Quotes about Walter Brueggemann

Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann's Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink's The Bible in Human Transformation.

Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel's "countertestimony" . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel's main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.

This likely means the Torah of Deuteronomy, but it is not spelled out. Most spectacularly, there is only one condition spelled out … keep Sabbath!

It is my hope that the Christian community in the United States will cease to appeal to the Bible as a direct support for the state of Israel and will have the courage to deal with the political realities without being cowed by accusations of anti-Semitism.

I intend to focus on the question of truth. That means I do not inquire about facticity-what happened-but what is claimed, what is asserted here about reality.

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.

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.22

Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.