Walter Brueggemann famous quotes

03-28-2025

Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let oneâ€™s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Anxiety #Pharaohs #Firsts
Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Hurt #Taken #Compassion
The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Taken #Grace #World
The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Empires #Fiction #Judged
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Perception #Tasks #Ministry
God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Order #Gods Will #Casts
The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Lying #Believe #Hands
When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Thinking #People #Church
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Kings #Artist #Imagination
We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Prayer #Self #Yield
The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Church #Imagine
Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Scarcity #Anxious #Neighborhood
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.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Love #War #Justice
The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Hurt #World #Lines
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.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Jesus #Nice #Men
Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Celebration #Celebration Of Life #Sabbath
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.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Reality #Alternatives #May
Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Sabbath
If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Faithful #Church #Notable
On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Commitment #Hands #Limits
Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Moon #Use #Sun
Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Giving #Easy #Burden
And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.
-- Walter Brueggemann

#Brother #Healing #Theologian

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