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Reading the Bible afresh

Brueggemann has a systematic mind and an exegete’s heart,d eclares Sam Wells

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Mandate to Difference: An invitation to the contemporary Church
Walter Brueggemann

Westminster John Knox Press £10.99 (978-0-664-23121-7)
Church Times Bookshop £9.90

MANY scholars are more than capable of the systematic theological or detailed exegetical treatise that becomes a new benchmark in the field. Many communicators are more than adept at coining the soundbites, and crafting the arguments that inspire the Church to new adventures in discipleship. But few authors can cross effortlessly from one genre to the other and back; and almost none does so as successfully as Walter Brueggemann.

The reason, perhaps, is that he has a systematic mind and an exegete’s heart. While devoted to the (largely Old Testament) text, he is itching to render it for the listener or reader in ordered, applicable wisdom. As fond of the world as he is of the text, he is impatient to show how it might be reordered along faithful, humble, theological lines. The final chapter of this book does this in a characteristically compelling way.

Whenever a famous author admits that the volume in question is a collection of scripts from oral presentations, the reader knows to handle the text with appropriate reserve — as a mine to be searched for nuggets, not as a continuous argument or detailed exposition.

That said, the broad contours of Brueggemann’s current concerns are conspicuous. He repeatedly refers to the present and coming Kingdom of God as “regime change”, coining and subverting a topical political expression — and one that might have made a better title for the book. Regime change has come to a society that is in thrall to “therapeutic technological military consumerism”.

Lists of idolatries of this kind appear all over the book, and play for Brueggemann the part that foreign gods and threatening armies of the nations do in the Old Testament.

What is really going on in Brueggemann’s work is a reclaiming of the Bible for the non-Evangelical American Church. In his words, “The Bible has mostly been lost to conservative ideology and liberal indifference.”

Following Karl Barth, Brueggemann repeatedly refers to the strange new world of the Bible. He is unsentimental about the liberal Church, which has largely “given up on the hard work of hearing and speaking the alternative that is in the script”. He knows that the silencing of minority voices is not a penchant just of the right, but also of the left — particularly in his own denomination, the United Church of Christ.

One theological shift I welcome is that Brueggemann, these days, seems to talk less about exile as an experience of the Church. I welcome this change because, though exile is a pregnant and fruitful contemporary motif, I have found that in America this claim is often heard as being a lament for a golden era (before the Civil Rights period) when the American (mainline) Church was truly at home.

Relentless misunderstanding has threatened to make the theme of exile more trouble than it is worth. And Brueggemann, as this book demonstrates, has so much else to say.

Canon Dr Sam Wells is Dean of the Chapel and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University, North Carolina, USA.



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