105 Quotes by Walter Brueggemann

It is of great importance for a student of Old Testament theology to notice that in every period of the discipline, the questions, methods, and possibilities in which study is cast arise from the sociointellectual climate in which the work must be done.(p. 11)

I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

Sabbath is the practice of letting life rest safely in God’s hand.41.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are “speeched” to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, “finally comes the poet”-finally.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.

Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.

The outcome is to delegitimize and deconstruct the kings in effective ways in order to show that while they occupy the forms of power, they lack the substance of power.