THE death of Walter Brueggemann on 5 June is an immense loss to the worlds of biblical scholarship and prophetic witness to the Judaeo-Christian tradition in its challenge to the unjust and ultimately unsustainable ways of the world.
But this exhilarating collection of essays will ensure that his voice will not be silenced. They range across a kaleidoscope of issues, from particular cases of gross injustice to more generic instances of institutional political and institutional “self-serving systems” with which we are all more or less complicit.
The collection comprises 23 essays ranging over what he calls his “abiding interests well grounded in scripture and effectively linked to our present daily life that summons us to faith” — and, we might add, to hope and love. The Covid pandemic and Trumpism feature prominently, thus providing a backdrop to the themes of lamentation, and divinely inspired restoration, which thread their way through both the old and new covenants to which Hebrew and Christian scriptures bear witness.
Whether applying his unrivalled hermeneutical skill to the contemporary relevance of eighth-century prophets or first-century epistles, he furnishes today’s preachers, expositors, and prophets with a rich seam of source material too good to miss. No two readers will highlight the same essays as being of especial topicality and relevance: much will depend on breaking news or issues currently confronting local communities and congregations. But these topics are likely to be of general relevance:
- “The linkage between the God of the Gospel and economics is deep, wide and inescapable. One cannot have the God of the Gospel without the neighbourly economy willed by the God of the Gospel.” Brueggemann advocates for “New Monetary Theory” fuelled by an imagination freed from “the tyranny of the spreadsheet”.
- A plea for the Church to be at the forefront of campaigns for emancipation from servitude, and cancellation of immobilising debt.
- Psalm 90 challenges us to recognise that we are at a kairos moment globally and locally, but the Church is generally better at responding to the longer-term reality of our being “borne away” by death than to such kairos moments in the here and now.
- Advances in AI should prompt the Church to promote the themes that make us human, the great themes of human relationality: justice, righteousness, compassion, steadfast love, and faithfulness.
- Psalms skilfully interpreted as timeless texts, pertinent to today’s dilemmas.
- The prevalence of “Providential Tyranny”: the assumption that possessions are ours by right rather than gifts to be shared.
- “Building Back Better” with the help of the Prophets.
- When Psalm 133 meets Acts 4, we learn that the Church is, or should be, committed to neither capitalism nor socialism, but “to an economics of neighbourliness”.
- No church anywhere can fail to be challenged by the inclusiveness made explicit in the “ands” of the Gospel.
- Challenging the wealthy one per cent to emulate Josiah, who chose to be “a traitor to his class” by enacting a bias to the poor, unlike Jehoiakim and Zedekiah.
- Notwithstanding Jeremiah’s jeremiads, as the Easter people Christians affirm the Psalmists’ assurances that “Weeping may linger for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”
- By no means least, his moving lament for the Land in an age of environmental degradation is itself worth the purchase price,
Like John Lennon, we are invited to imagine a better world, but, unlike Lennon’s, it will be a world with religion — religion at its best, informed by the prophetic wisdom of scripture, the teaching and example of the incarnate Christ, the gifts of the Spirit, and the transformation of lamentation and injustice into the eternal joys of a covenantal relationship with our Creator and one another.
The Rt Revd Dr John Saxbee is a former Bishop of Lincoln.
Lament that Generates Covenant: And other essays
Walter Brueggemann
Cascade Books £19
(979-8-3852-1771-7)
Church Times Bookshop £17.10