Abstract
Walter Brueggemann has been perhaps the most distinguished American theologian of the Old Testament during the last forty years. Though retired for over ten years from Columbia Theological Seminary, Brueggemann has continued to publish at a prolific rate. This book, a collection of various public addresses from 2002 through 2009, exemplifies Brueg gemann's combination of incisive eloquence and trenchant wit in bringing Old Testament texts to bear on 21st-century issues such as globalization, workaholism, and American foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. In numerous ways, the present collection of essays reads like an updated and more systematic exposition of Scripture in the same vein as Brueggemann's classic book, The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 1978).
Brueggemann's seventeen essays are introduced and edited in this volume by Carolyn Sharp. Though these addresses were delivered in different contexts, Sharp has performed a helpful service for the reader by categorizing them into four parts: Torah; Prophets; Writings; and Canon and Imagination. Sharp's introductory remarks are also substantial in their own right for cross-referencing Brueggemann's other books and highlighting the hermeneutical and theological commitments that underlie Brueggemann's own interpretations. These features distinguish this book as the primer of choice for those who are unfamiliar with Brueggemann's wide-ranging body of work.
Since space limitations preclude a critique of each essay, this review must limit itself to identifying three themes of particular relevance for Christians in America, Brueggemann's primary target audience in this book. First, Brueggemann frequently urges modern prophets to join their biblical counterparts in exposing the idolatrous abuse of power. In his comments on the Exodus story, for example, Brueggemann argues that
readers of this paradigmatic narrative may refer it to the reality of economic-military globalism in which the United States … seeks to leverage other states and other cultures so that the world economy is under mandate for U.S. insatiability [p. 49].
In response to such a worldview ridden by anxiety, Brueggemann urges believers to follow Moses instead of Pharaoh by living as a people of Sabbath (pp. 73–74).
Second, Brueggemann views suffering as an indispensable part of authentic biblical faith. In his essays on the laments and the need for a dialogic faith, for example, he hails the pursuit of brutal honesty in the midst of pain as the best way to engage with God as well as to expose the numbing folly of much modern life:
The empire depends on quiescent taxpayers. The market depends on isolated shoppers. As we grow quiescent and isolated, the human spirit withers; and options for newness grow jaded in fatigue [p. 224].
Only a faith that has struggled with such realities will be motivated to imagine God's subversive promise to restore all things.
Third and finally, Brueggemann does not spare either right- or left-wing Christians in his critique of the American church. Both “Red” and “Blue” Christians can be equally guilty of silencing opposing voices rather than letting the Bible speak authoritatively in matters of “sacerdotal purity” and “societal justice” (p. 320). Here Brueggemann draws a fascinating link between “Red” and “Blue” notions and the worldviews contained in the P and D tradition layers in the Pentateuch, respectively. The fact that the final redactors of the Pentateuch allowed both tradition layers to coexist furnishes a model for Christians to embrace both perspectives.
Though many will disagree with these controversial interpretations, we are greatly in debt to Walter Brueggemann and Carolyn Sharp for this trenchant collection of essays. Even as American Christianity begins to emerge from the theological shadows that fell in the aftermath of 9/11, Brueggemann's essays will remain a powerful though uncomfortable reminder of the messiness of faith in the God of the Bible. To the extent that Christians living elsewhere can relate to the particularities of the American scene, this book will prove stimulating in applying the prophetic imagination of the Bible to our modern world.