Remembering Walter Brueggemann

Earlier this month, renowned Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann (1933–2025) passed away. Brueggemann was a lion of the mainline Protestant establishment, a prolific interpreter of the Psalms and prophets, and a powerful spokesman for what is known in the discipline as “biblical theology.” Using themes and categories derived from the Bible itself (and not from systematic theology), the biblical theologian provides an account of faith expressed in various parts of the Scriptures.

Brueggemann’s biblical theology, I must confess, was not to my taste. He tended to surrender rashly to postmodern currents, bracketing out historical and ontological questions proper to theological study and leaving the texts of the Old Testament more or less hanging in midair. Without the wisdom of tradition or some way of integrating the Bible’s disparate portrayals of God, Brueggemann risked theological arbitrariness and incoherence. Brevard Childs thought that Brueggemann’s mistrust of tradition led him toward Gnosticism; Jon Levenson argued that Brueggemann’s magnum opus, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (1997), fell short in profound ways, mishandling the question of Jewish-Christian relations and dressing up the old liberal project in postmodern disguise. My biblical-theological sympathies are with Childs and Levenson rather than Brueggemann. For all that, Brueggemann’s death is a fitting occasion to honor the man and to consider what his legacy might teach us. 

Eminent scholar though he was, Brueggemann was also a man of the church. He spent his entire career at seminaries rather than universities or divinity schools, teaching first at Eden Theological Seminary (his alma mater) between 1961 and 1986 and then at Columbia Theological Seminary between 1986 and his retirement in 2003. He was thus strongly oriented toward the life of the churches and keen to address the struggles that they faced both in preaching the Scriptures and in remaining socially relevant. 

Brueggemann knew academic form and idiom well, but his work drew its inspiration from the tension that churches face as “communities of interpretation” that must be in the world but not of the world. In his widely influential book The Prophetic Imagination (1978), Brueggemann argued that the prophets challenged existing power structures through language, nourishing various modes of “alternative consciousness” by which to resist greed, injustice, and oppression. Though the term “alternative consciousness” feels a bit dated, Brueggemann is right about the importance of consciousness. Perhaps he understood this because “alternative consciousness” is a fair description of life in the church. The church is where one learns how to be conscious of God in prayer, of others, and of what it means to live in the world. In this instance, Brueggemann the churchman connects the faithful to their scriptural roots. This is the central task of interpretation. As Brueggemann’s career demonstrates, biblical scholarship can aid this task, but it is participation in the life of the church that gives it direction and vitality.

We see the same regard for the church years later, when things began to change radically in the eighties and nineties. Where others hung back and clung to older modes of historical criticism, Brueggemann steered directly into postmodern headwinds. He greeted the decline of metanarratives, cultural hegemony, and epistemic foundationalism with joy, arguing in his 1993 book Texts Under Negotiation that the postmodern situation presented an “enormous opportunity for Christian ministry.” Under the terms of the old settlement, biblical scholars did history and philology, leaving theology to theologians. But in the early nineties, Brueggemann dared to imagine a new world. He spotted an opportunity for scholars to ignore old taboos against confessionalism and religious bias and simply do theology with the Bible—in other words, to do “biblical theology.” Brueggemann was among the first and the boldest to recognize that, if historians cannot really be objective, then there is no reason for theologically minded biblical scholars to stay on their side of the fence. 

This is not to suggest that Brueggemann was an opportunist or merely a man of his moment. It took courage and vision to see new possibilities for academic biblical interpretation when and where he did. He must thus be counted among the seminal figures responsible for the flourishing of biblical theology today. Brueggemann was one of the few prominent biblical scholars who understood the discipline and navigated successfully within it while seeking opportunities to reconnect biblical theology to the life of the churches, a dual identity that is not easy to maintain. To use two of Brueggemann’s favorite words: One needs scholarly “imagination” to enter into the life of the texts, but one also needs “commitment” to something greater than the academy for this imagination to alight on something real.