Abstract
In a slim volume of seven essays, readers familiar with this Old Testament scholar supremely skilled at opening up the scriptures for modern preachers, will recognise familiar themes such as exile, land, covenant, and preaching as an act of prophetic re-imagination. Here there is little to tie them together other than Brueggemann’s passion and rhetorical flair, and readers searching for a Lenten series will be disappointed, apart from the eponymous final essay. Nevertheless there are many gems.
In the first essay, he notes that the idea of ‘covenantal communication’ leads to the conventional view of the sermon as the word of God to God’s people, and prayer as the word of God’s people to God. But what if on occasion the preacher used the sermon as ‘our turn’ to speak the words of the church that might be addressed to God? This is illustrated by a powerful sermon in the form of a psalm of lament and complaint. Chapter 2 is an essay on wisdom in which he demonstrates that obedience and praise, so ‘missing from the liberal modernist project,’ are the beginning and end of wisdom, and are the perfect counteract to our prevailing cultural dangers – identified (after Descartes and Locke) as modernity, autonomy, and individualism.
The third essay is an exposition of Psalm 77 that is informed by both his customary masterful OT scholarship and trenchant 21st century cultural insight, and he never ceases trying to bring the two into dialogue. The fourth essay challenges preachers with the task of using language of lament and complaint (drawing on Lamentations and Psalm 74) as an appropriate ‘speech resource’ for those in exile, for whom ‘all the old certainties are in profound jeopardy.’ The fifth chapter is a deeply inspiring sermon based on Jeremiah 19 -20, and which he states is ‘only for those among us who find yourselves in conflict, under assault, in deep tension for the practice of faith (p. 55). The sixth essay, ‘To whom does the Land Belong?’ addresses issues of creation faith and superpower imperialism rather than Zionist determinisms, and is a denunciation of uncurbed acquisitiveness. Chapter 7 concludes the book with a meditation on the Ash Wednesday gesture as an invitation to remember our true identity before God, against the ‘large, shared propensity to amnesia’, which is the ‘inevitable outcome of the dominant values of our culture’.
The concise philosophical, theological and cultural analyses will seem brilliant and incisive to some (this writer included) or an irritating intrusion of the author’s bete noires, as, for example, when he characterizes the profoundly upsetting, destabilizing current social situation in the West as ‘our loss of the white, male, Western, colonial hegemony’ (p. 41). It is telling that the words ‘preacher’ ‘prophet’ and ‘poet’ are used almost interchangeably in this collection of writings to refer to the minister charged with delivering God’s word to the church and to the world. These essays will serve as both a resource and a provocative reminder to such preachers of their challenging task.