Remembering Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann
(March 11, 1933 - June 5, 2025)

The first Bible commentary I received as a gift was Walter Brueggemann’s Genesis commentary. Upon hearing of his death, I was flooded with memories of encounters with him in conferences, the classroom, and even jogging together on the track by Candler Seminary. I recall so often being mesmerized by his energetic style of teaching. His whole body was involved in conveying the depth of scripture. I’m wide-eyed thinking: “This man really believes in the “wild and wooly” mysterious and never-domesticated God. This is no conventional lecture.”

His capacity to imagine new ways of interpreting God’s ways among seemed bottomless. Listening to him and reading him, filled me with astonishment and courage to imagine God-with-us in new ways. When I did a computer search, I discovered again how often I relied upon his insights in my sermons. I could not preach on Genesis without referring to him. The same with the prophet Jeremiah, surely his favorite prophet. I also found several of his prayers from his magnificent book of prayers: Awed to Heaven, rooted in Earth. 

He was a scholar, professor, a faithful Christian, who never failed to pray in the classroom or conference hall. His prayers were rich in theology, biblical imagery, Psalm echoes and contemporary culture. No wonder pastors, like me, saw him embodying the vocation of pastor/prophet/scholar, and always the poet. 

Brueggemann encouraged a poetic reading of Psalms, that opened upon a fresh way to understand as well as pray-with-depth the Psalms as poetry. 

My wife reminded of the time he was the guest preacher at Central Presbyterian in Atlanta where we worshipped during graduate school. During the sermon, a homeless man came into the sanctuary and marched to the front row. He was clearly having a mental health breakdown, screaming and waving his arms. Before the ushers could reach him (presumably to gently escort him out,) Walter began to speak directly to the man, adapting his sermon in pastoral way to address him. Remarkably, the disturbed man spoke to him then quieted. He appeared to be listening carefully. Within a few minutes, he was settled and slowly walked out of the sanctuary. I, a seminary student preparing to be a pastor/preacher, was astonished, along with everyone else. It was a remarkable moment, to say the least. 

So much more I could say about this man whose influence will last a very long time. I plan to offer more from him in the following weeks. For now here is a quote that contains many of the themes of his life work. 
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“We who are now the richest nation know more about coveting than any other. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity— a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.”

The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity.