moses' difficult work at Sinai is to transform the narrative vision of the Exodus into a sustainable social practice that has institutional staying-power, credibility, and authority. — Walter Brueggemann

I have suggested creation is a work guaranteed by the king. The king is the one charged to order and preserve creation, and thus the return to chaos implicitly announces the failure of kingship and its end. — Walter Brueggemann

The emancipatory gift of YHWH to Israel is contrasted with all the seductions of images. The memory of the exodus concerns the God of freedom who frees. — Walter Brueggemann

2. The second partner in the meeting is the baptized. — Walter Brueggemann

There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal. — Walter Brueggemann

The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance. — Walter Brueggemann

I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude. — Walter Brueggemann

Advent Prayer
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
Amen. — Walter Brueggemann

The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one. — Walter Brueggemann

Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia. — Walter Brueggemann

The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt. — Walter Brueggemann

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. — Walter Brueggemann

Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available. — Walter Brueggemann

Here we are, practitioners of memos: We send e-mail and we receive it, We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it. We write to move the data, and organize the program, and keep people informed - and know and control and manage. We write and receive one-dimensional memos, that are, at best, clear and unambiguous. And then - in breathtaking ways - you summon us to song. — Walter Brueggemann

It takes no great imagination to see that this picture of David is drastically different from the portrayals given in the Samuel traditions. It is not hard to see that such a constructed picture of David surely serves the context of the fifth century and no doubt serves the specific claims of the Levitic priesthood. The truth about David given here is that David is a pious, cultic man who finds his life shaped and enhanced by such explicit religious commitment. He is indeed a man of the assembly. — Walter Brueggemann

Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing. — Walter Brueggemann

Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives. — Walter Brueggemann

The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. 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. — Walter Brueggemann

The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. — Walter Brueggemann

Clearly, it is not simply exegesis that determines how we read the Bible; rather, it is our vested interests, our hopes, and our fears that largely determine our reading. And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction. Palestinians' and Israelis' fear of the other, said to be grounded in the Bible, has been transposed into a military apparatus that is aimed at the elimination of the other. It is wholly illusionary to imagine that such an agenda is congruent with the God of the Bible who is commonly confessed by Jews and Christians. — Walter Brueggemann

And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor. — Walter Brueggemann

Sabbath is the practice of letting life rest safely in God's hand.41 — Walter Brueggemann

God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history. — Walter Brueggemann

Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age — Walter Brueggemann

One compelling alternative to land theology is the recognition that Judaism consists most elementally in interpretation of and obedience to the Torah in its requirements of justice and holiness. — Walter Brueggemann

The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only my God who saves. — Walter Brueggemann

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. — Walter Brueggemann

Jesus had understands Jeremiah. Ecclesiastes said only that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh; but Jesus sees that only those who mourn will be comforted (Matt 5:4). Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life. Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted and those who do not face the endings will not receive the beginnings. The alternative community knows it need not engage in deception. It can stand in solidarity with the dying, for those are the ones who hope. Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on. — Walter Brueggemann

1. The first partner in the meeting is the text. — Walter Brueggemann

The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life. — Walter Brueggemann

The David given here, and the world of David presumed here is liturgically shaped. That is, these are images, pictures, and scenarios that Israel experienced in public worship. The public worship lying behind these texts is not a sober description of what is, but a visionary, evocative portrayal of what will be. The David of these texts is not obvious to everyone in this dismal historical setting, but is the David trusted and hoped-for by this community, which could find little to value in its actual circumstance. — Walter Brueggemann

The outcome is to delegitimize and deconstruct the kings in effective ways in order to show that while they occupy the forms of power, they lack the substance of power. — Walter Brueggemann

Thus I have come to think that the fourth commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses ... along with anxiety and violence. — Walter Brueggemann

Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice. — Walter Brueggemann

When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer. — Walter Brueggemann

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. — Walter Brueggemann