Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

is clear that Sabbath, in the horizon of Deuteronomy, is not only provision for a day of rest. It is in fact a tap root for a political economy that is imagined and practiced differently. In that different economy, economic concerns are subordinated to and governed by neighborly relationships. The economy has no autonomous function, but is designed to serve the common good of the neighborhood.

The weariness and serenity of the churches just now make it a good time to study the prophets and get rid of tired misconceptions. The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers, is that the prophet is a fortune-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually with specific reference to Jesus.

It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits

It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology

God has defied the purity laws! In doing so the God of the trance has violated Israel's definition of chosenness. All of the old certitudes about chosenness are coming unglued. There is no distinction between pure and impure, clean and unclean. So is there no distinction any longer between chosen and unchosen?

The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.

Because if you cling excessively to the past, you will miss the newness being enacted before your very eyes.

Sabbath is a big no for both; it is no to the worship of commodity; it is no to the pursuit of commodity. But it is more than no. Sabbath is the regular, disciplined, visible, concrete yes to the neighborly reality of the community beloved by God.

Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile.

Lament is the loss of true kingship, whereas doxology is the faithful embrace of the true king and the rejection of all the phony ones.

First, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt; second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land; and third, that "the way to the land is through the wilderness." There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.