On Walter Brueggemann--my column for the church newsletter
June 09, 2025
The greatest Bible scholar of our time died on June 5. Walter Brueggemann was a deep influence on thousands of clergy, including myself. His Biblical scholarship was written for the pastor, with a focus on the proclamation of the Word. He wrote well, with the skill of a poet. Plus, he was a constant presence at preaching conferences—as effective a public speaker and preacher as he was a writer. It’s strange for me to imagine being in this career without new, wise words from Brueggemann.
He was 92 and continued to write and publish. He had taught at Eden and Columbia Theological Seminaries and was an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Brueggemann was born in Tilden, Nebraska and grew up at Friedens Evangeliche Kirche (now Peace UCC) where his father was the longtime, beloved pastor. In my church in Omaha, I had one congregant who had also grown up in that church with Brueggemann.
In their obituary, the World Communion of Reformed Churches wrote of him, he “was more than a scholar; he was a prophetic witness to a collapsing world and a vision for new life beyond that collapse. His work challenged the church to face hard realities — the failure of old certitudes, the disintegration of empires, and the urgent call to love neighbour amid economic and social injustice.”
I have relied deeply upon his books, commentaries, articles, and lectures, to understand the Bible and the task of preaching. For instance, after the inauguration in 2017, he published an essay in which he encouraged preachers to go “back to the basics” and simply let the basics of the Biblical message speak to congregants. His conviction was that the core themes of the Bible were relevant to our current needs without having to respond directly to each new event in the news. He also somehow published a book on responding to the pandemic that came out in 2020 while we were all still in lockdown!
I treasure his commentaries on the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah. His Theology of the Old Testament is a constant companion. In the preface of the latter, he wrote about how the scholarly consensus that had existed in the middle of the twentieth century is now in disarray. But he delighted in that disarray because it permitted “venturesome efforts at Old Testament theology.” Even more importantly, he thought the disarray better reflected the nature of scripture and “the unsettled Character who stands at the center of the text.”
But his single most important work, including on my own thinking and preaching, was The Prophetic Imagination. Not only did that book present a framework for understanding the prophetic books of the Old Testament, it was also a call to the vital role of prophetic ministry for the contemporary American church which Brueggemann found to be numbed and too “enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism.” The thesis of the book was clearly and boldly stated, “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.”
May this great Christian scholar of our time rest in peace and rise in glory for all his contributions to the gospel.
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