The following from Walter Brueggemann. Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation, (Fortress, 1989), p. 1-2.
"The gospel is too readily heard and taken for granted, as though it contained no unsettling news and no unwelcome threat. What began as news in the gospel is easily assumed, slotted, and conveniently dismissed. We depart having heard, but without noticing the urge to tansformation that is not readily compatible with our comfortable believing, that asks little and receives less.
The gospel is thus a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, revises quality into quantity, and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes
Preaching among us happens in this context in which the gospel is greatly reduced. That means the gospel may have been twisted, pressed, tailored, gerrymandered until it is comfortable with technological reason that leaves us unbothered, and with ideology that leaves us with uncriticized absolutes. When truth is mediated in such positivistic, ideological and therefore partisan ways, humaneness wavers, the prospect of humanness is at risk, and unchecked brutality makes its appearance. We shall not be the community we hope to be if our primary communications are in modes of utilitarian technology and managed, conformed values."
…………………………..oooooooooooooo………………………
Walter Brueggemann is one of those writers on the Bible who decisively shapes how we think and shakes up our cherished but unexamined assumptions. Long before he became the doyen of Old Testament scholarship at its provocative best, I've read him regularly. From his early work on the land, the prophets and a quite wonderful book on shalom since reprinted, and then over thirty years of productive writing, he has given the church a constant flow of biblical theology whose foundation pillars are plunged deep into bedrock scriptural text.
Brueggemann is a scholar not always at home in a church at times too keen to buy into the values and techniques of consumer culture and what he calls the hegemony of empire! He is a biblical theologian who deeply reveres the biblical text, a preacher who creatively and disturbingly sets ancient text and contemporary western culture on a collision course. And in his preaching and writing he warns that the church inevitably feels the impact of that text as it allows itself to be too closely aligned with a prevailing culture under judgement.
Over the next while I'll post some further extracts from his lectures on preaching, with the characteristically enigmatic title, Finally Comes the Poet. Daring Speech for Proclamation. This book is now 20 years old, pre-dates fashionably post-modern jargon, and therefore demonstrates Brueggemann's prescience about the dis-ease of consumer driven culture, and the capacity of the biblical text to address postmodern ambiguities with "thickly textured" hopefulness. In this as in all his books, Brueggemann gets under our skin as readers and hearers, by an exegesis of the biblical text as that word from God that tears down and builds up, that breaks open in order to heal deeply, that calls us in question, in order to call us again to obedient grateful living.