The Word That Redescribes the World: The Bible and Discipleship

Editor’s Foreword

Editor’s Foreword The beginning point for this new collection of Walter Brueggemann’s essays is not new at all. It is where he always begins—with the text of Scripture. Few persons in our time have been more committed in theory and practice to the significance of the words of Scripture for faith and life, for our time and for all times. Few also have been more self-consciously attentive to the problematic of the biblical text as much as to its possibility. There is a candor—a favorite word of Brueggemann’s—to his interpretive work that does not hide or flinch from the alien character of the Bible and its humanity. Surely no contemporary interpreter better exemplifies Luther’s image of the Bible as the Word of God in a very human, crude manger. Both the danger and the power of the word of Scripture are lifted up in his writing. So also he has insisted, and not without some strong opposition on the part of other capable interpreters, that we have no access to the reality of God except through Scripture. Its interpretation is thus difficult, dangerous, and absolutely necessary. In what follows, my comments are not aimed at a summary of the essays. Rather I would point the reader to some of the themes and notes that are sounded throughout all of them. Each one is discrete in its focus and emphasis, but they also overlap in significant ways. So here are some of the things to watch for: 1. In the opening essays of this book and throughout, one encounters a mode of looking that is confrontational, not so much between author and reader as between text and the world in which we live. It is the text that confronts us and makes us uneasy or calls us to a new attention and consideration . At one point (“Proclamatory Confrontations”), Brueggemann speaks of preaching as “truth speaking to power.” He is not unaware of the ambiguity of both truth and power. Indeed, he underscores the problematic . Yet there is a sense in which all of the essays here embody that definition of preaching as they place the text of Scripture, with its judgment and its hope, against the realities of the world in which we live. ix 2. That judgment and hope are always before the reader. One will note how often Israel’s experience of exile is the focus of attention. It is precisely there that the community comes to know both judgment and hope. Brueggemann thinks that exile is not simply a moment in the history of ancient Israel. It is a metaphor for the church’s contemporary existence. From careful attention to Israel’s story of exile, the church may—and he would underscore the “may” because he is not primarily an optimist—discover where it is and why, what its future holds, and what is required for faithfulness in our time. A lot of attention is given these days to the significance of the exile and its aftermath as the time of composition of much of the Old Testament. Brueggemann is less interested in that literary history and more interested in whether the experience erupting in the text of Scripture can break through our academic arguments to mirror the present even as it tells the story of the past. After all, why do we bother to hold on to these texts? 3. Israel’s way of holding on to the story that carried them through the present and into the future was by way of memory. Remembering forward and hoping backward is a construct that Dietrich Ritschl has used in his Christology (Memory and Hope: An Inquiry Concerning the Presence of Christ). It is also a way of thinking and living that is lifted up in Brueggemann ’s continuing recall of the biblical story, of the credo, of the redemptive acts of God, and his insistence that such memory is what feeds hope and creates identity. 4. Indeed, a concern for identity, which he finds so heavily in Scripture, is one of the communal requirements Brueggemann lays upon the contemporary church. Whatever marks go into that identity seem to come from an ethos that is heavily counter to the present way of living in this world. So again and again, Brueggemann hears the text of Scripture pressuring against the way things are and proposing an alternative or counter way—a counter culture, a counter lifestyle, a counter world, a counter economics...