Remembering Walter Brueggemann

I didn't know Walter Brueggemann personally, and, apart from a few shenanigan-shaped close calls with Jim West at SBL, I barely even spoke to him! But news of his death hit home, not just because we've lost a giant of Old Testament scholarship—though we certainly have—but because, for me, it's more visceral. 

Brueggemann was the scholar who shook me out of fundamentalism.

I vividly remember listening to a lecture of his years ago as I travelled on a bus in Tübingen—it was about God in the Old Testament, and it disrupted my assumed account of the relationship between what the Bible "says" and what we must believe. His forceful argument finally dislodged something rigid in me. While initially his argument made me feel sick, ultimately his readings gave me permission to encounter Scripture as something more, not less—more complex, more dangerous, more real. It was at that moment, despite the fact that I had already obtained an MA in theology, that I finally became a theologian.

In my own earliest lectures on the Old Testament, I drew on his Theology of the Old Testament, and that now-famous "testimony, dispute, and counter testimony" framework—not merely to organise content, but to let students feel the heat of Israel's wrestling with God. Something of his pedagogical approach stayed with me, even as Barth shaped my theology in deeper ways. Brueggemann remained a voice I respected, returned to, and was grateful for. His attentiveness to the rhetorical and theological textures of the biblical text, his prophetic concern for justice, his sermons, his wide-ranging scholarship—all of this remains a great legacy, making him a true gift to the church and academy. 

But as I said, I must factor with more immediate and personal gratitude. I learned to really love the Old Testament—nay, Scripture as a whole—because Brueggemann taught me how to listen to it differently.