Walter Brueggemann and the prophetic witness we need right now

"We are now arriving at a moment when there is no more middle ground."

I wrote last week about the difference between prophecy and pessimism. This week, I want to take a look at the work and witness of Walter Brueggemann, one of the country’s sharpest scholars of the biblical prophets. Walter’s witness and perspective is crucial to our country going forward. 

Walter’s persistent call for an independent, Bible-based, prophetic imagination is sorely needed right now. We live in a world of binary politics, to which Christians must not conform in either a “religious right” or a “religious left.” 

I spoke with Walter recently and we discussed our commitment to this sentence: “Don’t go right, don’t go left; but go deeper.”

He said, “Conservatives have found me too liberal, and liberals have found me too conservative.” When I asked him to unpack that, he said too often liberals tip their hats to the Bible without understanding that God is a real character and active agent; and conservatives fail to recognize that the character of God is committed to social, racial, and economic justice. 

Walter Brueggemann

He said he was reading about how and why Pope Pius XII refused to speak up against Hitler and the rise of the Third Reich. And we discussed, in some detail, how this moment in American history and the upcoming 2024 presidential election is a “Bonhoeffer moment” for us – a testing time not only for our democracy but for the Christian witness in this country. 

We discussed how religious leaders and Republicans are refusing to speak up and stand up to Donald Trump and the racial autocracy he promotes. 

We talked about the ideological politics we have tried to distance ourselves from, even when our churches conform to them. Walter said some denominations have reached “ideological closure.” I quoted a young Black leader who told me that when you conform to conservative or progressive viewpoints you are “outsourcing” your politics and not digging into what the Word of God says to our public life. 

“It’s a great thing,” Brueggemann said, that “for going deeper, as you keep saying, we have the text, we have the Scriptures to do that!” 

Walter said he loves what his work of all these years: “to live everyday in the texts!” Too often, our leaders don’t do that, instead proof-texting the Scriptures to promote their own political careers and agendas. 

Conrad Kanagy’s highly recommended biography of Walter Brueggemann tells the story of when I asked Walter to speak at our annual Sojourners Summit. 

He wasn’t traveling and lecturing anymore but agreed to do a video for us entitled “Jesus Acted Out the Alternative of Empire.” 

He shared how the prophets must be understood as being in the context of totalism, –which is the enemy of imagination, threatens allies of the prophets, seeks absolute social control and installs a system of economic exploitation. Totalism arms itself, said Walter, at the cost of the marginalized and seeks to control all technology. Bruggemann reminded us that God is a lively character who is a real agent in the world, and the task of the prophet is to identify totalism, reveal the contradictions that sustain totalism, and offer an alternative reality to the totalism that lies before us.

But then he taught the Sojourners crowd that “the practice of prophetic imagination, as you know, requires energy, courage, freedom, and the sense of being otherwise. And I have no doubt that we are now arriving at a moment when there is no more middle ground. That we either sign on uncritically to the totalism, or we take on this task of dangerous oddness that exposes the contradictions and performs the alternatives.”

Read Brueggemann’s entire address here. 

I have never seen a standing ovation to a taped video talk before, but that is what Walter’s record talk got. 

Walter Brueggemanns’s commitment to the integrity and prophetic vocation of Scripture Is needed now more than ever. Teach and preach as he said in this election year, for the sake of the gospel.

Amen.

By the way, my new book, “False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy,” is available for preorder. Please consider ordering a copy.