Quotes from Walter Brueggemann

The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God.

In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost.

While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges upon the present. Conversely, liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present.

power is not free to disregard truth.

The reason Miriam and the other women can sing and dance at the end of the exodus narrative is the emergence of new social reality in which the life of the Israelite economy is no longer determined and compelled by the insatiable production quotas of Egypt and its gods (15:20—21).

This story begins wherever there is enough courage and freedom and daring and sensibility to acknowledge that the pain of ruthless exploitation is not normal and cannot be borne.

Until that moment of utterance, every objective analysis of economic production in Egypt would have concluded that the pain of the peasants is a necessary, normal, even natural arrangement of labor—the cost of doing business.

God is a magnet who draws pain to God's own self.

The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only "my God who saves.

In the prophetic tradition the continual insistence is that trusting relationships and not tradable commodities are the proper category for communion with God.

They imagined that with a rightly honored commodity they could "purchase" security in a world that seemed devoid of the creator. "Godmaking" amid anxiety is a standard human procedure! But

and the birth of Jesus, two things become clear. First, in the witness to Jesus by the early Christians in the New Testament, they relied heavily on Old Testament "anticipations" of the coming Messiah. But second, Jesus did not fit those "anticipations" very well, such that a good deal of interpretive imagination was required in order to negotiate the connection between the anticipation and the actual bodily, historical reality of Jesus.