105 Quotes by Walter Brueggemann

Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

Prayer is a refusal to settle for what is.

Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.

The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.