The leading Old Testament theologian reflects on the meaning of the gospel in today's world. These studies on a variety of biblical texts focus deftly on reading, listening to, and proclaiming the gospel in a broken, fragmented, and "post-Christendom" world. Brueggemann explores how these traditions have the potential to continually resonate in our contemporary communities and individual lives.
Walter Brueggemann was an American Christian scholar and theologian who is widely considered an influential Old Testament scholar. His work often focused on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and the sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argued that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
I picked up this book from my shelf on the first full day of my self-quarantine, sensing there was something here that would speak to the moment, something I needed to hear. Though Brueggemann wrote this twenty years ago, it often felt like he was speaking directly to this cultural moment of exile from the habits and certainties that moor us to a sense of belonging and hope. In the age when toilet paper flies off shelves and vast amounts of jobs and human lives are lost every day, scarcity is the pounding, haunting rhythm of our lives. Brueggemann instead joins in song with ancient Israel, singing of God’s inscrutable yet real abundance. His words were a refreshing cadence of calm and reassurance threaded with fierce honesty.
This not an easy book, more meant for serious theological study than a restful afternoon. But if you feel like paying attention to the stronger song of God’s presence while scarcity screeches its siren song, you will find timely wisdom and encouragement here.
In this collection of essays Brueggemann unpacks some of the more difficult aspects of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in addressing those passages that speak of God's absence and abandonment of his people. While referencing numerous other biblical scholars. Brueggemann puts a fresh perspective on the struggle many believers have. In his final essay on OT interpretation he makes this statement about God that is both profound and humbling:"at the core of lived reality there is a mystery invested with transformative energy and with durable purposiveness. The witnessing community endlessly relearns however that embrace of that transformative energy and durable purposiveness does nothing to minimize the inscrutable Otherness of the Character who inhabits such mystery" (p. 118). That statement was worth the whole book
This is the third and final offering in a trilogy of reflections on our lives together by Walter Brueggemann, published by Fortress Press at the end of the last century, beginning of this one.
In memory and in hope, "We are forever re-imagining and retelling and reliving our lives through the scandal of Friday and the rumor of Sunday." Preaching as sub-version: a life-giving word within a death-dealing situation. Staying in Egypt is not our only option, and remember, [the exilic] 2nd Isaiah "funded Handel's Messiah!"
In this last book of the series that began with "The Covenanted Self," and continued with "Texts that Linger, Words That Explode," Walter Brueggemann asks why on earth anyone would want to "delete YHWH" [page 119] in relating these stories, these sagas, if you weren't proclaiming YHWH's agency and part in them? Well, if it weren't for YHWH, we wouldn't be reading or talkin' about any of these mighty acts of creation, liberation, homecoming, and resurrection because they wouldn't have happened; we couldn't begin to envision the possibility of daily bread for which we are not indebted to empire. In fact, if you do leave YHWH out of everything, "...not much that matters remains."
All three books in this series would be outstanding preaching and teaching resources; they even include detailed endnotes, as well as author and scripture indices.
Fantastic book! For anyone who has every wondered if there is anything of value for today to be learned from the Old Testament, this is a must read. Brueggeman takes the most difficult subjects and passages of the Old Testament (read genocide, ect.)and examines them honestly and intelligently. This book is not an apology but an eye opening confrontation with the message of the God of the Old Testament. Much of it will be challenging for Christians to reexamine our understanding of God and what we "think" God is portrayed as in the OT. It is a short and mostly easy read, though it does address some technical and philosophical issues; so you might want to have a dictionary on hand.