Walter Brueggemann Quotes

The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God’s abundance.

People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress – in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness – dressed for the work that is to be done.

While the Passover narrative [in Exodus] energizes Israel’s imagination toward justice, Israel’s hard work of implementation of that imaginative scenario was done at Mt. Sinai. . . . Moses’ difficult work at Sinai is to transform the narrative vision of the Exodus into a sustainable social practice that has institutional staying-power, credibility, and authority.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.

Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.

Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.

We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.

Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.