Long, long ago, during the latter days of the biblical theology movement, when massive tomes of biblical theology built on synthesised and sophisticated learning were becoming a species as endangered as dinosaurs, and perhaps for similar reasons of mismatch between evolution and environment, a young Lutheran biblical scholar began to write about the Old Testament. What made him different, interesting, provocative, was that he was….different, interesting and provocative!
I’ve read Walter Brueggemann for over 30 years, from one of his earliest books on Hosea, till his latest books on the theology of Jeremiah. I’m not always comfortable with how loosely he hangs to biblical history and how free he is in imposing canons of narrative criticism on the biblical narratives; at times I think he is plain wrong, but often, very often, I think he is plain right. Or if not ‘right’, then his interpretation of biblical text feels the most persuasive, sounds plausible, is relevantly contemporary and applicable; and because Brueggemann respects the angularity of the text, and the right of the text not to fit easily into our modern presuppositions, I don’t sense, as I often do in other commentators, an anxiety that domesticates the biblical text to make it sound more safely ‘biblical’. Brueggemann is uncomfortable with the imposition of ‘right’, ‘correct’, ‘true’ interpretations, if by that we think we can establish beyond dispute what a biblical text must mean for us now, or what it must have meant, or how it must have been received, by the original audience. He is far too open to the work of the Spirit in the interpretive process to think that our puny words can finalise the meaning of the Word. Speaking of words, words like stimulating, insightful, provocative, imaginative are now cliches as reviewers search for adjectives to describe his writing on the Bible. But they remain true.
There are a number of recurring concerns for Brueggemann. He is a brilliant diagnostic analyst of the psychology of power; he understands as few biblical scholars do, the anatomy of the body politic; he rages with outrage against the empire of global consumerism, and the hegemony of monetary power. And from the other side he has a genius for discerning the strands of hope woven through human experience; he is an enthusiast, in fact he seems at time obsessed with, the liberating energy that drives and informs the divine justice. He understands the complicated unorthodoxies of the prophetic mind that refuses to be conned by the comfort songs of the prevailing culture, and becomes a translator not only of prophetic texts, but of the prophetic intent of the One who says, Thus says the Lord.
So as Remembrance Sunday approaches, and I reflect on Isaiah 25 to find important words to say into a service that for many older people is always encumbered by powerful emotions surging up from deep memories; and a service for all of us who live in a world where oppressive systemic violence and random ad hoc violence fuel conflict, I wonder what Brueggemann makes of these remarkable words. And I pray and think and read. Much of the sermon is ready – The title, "Silencing the Song of the Ruthless" comes from the text – and in a world where monks in Burma are imprisoned and disappear, and in Pakistan where lawyers are beaten up and arrested, the song of the ruthless is being heartily sung, and needs to be silenced.
I’ve learned to stay away from Brueggemann till much of my own thinking is done – his ideas are far too borrowable. But as usual, I find in a few of his phrases, important things I wouldn’t know where else to find – and my sermon is the better for this Lutheran scholar, this prophet’s prophet. I thank God for one whose piety drives his scholarship, and whose scholarship critiques his piety, and one who is the enemy of that defensive timid piety that will not question its own assumptions! May this uncomfortable, discomforting prophet, go on writing for a Church called to sing the song of the Lamb, which will silence the song of the ruthless.
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