The Psalms and the Life of Faith

by Walter Brueggemann, Patrick D. Miller Jr. (Editor)

Walter Brueggemann's unique gift of joining historical-exegetical insights to penetrating observations about the traumas and joys of contemporary lifeboth personal and socialis here forcefully displayed. Everyone who is familiar with his work knows the power of his speech about "doxological, polemical, political, subversive, evangelical and about the ways such faith is enacted in the praise of ancient Israel and in the church.

Readers of this book will find fresh insight the Psalms as prayer and praise the categories of the Psalmsthe social context in which psalms were prayed and sungthe theology of the Psalmsthe dialogical character of the Psalmsjustice and injustice in the Psalmsthe study and "use" of the Psalms by the churchpraise as an act of basic trust and abandonmentthe impossible wonders of God's activity that overturn conventional ways of thinking and acting

Genres: Theology, Biblical Studies, Christianity, Old Testament, Religion

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays by Brueggemann mostly on the Psalms with special considerations for the value of the Psalms to the faith of the church.

Essays range from the language of the Psalms to the psalms as prayer, stages of life, grief, lament, glad abandonment, prayer as dance, covenant, impossibility in the OT, psalms as canon, and explanations of Psalms 9-10, 37, 77, and 109.

The first essay is an analysis of the language of the Psalms using Ricoeur's theory of language, a powerful discussion of how the language of the Psalms evokes and does not merely describe. In later essays he explores the various genres of the Psalms, how Israel praises and why, the logic of the lament as working through disorientation from complaint to expression of faith in dramatic form, how the Psalms work and deal in the real world and not as we might hope things would be. He points to how Israel dealt with grief as recorded in the Psalms in ways consistent with Kubler-Ross and yet in many more effective ways through their faith and confidence in YHWH. His essay on how the loss of lament has diminished the faith of believers is extremely powerful and important, wrestling with the very different portrayal of God, not only in terms of who He is but also in terms of how to approach Him, that is seen in the Psalms as compared to modern conceptions. His canonical interpretation seeing the Psalms move from obedience to praise is also compelling as are his interpretations of individual psalms.

The work is not entirely coherent but has many great thoughts to commend it. Worth consideration in a study of the Psalms.

[Daniel Seifert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brueggemann is informed by rich philosophy of hermeneutics such as Paul Ricoeur and his view of the parables of Jesus, which exhibit a pattern of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation for understanding the Psalms. Thus like the the parables the Psalms for Brueggemann do not give us a conceptual system about God and his action among us, but offer us a view of the (cyclical) structure of life. this plays well into the life of faith.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Psalms and Life of Faith” by Walter Brueggemann ****

Insightful perspective of these ancient poems and useful for empowering groups and teams to be reflective and embrace transformation.
****

PSALMS: THE RHYTHM OF LIFE AS ORIENTATION, DISORIENTATION, REORIENTATION

The basic movement in everyone’s life is:
• Firstly the move “into the pit”, when our world collapses around us
• Secondly the move “out of the pit” into a welcome place

Walter Brueggemann suggests that our life consists of moving with God in terms of:
• being securely oriented - in which everything makes sense in our lives;
• being painfully disoriented - in which we feel we have sunk into the pit; and
• being surprisingly reoriented - in which we realize that God has lifted us out of the pit, and we are in a new place full of gratitude and awareness about our lives and our God

Brueggemann says that the Psalms offer a framework for engaging God

First Movement- Orientation
• Songs of Creation – God’s gifts (Ps 8, 33, 104, 145)
• Songs of Torah - God’s purposes (Ps 1, 15, 19, 24, 119)
• Songs of Wisdom – God’s certainty (Ps 14, 37)
• Songs of Well-Being - God’s goodness (Ps 131, 133)

Second Movement- Disorientation
• Songs of Personal Complaint (Ps 13, 35, 86)
• Songs of Communal Complaint (Ps 74, 79, 137)

Third Movement: Re-Orientation
• Personal Thanksgivings- God’s rescue (Ps 30, 34, 40, 138)
• Communal Thanksgivings- God’s salvation (Ps 65, 66, 124, 129)
• Kingly psalms – God’s leadership (Ps 29, 47, 93, 97, 98, 99, 114)
• Hymns of praise – God’s newness (Ps 100, 103, 113, 117, 135, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150)

Psalms are for people who are living at the edge of their lives, sensitive to the raw hurts, the primitive passions, and the naive elations that are at the bottom of our life. For most of us, liturgical or devotional entry into the Psalms requires a real change of pace, to listen as well as speak. It asks us to depart from the closely managed world of public survival, to move into the open, frightening, healing world of speech with the Holy One.

The speech of the Psalms is abrasive, revolutionary, and dangerous. It announces that our common experience is not one of well-being and equilibrium, but a churning, disruptive experience of dislocation and relocation. These Psalms are a sufficient resource to enable robust faith and provides a model in which we may challenge established consensus, raise true and hard questions about theology and society, and emerge with a truer picture of the nature of God and society.
PSALMS AS SPIRITUALITY

This movement is most clearly played out in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. For example Philippians 2:5-11
Orientation: “Though He was in the form of God…”
Disorientation: “He emptied himself.”
Re-Orientation: “Therefore, God has highly exalted him…”

We see this in Christian baptism
“We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.” Romans 6:4 (NIV)

“Sharing in his death by our baptism means that we were co-buried and entombed with him, so that when the Father’s glory raised Christ from the dead, we were also raised with him. We have been co-resurrected with him so that we could be empowered to walk in the freshness of new life.” Romans 6:4 (TPT)

The psalms of negativity, the complaints of various kinds, the cries for vengeance and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith in this particular God.” (W.B. SofP, page xii).
Hope is rooted in the midst of loss and darkness.
The Psalms are profoundly subversive of the dominant culture, which wants to deny and cover over the darkness we are called to enter.

PSALMS AS SEASONS OF LIFE

Human life consists of:
Satisfied seasons of well-being that evoke gratitude for the constancy of blessing (orientation)
Anguished seasons of hurt, alienation, suffering and death. These evoke rage, resentment, self-pity, and hatred (disorientation)
Surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through despair. Where there has been only darkness, there is light.

From nomos (order) to anomie (chaos). From plea to praise, and the kingly psalms are further emphasised in Mark 1:14-15; Luke 4:18-19; 7:22; Matthew 6:10.

To preach that ‘everything is awesome’ is not true because life is marked by incoherence and loss of balance. Christian praise songs about God’s order and reliability are at best only partly true. It is not faith or defiance of the devil or resistance to secular worldliness, but a frightened numb denial and deception that doesn’t want to acknowledge, admit or experience the savage disorientation of life.

It is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users because the large portion of Hebrew Scriptures are liturgies of lament, poems of protest and cries of complaint about the angst in the world. I think religious people dismiss lament as negativity as if that is ‘unfaith’ and implies God’s loss of control.

To cling to an insistence that everything is in order and rightly orientated is to completely miss the point of Jesus’ life, betrayal, murder and resurrection. “I must be betrayed and handed over to death.” But his disciples implored him to not go that way, unable to cope with such a threat to our sense of sage, assured orientation. Jesus gave his sharpest rebuke to his friends who tried to stop the process (Matthew 16:21-26). It is re-orientation that Jesus is leading them to. It is being lead from the green pastures to descent into the valley of the shadow of death in order to ascend and enter the house of the Lord (Psalm 23).

Similarly, on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24: “(v17) They stood still, with sadness on their faces… (v21) ‘But we were hoping He was the One..’ (v25) Then Jesus said to them, “O foolish ones, how slow are your hearts to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory?”

The point I am making is that psalms of darkness are not failures but acts of bold faith. Bold because it exposes pretend superficiality to acknowledge reality, and bold because it insists that disorder is something that we can actually talk to God about. Nothing is out-of-bounds or inappropriate to say to God. Here’s the deal: everything we experience can and must be turned into speech and addressed to God.

This is why psalms of darkness are crucial because God is present in, participating in, and attentive to darkness, weakness and displacement. After all, the Saviour is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3).

A religion of secure orientation is terrified by the honest, even visceral, speech that it has always censored, denied and forcibly quenched, because it offends proper and dignified religious sensitivities.

But when a desperate plea is addressed to God (in the form of complaint, petition and unguarded language) the divine breakthrough comes and the plea is then transformed into praises of assurance of being heard, new vows and promises made, and expressions of adoration.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a classic work on the psalms that deserves a read through, if for no other reason than that his work has laid a foundation for interpreting the psalms that is often quoted and built upon by other scholars. Most notable is his classification of the psalms into psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. What I find eyebrow-raising is his reliance on psychiatrists such as Freud in his analysis, as well as some of his perspectives on God, particularly in his denial of the immutability of God. His treatises in prayer are a fascinating read. I particularly found his description of Moses’ prayer to be powerful, as I applied the lessons learned and experienced the Lord’s amazing response. I would recommend this for anyone who regularly sees Brueggemann’s name mentioned in the commentaries and would like to gain first hand understanding of his thought process.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Brueggemann, a master of Christian exegesis, scores big with this in-depth analysis of the Psalms and their impact on the life of faith … In particular, his sixth chapter, “Praise and the Psalms: A Politics of Glad Abandonment,” is a must-read for every committed Christian … absolutely stellar …

[darryl angelo walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walter Bruegmann's" Outstanding "

My pastor referred to this book during one of his sermons and he suggested that we read it. I chose to purchase it because I love the book of Psalms. I am neither clergy nor a theologian, therefore it was very interesting and enlightening.

[Rob Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and brilliant book. Not easy reading but rewarding for the effort.

[Matthew Molloy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came across this book through some quotes used in a lecture at bible college. Brueggemanns "typology of function" really put the Psalms into a new light for me so to speak. His thoughts around orientation-disorientation-reorientation have had an impact on my own faith and ways of praying to God. Much easier read than Westermann and recommend to anyone who has a theological interest in the book of Psalms.

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a selection of essays and so doesn't read with the same coherence as some of Brueggemann's other books. The first part deals mostly with an understanding of the Psalms of lament - in which Brueggemann's famous progression of orientation-disorientation-reorientation is applied to Israel's own grievances with God. The second part, and in my opinion by far the best, takes a wider view of the Psalter with a fascinating view that the neat ordered world of Psalm 1 is disrupted by the experience of abandonment and injustice before finally resolving in the abandonment of praise in Psalm 150. Perhaps a little too neat (where do the lengthy history Psalms come into this scheme?) but convincing nonetheless. His analysis of Psalm 73 (my personal favourite) sitting near the centre of the Psalter and summing up Israel's internal wrestlings with a just God and unjust world is brilliant. The third part feels more "bitty" with some specific analysis of five psalms. His analysis of Psalm 37 is again interesting and quite different.

[Frank Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume is a set of essays that the author previously wrote; all of which relate to his study of the Psalms. The volume was put together by a different editor, who appears to be a colleague. As a book, the volume is really not brilliant, as the chapters while related, do not form a cohesive whole. The individual chapters or essays are then a mix, from overly technical and academic (from my perspective), to spiritually and theologically useful and important. The academic essays seemed to spend too much time referring to the work of others, all the while implicitly assuming that the reader will of course be familiar with those who are references. For someone not in the authors academic discipline, this pattern results in a very dull and difficult essay. Thankfully some of the essays were also gems, which can be profitably read by a much wider audience. These were the highlights of the book.

[Joshua Booher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read as part of an oblate formation program. Parts of this book were interesting and helpful to me. However, overall, I was just glad to get through it.