WALTER BRUEGGEMANN, who died last week, aged 92, was the best-known Old Testament theologian of this generation. He was something of a legend: a biblical scholar who changed biblical studies for ever — perhaps dispensed with the subject altogether — but never let go of the text, and never let go of the God of whom the text speaks.
Born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1933, the son of a Protestant pastor of German descent, Brueggemann told his biographer that nothing interesting had happened in his life. On one level, that might well be true. The stations of his academic career are relatively few: professor and dean at Eden Theological Seminary (1961-86), where he had studied himself; and William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia (1986-2003). He was president of the Society of Biblical Literature in the 1990s; the recipient of several honorary doctorates; the author of numerous books and articles; a sought-after speaker at conferences; a preacher — and an inspiration.
Unremarkable though his life may have been on one level, what he offered to the Church and to the world was and remains dynamite. Having said that “nothing interesting” had happened in his life, he continued that the biography would be primarily about his thinking and writing. And there was a great deal of that: dozens of books, hundreds of articles, and numerous conference presentations and sermons. He wrote almost compulsively, wrestling with the text and through the text with God: text bursting with metaphors, always exploring, probing, speaking of a God who is not neat and tidy, but free. And, for Brueggemann, all theology was biography.
Having grown up in churches that did not treat their pastor, his father, well, not least because of his lack of education, Brueggemann remained throughout his life committed to teaching pastors and preachers. He opened the scriptures for his readers and found in them something that needed to be wrestled with and proclaimed boldly, and to be liberated from domestication at the hands of historical-critical scholarship.
The experience of small-town Christianity shaped Brueggemann’s development: the pastor of the “other” Lutheran church in the town where he grew up would not acknowledge August Brueggemann, and yet was later co-opted as a Latin teacher for Walter and his brother, Ed. The boys’ decision one day to go to the Black church in town sowed the seeds for a lifelong commitment to social justice, which he found in the message of the Old Testament prophets, and throughout the Bible.
What he offered were typologies and tools, patterns and practices, ways of reading which would bring the text, the Bible, and, most importantly, the God who speaks to life: ways that would make the words of the prophets resonate. And it was about God that he wanted and needed to speak: a God, as his biographer Conrad L. Kanagy puts it, “who cannot be fully measured, a God who pivots just when we imagined we knew where God was going, and a God whose mystery and preference for openness and unpredictability are enough to keep any one of us on our toes”. This was a God who stands in solidarity with the downtrodden and the marginalised, and with the poor; a God whose freedom subverts God’s faithfulness; a God who can be hard to get.
AND finally comes the poet. In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann associates writing in prose with empire, with Pharaoh: totalitarian governments, he tells us, are suspicious of poets, and yet it is the poet who can and does speak the truth of God.
There is much that is unsettling in Brueggemann’s writing. His books are full of images, questions, analysis, and metaphor, unleashed on the reader and compelling — at times, unnerving. His work is not without its critics. Many find the notion of the free God who has an unstable inner life — is even, as Brueggemann once suggested, “in recovery” — unsettling.
Perhaps less well known is Brueggemann as a writer of poems and prayers, the latter going back to his early teaching days, when he opened every lecture with a prayer that he had written himself.
Your holiness breaks our numbness;
Your holiness mocks moral control;
Your holiness opens life beyond our blame games.
We pause in awe before your transformative power.
We move beyond our management;
We mount up with wings like eagles,
We run in eagerness and are not tired;
We walk in wellbeing and do not grow faint.
We are made new well beyond our best selves.
It is no surprise that we break out in loud praise,
Lost in wonder at your goodness, Lost in love for the New World you give,
Lost in praise for you . . .
you . . . you alone! Amen.
Brueggemann’s prayers are an invitation to wrestle with God, to explore the text, reality, and God with a probing imagination.
There is hardly a teaching programme on the Old Testament which does not have Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament on its reading list, and yet it is the clarion call of The Prophetic Imagination (first published in 1978, second edition, 2001) that put Brueggemann on the map. Sales of this book alone exceeded one million in his lifetime, and it set out the programme for his work.
Already, here, Brueggemann shows himself as a master maker of connections, not only with the text, but also with the world of writers as diverse as Paul Ricœur, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and the liberation theologian José Miranda. For Brueggemann, a passion for justice for those to whom justice was denied was at the heart of the alternative community that God’s prophets were called to imagine. The Prophetic Imagination liberated biblical scholarship and, one could say, gave the Bible back to the Church. It sought to restore confidence that the Church could still have something to say, could still know God and speak of a God who was free — and free to raise up prophets.
PIETIST though Brueggemann’s background may have been, his message is by no means a simplistic “Back to the Bible”, as if such a thing were possible. It is always about speaking of God, a God who is free and, therefore, makes an alternative imagination of justice and freedom possible.
Brueggemann’s work on the Psalms and the typology of orientation (towards God), disorientation, and reorientation is a firm part of the landscape of Old Testament scholarship. Yet it was the discovery of lament which is Brueggemann’s greatest gift to the praying Church, born out of his experience of prayer as wrestling with God; and it is the gift that he wanted most to be remembered for.
As some Churches saw Christianity as legitimation of their own triumphalism, Christians needed to learn, again, to express their grief, their anger and frustration, and their trauma and that of the world around them before God. The Psalms of Lament were “the script for an ongoing conversation with God”, Brueggemann suggested. “I think I have helped the church rediscover the lament songs after the church worked hard to get rid of them. The lament songs are the voice of faith, the voice of Israel. So that our conversation with God is a genuine dialogue and not a one-way address from God to us.”
And that prophetic imagination was not something of the past and for the past: it was ultimately a calling for the present, the Church’s calling. For Brueggemann, the text needs to be read in the light of the events and situations of the present, be they the end of the Cold War, racism and apartheid, the Gulf Wars, or Putin, Trump, and Kim Jong-Un, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the rise of populism and nationalism now.
WHAT good can come from Blackburn, Missouri? To whom is Brueggemann passing his prophet’s mantle?
Although Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Walter Brueggemann have roots in German Protestantism, they are in many ways profoundly different writers and theologians, and lived in very different times and contexts. And yet there are some interesting parallels. Both were students at Union Theological Seminary. For both, the encounter with Black Christians became a catalyst for their commitment to people on the underside of history. Both lamented and sharply criticised the complacency of the Church of their day, and yet taught and formed pastors who might become prophets.
As the Church in the United States and around the world faces what some call a “Bonhoeffer moment” — when there is a need to resist, and to speak, act, and live prophetically in defiance of the false prophets of empire — Brueggemann is perhaps among the teachers, guides, and prophets from whom the Church needs to learn to embody what it preaches. “Thus,” Brueggemann wrote, “the essential question for the church is whether or not its prophetic voice has been co-opted into the culture of the day. The community of God’s people who are striving to remain faithful to the whole counsel of God’s Word will be prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness of the dominant culture of our day.”
Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian, writer, and editor based in Peterborough.
