Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

     This last summer the church lost one of its most significant voices. It is a voice that I in particular will miss greatly. Having read many of his books and having heard him speak on numerous occasions, I will miss the distinctive voice he brought to theological reflection. The person I am talking about is Walter Brueggemann, who died at the age of 92 on June 5^th.
     Walter Brueggemann was born in 1933 in Tilden, Nebraska, the son of a German Evangelical pastor and a church musician. He earned his B.A. from Elmhurst College and went on to study at Eden Theological Seminary and at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he completed his doctorate in Old Testament. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, he taught for many years at Eden before joining Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, where he taught Old Testament until his retirement. Though he published prolifically and lectured widely, his voice never lost the cadence of a preacher shaped by the prophets he studied.
     As Jason Edwards has written in a tribute he wrote for the Christian Century, “Brueggemann was not interested in easy answers or sanitized interpretations. He wrote, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception of the dominant culture.” He did not ask the biblical text to be safe; he asked it to speak. And when it did, he stayed. And so he illuminated for us the wild terrain of the prophets. The aching honesty of the Psalms. The fierce poetry of a God who delivers slaves and dismantles empires. He reminded us that the Bible is not a flat text but a living witness full of contradiction, beauty, and generative tension; not a book of certainties but a collection of testimonies, laments, and hopes. He showed us how to love a book full of arguments and angels, blood and bread, where prophets weep and poets pray with dirt still on their hands.
     “Brueggemann’s writing was prolific but never mechanical. His words pulse with urgency, even when delivered with academic precision. In The Prophetic Imagination (1978), he frames the work of the prophet as that of imaginative disruption, creating a vision of reality in which grief is not privatized and hope is not managed. That book alone has reframed the work of ministry for multiple generations of preachers.
     “Though The Prophetic Imagination became his signature work, Brueggemann’s output is astonishing in its breadth. He authored more than 100 books and hundreds of articles, ranging across biblical commentary, homiletics, theology, and spiritual formation. From his poetic reflections in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth (2002) to his political and economic critiques in Truth Speaks to Power (2013), he shaped the theological imagination of mainline Protestants, progressive evangelicals, and seminarians across traditions. His Texts for Preaching series (1993–1995) became a lifeline for many lectionary preachers, while Sabbath as Resistance (2014) invited Christians to reclaim rest as a form of defiance in a culture of productivity.
     “What Eugene Peterson did for the pastoral imagination, Brueggemann did for the prophetic one. He gave voice to what many of us felt in our bones but couldn’t yet name: the dissonance between the kingdom we were preaching and the systems we were serving. He didn’t fix the world, but he showed us where to stand when it breaks.

 

 

And he did not flinch from naming where we had compromised. He saw Pharaoh everywhere—in politics, in consumerism, in pulpits that traded conviction for comfort. And still, he loved the church—fiercely, restlessly, hopefully.     “His influence extended far beyond academia. His teachings resonated in seminary classrooms, church basements, and coffee shops. He had a unique ability to bridge the gap between scholarly exegesis and pastoral application. His interpretations of scripture were never ornamental. He saw the Psalms as a collection of not private devotionals but public testimony—what he called “speech-events,” or moments when truth telling breaks through despair. In The Message of the Psalms (1984), he categorized each psalm by its sense of movement: orientation, disorientation, or reorientation (or new orientation). This framework gave language to readers walking through seasons when God felt absent or suffering seemed endless.”
     Davis Hankins, associate professor of religious studies at Appalachian State University, a friend and former student of Brueggemann, framed it this way in remarks at the memorial service: “On this side of history, on our end of modern colonialism, slavery, and the Holocaust, Walter never denied, discounted, or distorted the role played by Christians and Christianity in any of those horrors, even as there were of course always Christians and Christianity on the underside of all those struggles. And that is where Walter encouraged us to discover and join God at work in history, in the struggle, face to face with the pain, the difficulty, and the darkness.”
     This all said, Brueggemann wasn’t a dour prophet. He was known for his sense of humor−and his warm laughter. He was a ravenous and broad reader, and almost without fail, in our experience, included a note of encouragement in even the most mundane work correspondence.
     Again, to quote Jason Edwards:
  “For pastors, Brueggemann was both companion and challenger. For students, a translator of complexity. For the church, a sacred irritant. And for the rest of us—trying to preach and pray our way through contradiction and beauty—he was a reminder that scripture can still surprise us, still disturb us, still set us free.”
     “Walter Brueggemann has died, but his disruption remains—a poetic, unmanageable, holy disruption that still whispers to those with ears to hear and hearts brave enough to respond. He did not ask us to copy his voice. He dared us to find our own. He gave us permission to trust that the word is still alive—and that maybe, somehow, so are we.”

God Bless the Memory & Witness
of this remarkable theologian,

Pastor Greg Kintzi