Interview with Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann
On October 8 and 9, Walter Brueggemann will be the guest speaker for the 2008 Laing Lectures series. Recently we interviewed Dr. Brueggemann about the upcoming lectures and his work in the field of Old Testament studies.
Your over-all title for the three lectures you will deliver at Regent in October is “The Church in Joyous Obedience: Biblical Expositions.” What prompted to you to choose this topic?
WB: Well, I just stay at the task of doing Biblical interpretation that will help pastors and will help the church gets to its faith and its obedience and its joy, so I had these three lectures in front of me, and then I had to find an umbrella topic for them, so they just reflect where I am in my ongoing research in terms of what I think it’s important to be talking about.
You are often considered a somewhat controversial figure. Why do you think this is?
WB: That jumped out at me…I didn’t really know that! I’m a pretty mild guy! Well, I think that as I’m paid to study the Old Testament, and out of that perspective I try to describe things the way I am able to see them in terms of our public life and the church, and I don’t think that description of things is always very welcome, so I suppose that’s an inevitable tension between biblical faith and public life. I take it you have been following the conflict over Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright? He’s not a close friend of mine, but he’s a friend of mine, and I would say that I do the sort of thing he does in a much less inflammatory way, but I think we’re on the same wave length, and that kind of critical perspective is often a surprise to people, and in some quarters not very welcome.
So sometimes it’s an uncomfortable message that people respond to negatively.
WB: It is. And, you know, I myself find it uncomfortable. I’m as situated in this self-indulgent culture as anybody is, and so I wish I didn’t see this and have to think this way.
Some have criticized you for holding the authority of scripture loosely, yet you are speaking on the topic of obedience. How do we act in obedience to a text that is subject to, in your words, “human refraction”?
WB: I think it requires a great deal of courage, and it requires a great deal of imagination, and it requires an awareness that our best judgments are always provisional and penultimate. And I think there are very few things about which we can speak in an absolute voice. And those who criticize me for holding the authority of scripture loosely, I think believe that you can get to much more absoluteness than I think you can get to. So I think we have to make our best judgment for today, in faithful obedience, but then we know that we’re going to have to review it and revise it as we see more and as the Spirit leads us. So a major accent of my research is imagination, and that means we’re always making interpretive leaps that are always in dispute. But I think we have to go on and make those leaps, and see where we go next.
What motivated your choice of Exodus, Jeremiah, and Isaiah as your texts for the topic of joyous obedience?
WB: I happened to be studying those in any case, but I also happened to be studying them because I think they are particularly pertinent. The latter two, Jeremiah and Isaiah, they are basically preoccupied with the destruction of Jerusalem in the Old Testament period, and the way I make that argument is that the destruction of Jerusalem for the Israelites in the Old Testament, was really their 9/11. As you may know people in the United States are very preoccupied with 9/11, and what’s come out of that. So I try to make that connection, and when I do that, why these texts seem to be enormously important and pertinent. So, that’s kind of how my imagination works about this.
All three of your lectures will address, in one way or another, issues of public life and social justice. In fact, you frequently address these topics in other contexts. Why does an Old Testament scholar engage in this sort of public theology?
WB: Well, there are lots of ways of being an Old Testament scholar…and there are people upon whom I depend—much more technical critical work, and I use their work. But my mind works basically to try to make connections, because my primary audience…are pastors and church people, and while you have to do the technical critical stuff, by itself that doesn’t really give any payoffs to pastors and churches. So I want to work at those connections, I think partly that’s my social vocation, and partly that’s how my mind works. But the other side of it is, if you study the Old Testament theologically, you can’t help but be driven to public questions—they’re all over the text. The challenge is to try to make connections between those ancient public questions and our contemporary public questions, and that’s what I try to do.
Since your primary audience consists of pastors, and those on the street doing theology, let me ask you this: since the Old Testament is sometimes ignored by those you identify as your primary audience, have you come across any tension in that area, or any objection to your work?
WB: Of course, of course! A lot of people say back to me that if you get to the hard parts of the Old Testament: “Haven’t Christians gotten past all that?” And the answer that I make to that is that what we call the Old Testament was the scripture for the early church, and I think that if we don’t study the Old Testament then the New Testament is bound to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And as they say, there’s a lot of that going around. One of my continuing passions is that the church really has to recover the Old Testament as an important part of our scripture. You can’t avoid it, I think.
Who do you feel would most benefit from attending these lectures?
WB: I suspect pastors and seminarians, probably. But also thinking Church people, and if there are people who are preoccupied with public questions. I think it’s very hard to get this way of thinking into the conversation of public questions, but every once in awhile someone who has public responsibilities turns up in these conversations, and that’s a terrific thing when that happens. But I think my primary constituency probably is pastors and seminarians.
Based on your knowledge of Regent College, and your knowledge of yourself, what type of discussion and debate do you anticipate?
WB: My experience usually is that the questions that finally come up are: “So what? What are we supposed to do about this?” And that’s not easy to answer, because the issues are so complex. But I suppose there’ll be questions about whether the imaginative leaps of interpretation that I’m making are valid, or whether the text has to be read in a safer way, or a more cautious way. And those are very important questions. If I am able to say anything in these lectures that challenges people’s thinking, you never know whether that’s going to happen, then you would expect if people feel challenged, that they would come back and quesetion it, and want to probe it, and see how you get there and stuff like that. So I think it’s always a question on the one hand of literalism about the text, on the other hand orthodoxy in terms of long-established church positions. And I want to move beyond literalism and I want to raise some questions about conventional church assumptions and practices. I assume that’s what the conversation will be about. And I enjoy those conversations, nobody has to win, and nobody has to lose.
If you could encourage people to read a particular book in preparation for your lectures this fall, which book would you choose, and why?
WB: Probably my recent book Mandate to Difference, that reflects my most recent thinking, and in some ways those are still the issues with which I am preoccupied. So I suppose that would be primary. My old book The Prophetic Imagination, sort of lays down the themes that I’ve been working on for twenty years (laughs), but I think in Mandate to Difference there’s more contemporaneity, and specificity than earlier.
Anything further that you’d like to add?
WB: I’m looking forward to it.
