“You are afraid of the text.”
He paused.
“You are afraid of what the Bible says.”
Again, a pause.
“You are afraid of the what the Bible says because you are afraid of what the Bible will ask you to do.”
A third pause, this time uncomfortably longer.
“I know you are afraid of the Bible because of how much time you spend introducing the text you are going to preach, softening it, explaining it away, deferring to its context and, then, all the time you spend trying to illustrate the text.”
Carey Newman
The group of 200 or so pastors, mainly Baptists, a group who prided themselves on being a people of the Book, were stunned. The air became thick. People squirmed on the benches, even though they were covered with padding.
“You are afraid to read out the Bible, let the words stand and resonate, impeach and press.”
That was Walter Brueggemann. A prophet, with a prophetic word, delivered prophetically.
Born March 11, 1933, in Tilden, Neb., Walter died June 5 in Travers City, Mich. He was 92. All who had the gift of knowing him personally or through his 100-plus books, or both, will mourn his loss. Walter Brueggemann may well have been a complicated man, but he was a good man. A very good man, no more or less complicated than the rest of us.
On a lazy afternoon at a bar in Rochester, I was enjoying a late lunch when I struck up an equally languid conversation with the bar’s only other patron. The conversation limped along until I finally confessed I was an academic book editor, of theological works.
He became animated. “Do you know Walter Brueggemann?”
I said, “Yes, I do. And. well.”
The man responded, “I had him as a professor years and years ago. He will never remember me, but he changed my life.”
“I had him as a professor years and years ago. He will never remember me, but he changed my life.”
I copied down the man’s name and particulars in my notebook and sent Walter an email later that day. Walter knew exactly who he was, although he had not seen him for decades. That was Walter Brueggeman. A teacher — who, like YHWH, remembered names.
Walter split the time of his career between two seminaries — Eden and Columbia. But it easily could have been Yale and Oxford, Göttingen and Berkeley — or maybe not. The perpetually subversive side of Walter always preferred to stand with, and where, others might well have rather chosen to pass by on the other side of the road. That consistent choice of the other, the Other, not only marked his life as a teacher, but marked Brueggeman’s scholarship and his reading of the Bible.
Brueggemann was not alone. He made the bulk of his journey with a fellow traveler, Brevard Childs. Brueggemann and Childs built houses on the same theological street, separated by an empty lot. They spent most of their careers debating with each other about what should be built on the ground that separated them. Brueggemann believed knowledge of YHWH was located in the rhetoric of the Bible, while Childs believed the text witnessed to God directly. Childs’ commentary on Isaiah functioned as a meta commentary on Trinity, while, for Brueggemann, Isaiah was a prodigal text that mirrored YHWH’s prodigal love.
Walter Brueggemann was a bundle of contradictions. Passionate about the church in the world, but one of the church’s most biting critics. A scholar, yes, but one who was equally at home in a pulpit. A lover of the god of the text, but equally one who refused to objectify a god apart from the text. Prolific, yet always — and I do mean always — a conscientious and careful reader of other people’s work. (Walter read several books a week and did so for decades. It was a challenge to mention a book to Walter that he had not already read.)
His hunger to know and his hunger to preach were correlates. His industry in both reading and writing mimed the very industry of the God of the Bible.
“His industry in both reading and writing mimed the very industry of the God of the Bible.”
Maybe his most defining contradiction was his shy warmth, his gregariousness despite being a profound introvert — his intensely private, public prophecy. No personality tool, oh so fashionable these days, would be able to track Walter’s.
Conrad Kanagy, maybe more than anyone else, has pointed to how Walter married his German pietistic upbringings with his prophetic imagination. One went inward, one spiraled outward. This contradiction explained much about Walter and, at the same time, concealed much about him.
Walter always was ready with a hearty laugh and warm welcome. He made you feel as if YHWH had welcomed you — and, in fact, YHWH had. Yet, despite the drink, the fare, the time, there always was more to Walter than what was revealed. He was private. Very. He was prophetic. Very. And how the two became one in him was private, a unique sacrament peculiar only to him.
Walter was generous. He overflowed with generosity. And he was also loyal. His loyalty and his generosity made his two main publishers, WJK and Fortress, grateful. With WJK, Walter published his Introduction to the Old Testament and his Genesis commentary. Both blazed the same trail. Genesis showed how a particular text related to the whole, while his Introduction show how the whole threw fresh light on a particular canonical work.
With Fortress, Walter published Prophetic Imagination, a book that burst onto North American biblical scholarship not unlike what Barth’s Romans had done in Europe. Nothing was the same after. And Prophetic Imagination found its complement in Theology of Old Testament, a book that reveals the apex of Brueggemann’s thinking: Theology is located in the speech about the God of the Bible.
I opened the envelope. It contained a cutout from The Carrier Pigeon Post. I had written 500 words about a Psalm for an eight-page, newsprint paper published for those who experience incarceration. Walter had somehow found it, read it and sent me my article back, with a sticky note that read, “Nice!”
That was Walter. Kind. Generous. Giving. But also, shy, retiring, measured. It also was Walter to affirm, to stand with the effort to reach those at the margins. We will all miss him. Deeply so.
On June 5 the God who raises the dead, the God of the fathers, welcomed home one of the most choice of prophets.
Carey C. Newman serves as executive editor at Fortress Press. He also worked with Brueggemann as an acquisitions editor at WJK.
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Q&A with Walter Brueggemann: faith in a time of COVID-19