Tag: <span>00 Brueggemann_Walter</span>

Theological Education: Healing the Blind Beggar (Brueggemann, 1986)

Mark 10:46-52 records a standard healing miracle. There is a person in need who comes to Jesus. Jesus acts and the person is healed. We may be jaded enough not to believe in the story, or else so familiar with it that we don’t notice what is going on. It is, however, a story that has much to tell us about what it is that theological education should be helping the churches to do.

Truth-Telling & Peacemaking: A Reflection on Ezekiel (Brueggemann, 1998)

Ezekiel, the one who hallucinated, did not challenge the common notion that you need technology, muscle and power for security. He never even commented on that assumption. He did not think efforts at defense and security were important, but he did not argue about it. When he saw death coming, he interrupted the planning and deployment with a different agenda. You cannot have peace if you lie to each other, he said. You cannot have well-being if you do not speak the truth to each other. All the weapons in the world will not save you from your lies.

Conversations Among Exiles (Brueggemann, 1997)

Our society is marked by a deep dislocation that touches every aspect of our lives. The old certitudes seem less certain; the old privileges are under powerful challenge; the old dominations are increasingly ineffective and fragile; the established governmental, educational, judicial and medical institutions seem less and less able to deliver what we need and have come to expect; the old social fabrics are fraying under the assault of selfishness, fear, anger and greed.

How The Early Church Practiced Charity: Review of Peter Brown, Poverty & Leadership In the Later Roman Empire (Brueggemann, 2003)

Upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, former president Jimmy Carter remarked that the “growing gap between the rich and poor” is the most elemental problem facing the world economy. But the gap between the rich and the poor is also a very old problem. Princeton historian Peter Brown takes up this issue of care for the poor as it was practiced in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era

Off By Nine Miles (Is 60:1-7; Mt 2.1-12) (Brueggemann, 2001)

Matthew is not the first one to imagine three rich wise guys from the East coming to Jerusalem. His story line and plot come from Isaiah 60, a poem recited to Jews in Jerusalem about 580 B.C.E. These Jews had been in exile in Iraq for a couple of generations and had come back to the bombed-out city of Jerusalem. They were in despair. Who wants to live in a city where the towers are torn down and the economy has failed, and nobody knows what to do about it?

Covenant As A Subversive Paradigm (Brueggemann, 1980)

Covenant as a recharacterization of God, church and world is not simply a restatement of conventional Western assumptions; it requires drastically new affirmations. Attention to the theme exposes the failure of a remote God who has not triumphed, a church that has not known so much, and a culture that has not kept its promises.

Listening To The Text, Review of Alter, The David Story (Brueggemann, 1999)

Alter’s book is important because it shows a keen listener in the act of listening. It demonstrates how one who already knows a great deal about the text is again surprised and led elsewhere by its detail. Alter invites his readers to listen with him, to hear more and other than already has been heard. Listening is a countercultural activity, an activity that leads to freedom, as Alter demonstrates.

Entitled Neighbours: A Biblical Perspective On Living Wage (Brueggemann, 2002)

The central and defining narrative memory of biblical faith is the story of the Exodus. While popular religion is preoccupied with the great divide of water in the Exodus story, in fact this defining memory is not about water; it is about rescue from unbearable poverty and abuse in debt slavery.

The Gospel vs Scripture? Biblical theology & The Debate About Rites of Blessing [interview] (Brueggemann, 2002)

I incline to think that most people, including the movable moderates, probably make up their minds on other grounds than the Bible, but then they are uneasy if it collides with the Bible or at least they have an eagerness to be shown how it is that the Bible coheres. I don’t think, on most of these contested questions, that anybody – liberal or conservative – really reads right out of the Bible. I think we basically bring hunches to the Bible that arrive in all sorts of ways and then we seek confirmation. And I think that I’m articulate in helping people make those connections with the hunches they already have.