I am far from unique in crediting Walter Brueggemann, now of blessed memory, with shaping my vocation in the most fundamental way. For me, he stands with my teacher Brevard Childs as the two most important sources of inspiration, and indeed permission, for the particular kind of biblical scholarship that Walter described as “a convergence of a contemporary pastoral agenda with a more historical exegetical interest.”[1] Forty years ago, little of that convergence was then on display in (scholarly) guild circles; however, his essays, and later his personal encouragement, helped me to believe it could be done with intellectual rigor and integrity. “And that has made all the difference,” as the poet says, for Walter led the way in revivifying a field that Childs himself once called “moribund.”[2] Thus he enabled two generations of theologians—students, teachers, pastors, preachers, even activists—to move deeply into Israel’s Scriptures, convinced that there must be something in it for them and the people they seek to serve.
In a discipline in which expertise is everything and learning is shown dispassionately in order to be respected, Walter dared to show the value of amateurism, in the strong sense of that word. One does not have to be a professional economist to show how the Bible illumines perennial economic systems, nor an agriculturalist to see that land is of the greatest social and theological import. (In a 1993 essay on Psalm 37, he was already outlining a critique of agribusiness: “such indifferent, absent ownership of the land is in the long run not viable.”[3]) Brueggemann never feared venturing outside his already very broad areas of expertise and trying something. Perhaps the intellectual virtues of courage and humility make him, among theologians of all stripes and generations, one of the greatest essayists. Essayer (French) means “to make an attempt,” and so he did, over and over demonstrating the Bible’s capacity to stretch grace-fully into every area of human concern.
Implicit in all Brueggemann’s work is the understanding that Israel’s torah, its texts and teachings, were inscribed for the sake of life, “that a person should enact them and live by them” (Lev. 18:5). Accordingly, he did more to facilitate serious exegetical preaching than any other scholar working in our time; it is hard to think of one of his essays that does not bear in some way, overtly or not, on the task of preaching. It is a mark of his commitment to a Reformation tradition that Walter refused to make any clear separation between academic essay or lecture, on the one hand, and sermon, on the other. Once, in a public conversation at the Academy of Homiletics, I commented that I did not observe a clear distinction between what he did at the podium and in the pulpit. He replied, “For me the difference between a lecture and a sermon is …” (pause for effect) “… about thirty minutes.” The crucial point, however, is less the inseparability of exegesis and preaching than the reason for doing both. And the right reason is not to say something novel and reputation-making (as scholars often hope), nor to be friendly and entertaining in a spiritual mode (as preachers may think). Rather, it is to do what the prophetic and poetic language of the whole Bible consistently does for us, when we manage to articulate it clearly and get out of the way: it “shatters settled reality and evokes new possibility in the listening assembly.”[4]
Brueggemann’s refusal to draw a firm line between academic concerns on one side and pastoral concerns on the other finds consistent expression in his essays on the Psalms, which first drew my attention as a student. To this day I frequently assign them to my students, most of whom are people of active faith studying for ministry, because the essays so directly and helpfully treat the Psalms as prayers, very often prayers of the sharpest anguish. At the funeral of her 14-year-old son, Leigh Knauert offered an astonishing testimony to how Walter’s work and presence enabled her to cry out over the sudden deaths, first of her young husband (Walter’s student and later mine) and then of their son. That day she uttered a line that Brueggemann himself might have written: “The psalms are our Biblical model of the utterance of pain making possible the sight of hope.” She then gave her own answer to Paul’s rhetorical question, “Where, O Death, is your victory?” (1 Cor. 15:55): “Not here.”[5] The depth of this mother’s courage and faith beggars my imagination. Yet there is strong testimony (an important word for Walter) also in the simple act of trust that moved this foremost biblical scholar to open the book of Lamentations and let it guide the whole assembly of mourners through the raw, searing agony of loss.
Pastoral and intellectual engagement are inseparable components of Brueggemann’s theological writing, and those two kinds of engagement are further inseparable from his steady concern for the social and political dimensions of biblical texts, including prayers. In many cases lament “concerns a redistribution of power,” and when that outcry is stifled, so are “legitimate questions of justice in terms of social goods, social access, and social power.” [6] Likewise, the “doxological act of praise is at the same time and inevitably a polemical act.” In our time, the praise of Yhwh must be read as denying the legitimacy and ultimacy of the “‘isms’ of all kinds that want our loyalty and chase after our life commitment”; these include “consumerism, militarism, ageism, racism, sexism, and capitalism.”[7] When those statements from two different essays (first published in 1986 and 1992 respectively) are juxtaposed, it is evident that he saw lament and praise as complementary modes of prayer, and both as potentially challenging of the status quo.
Nonetheless it is fair to say that Brueggemann sometimes showed more ready appreciation for lament than for praise. I have never been quite persuaded by his oft-cited “typology of function” for the psalms, categorizing them as expressions of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. But even if (as he grants) different types sometimes appear in sequence within a single psalm, such typing seems too static for many of them, and especially those he places in the category of orientation. For instance, Psalm 145 is described as “coming very close to civil religion, for it sounds like a celebration of the status quo.”[8] One major challenge to that characterization is the function of this particular psalm in Jewish life. Many observant Jews recite Ashrei, as it is known from the opening word, “Fortunate is …,” three times a day, and at the time of death. We can then be sure that this psalm, or a fragment of it, was breathed or cried at Auschwitz, and in countless situations of persecution through the centuries. Imagining such contexts for its recitation, we can see how far removed from “civil religion” are the psalmist’s words of confidence addressed to God:
Your sovereignty is sovereignty over all worlds, and your governance is in each and every generation. Yhwh supports all those who are falling and raises up all who have collapsed” (Ps. 145:13-14, author’s translation).
However, if Brueggemann’s typology ever limited his insight into the potential of this psalm, a later attempt shows that his restless exegetical imagination was not long constrained; he returned to Psalm 145 and gave that psalm of orientation a more dynamic reading. What he had once (in 1980) described as its “unimaginative style”[9] is, a dozen years later, reread as “the most eloquent statement of God’s powerful providence,” whose daring lies precisely in its simplicity. Here he attends carefully to how much difference context makes to good-faith praying of the psalm: “The psalm is an evangelical act that invites a deep departure from the greed system of self-securing, nothing less than a redefinition of reality against our crippling ideologies.”[10] When another dozen years had passed, he located it specifically in a post-exilic community whose “life is under threat, and yet the community explosively praises the divine creator and king.”[11] Re-imagined in a context in which such prayer is credible, the psalm of orientation is gradually revealed to be a lifeline, the only lifeline that ultimately stands the test of reality.
The biblical text is a sturdy lifeline of words stretched between ourselves and God. This understanding is at the heart of everything Walter Brueggemann writes; it underlies (but is even more basic than) his insistence on the prophetic character of the text. From what he said of himself, it seems that he did not come to the strength of this conviction as a point of doctrine. Rather, through a lifetime of studying and teaching, writing and talking Bible, he learned the power of the text to speak directly and salvifically in desperate situations. Moreover, he had the wisdom and humility to get out of its way, as evidenced in his frequent practice of quoting a text at length in both the sermons and the essays. His sermon “At the Death of Peter Knauert” is an outstanding example, yet it is one of many.[12] Brueggemann leans hard on the text, and thus it (not he) pushes further into the space of our lives.
I take this posture of leaning on the text to be Brueggemann’s most characteristic scholarly stance, one I admire. Sometimes, I admit, I find less helpful the way he describes that stance, a key instance being this programmatic statement from the massive Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, that
… in doing Old Testament theology we must be careful not to import essentialist claims that are not authorized by [its] particular and peculiar rhetoric. I shall insist, as consistently as I can, that the God of Old Testament theology as such lives in, with, and under the rhetorical enterprise of this text, and nowhere else and in no other way. This enterprise operates with ontological assumptions, but these assumptions are open to dispute and revision in the ongoing rhetorical enterprise of Israel.[13]
I appreciate that Brueggemann’s chief intent is to prevent foreclosure of dispute and revision, and further, to counter readings flattened by the weight of theological doctrine and historical criticism, in order to produce a genuinely critical biblical theology.[14] Yet ironically, in taking care to observe particularity he makes an assertion that sounds absolutist, despite his aversion to all “–isms.” As I noted in a lengthy review of his Theology, the unsatisfactory consequence of the extreme non-essentialist position is that it produces formulations that don’t preach. But Brueggemann consistently does preach, in both sermon and essay.[15] And always he does it while looking “toward God and away from self,” as the creator of all “authentic newness.”[16] From that hopeful perspective, Walter’s resistance to finalizing statements is fully congruent with the insistence in both Testaments that the reality of God exceeds all human capacity for description and containment.
It is because of this steady resistance that in my judgment the genius of Walter’s theological work is demonstrated most fully in sermons and essays. The sermon is a local, occasional form of speech, a provisional statement that will have to be renewed from any given pulpit, by this preacher or another, in no more than a week’s time. Likewise the essay, by virtue of its brevity, cannot aspire to be comprehensive. It is an attempt at something, possibly a gesture toward a programmatic statement. Yet even so, its statement is necessarily partial; an exegetical essay normally argues a single main point and treats one text, or no more than a few. As Brueggemann’s frequent references to current events show, many or most of his essays were written consciously for a particular time in North American culture—even if some of them have become classics. His public attempts, offered over half a century, are an invaluable heritage for scholars; his example has made it easier for us to take chances, try new ground; the result is a field of study far more fertile than the space we occupied a few decades ago.
Yet doubtless Walter leaves his greatest inheritance to the church. Through all those attempts he has shown convincingly that the Old Testament cannot safely be ignored. Thanks to him, its language now rings in our ears; he has demonstrated that, book after book, the Old Testament preaches … and how!
[1] Walter Brueggemann, “Psalms and the Life of Faith: A Suggested Typology of Function,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 6. Italics in the original.
[2] Personal communication, c. 1989.
[3] Walter Brueggemann, “Psalm 37: Conflict of Interpretation,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 257.
[4] Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (the 1989 Beecher Lectures; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 4.
[5] Leigh Knauert, “Words for Peter,” Journal for Preachers 37/3 (2014), 38-39.
[6] Walter Brueggemann, “The Costly Loss of Lament,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 102, 104.
[7] Walter Brueggemann, “Praise and the Psalms: A Politics of Glad Abandonment,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 118-19. Italics in the original.
[8] Walter Brueggemann, “Psalms and the Life of Faith: A Suggested Typology of Function,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 10.
[9] Walter Brueggemann, “Psalms and the Life of Faith: A Suggested Typology of Function,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 10.
[10] Walter Brueggemann, “Praise and the Psalms: A Politics of Glad Abandonment,” in Psalms and the Life of Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 123-24.
[11] Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger Jr., Psalms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 205.
[12] Walter Brueggemann, “On the Death of Peter Knauert: “Peter amid Remembering and Hoping,” Journal for Preachers 37/3 (2014), 35-38.
[13] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 66. Italics in the original.
[14] Davis Hankins, “Introduction,” in Walter Brueggemann, Ice Axes for Frozen Seas: A Biblical Theology of Provocation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014), 15.
[15] Ellen F. Davis, “A Response to Theology of the Old Testament … by Walter Brueggemann,” Virginia Seminary Journal (July 1999), 49-54.
[16] See Walter Brueggemann, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation (the 1989 Beecher Lectures; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 69, 66.
Ellen F. Davis, Ph.D. is Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School. The author of twelve books and many articles, her most recent works are Preaching the Luminous Word (Eerdmans, 2016) and Opening Israel’s Scriptures (Oxford, 2019). She is a lay member of the Episcopal Church and long been active as a theological consultant within the Anglican Communion.
