Top 79 Walter Brueggemann Quotes
#1. Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!
Walter Brueggemann
#3. Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.
Walter Brueggemann
#4. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
Walter Brueggemann
#5. Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now.
Walter Brueggemann
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham
Walter Brueggemann
#10. The Sabbath, along with the other practices he exposits, concerns the maintenance of a distinct faith identity in the midst of a culture that is inhospitable to all distinct identities in its impatient reduction of all human life to the requirements of the market.
Walter Brueggemann
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I had come for certitude, but the poetic speech does not give certitude.
Walter Brueggemann
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
Walter Brueggemann
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one's life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.
Walter Brueggemann
#22. Two movements in human life are important: (a) deep reluctance to let loose of a world that has passed away, and (b) capacity to embrace a new world being given.
Walter Brueggemann
#23. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved until the human rights of the other are recognized and guaranteed.
Walter Brueggemann
#24. Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.
Walter Brueggemann
#25. Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
Walter Brueggemann
#26. Cynicism always comes clothed in "realism". The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?
Walter Brueggemann
#27. 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
#28. Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.
Walter Brueggemann
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.
Walter Brueggemann
#32. We have nearly lost our capacity to think ihcologicafly about public issues and public problems.
Walter Brueggemann
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our "rest time.
Walter Brueggemann
#37. God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
Walter Brueggemann
#38. (paraphrasing 1 Cor. 1:25) that the fictions of God are truer than the facts of men.13
Walter Brueggemann
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
Walter Brueggemann
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion.
Walter Brueggemann
#49. 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
#50. 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
#52. The two commandments go beneath social performance and social appearance to the deep, elemental, defining issue of God versus the gods.
Walter Brueggemann
#53. The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.
Walter Brueggemann
#55. The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
Walter Brueggemann
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Sabbath is the practice of letting life rest safely in God's hand.41
Walter Brueggemann
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.
Walter Brueggemann
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
Walter Brueggemann
#72. prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative.
Walter Brueggemann
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. We live our lives before the wild, dangerous, unfettered and free character of the living God.
Walter Brueggemann
#77. 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
#78. The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.
Walter Brueggemann
#79. The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
Walter Brueggemann
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