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Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography

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Conrad Kanagy discusses Walter Brueggemann within the historical and cultural landscape of his formation.

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 29, 2023

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This video video discusses the life and work of Walter Brueggemann, a prominent theologian and scholar, as presented by a pastor and college professor who faced challenges while preaching on racism during COVID-19. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, the speaker emphasizes the importance of authenticity in his teaching. The narrative details Brueggemann's early life, including his German Evangelical pietist background that shaped his progressive yet Bible-centered faith. It explores his sociological approach to theology, particularly his concept of "prophetic imagination," defined as the ability to see alternative realities beyond the superficial.

Brueggemann's influential work, including the pivotal book "The Prophetic Imagination," emerged during a tumultuous period marked by events such as the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. His writings resonated with the struggles of the church to respond to these social changes and have had a lasting impact over the decades. The speaker highlights Brueggemann's commitment to social justice, inclusivity, and his rejection of rigid labels like "progressive." He attributes Brueggemann's intellectual depth to influences from multiple disciplines and key figures in theology, sociology, and Jewish thought.

As Brueggemann reflects on his life at 90 years old, he expresses newfound clarity and appreciation for his journey, emphasizing that his life's narrative is interconnected with his spirituality and the divine teachers he encountered. This video video concludes with the assertion that Brueggemann's prayers, alongside his theological contributions, encapsulate his profound connection to God and illustrate his enduring legacy.

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Here are some articles that share themes and topics similar to the video you about Walter Brueggemann:

1. **"The Role of Prophetic Theology in Addressing Social Justice"** - This article explores the role of prophetic theology in contemporary social justice movements, drawing parallels to the teachings of theologians like Brueggemann who emphasize the importance of envisioning alternative realities through faith.

2. **"Spirituality and Social Activism: The Legacy of Progressive Theologians"** - An in-depth analysis of various progressive theologians, including Brueggemann, focusing on their contributions to social justice and activism, particularly during periods of societal upheaval.

3. **"The Intersection of Faith and Social Justice in Modern Theology"** - This piece examines how modern theologians integrate faith with social justice initiatives, highlighting the work of figures such as Brueggemann in advocating for change within the church and society.

4. **"Living with Parkinson's: A Theological Reflection on Suffering and Authenticity"** - This article provides insights into how chronic illnesses can shape one’s spirituality and teaching style, reflecting on how theologians like Brueggemann navigate their health challenges while maintaining their commitment to authenticity.

5. **"The Prophetic Imagination: Envisioning a New Church"** - A comprehensive look at Brueggemann’s concept of prophetic imagination, discussing how it can inspire a new vision for the church in light of contemporary societal issues.

6. **"The Influence of German Evangelical Pietism on Modern Theology"** - This article traces the roots of contemporary theological thought back to German Evangelical Pietism, examining how figures like Brueggemann were shaped by this background.

7. **"Celebrating 90 Years of Theological Innovation: Walter Brueggemann's Impact"** - A reflective piece celebrating Brueggemann’s 90th birthday, summarizing his contributions to theology, social justice movements, and his enduring legacy in the church.

8. **"Prayers of the People: The Role of Prayer in Shaping Theology"** - This article discusses how the prayers of theologians, including Brueggemann, reflect their theological beliefs and relationship with God, emphasizing the spiritual dimension of their work.

These articles collectively delve into themes of social justice, theology, personal authenticity, and the historical convideo of Brueggemann's work, providing a comprehensive understanding of his significance in modern theological discourse.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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I, was in trouble as a pastor

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because I was preaching messages

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during covid, about racism.

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Um, I'm a college professor and also a pastor,

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and, also diagnosed

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with Parkinson's disease seven years ago,

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and decided at that point I better become authentic,

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speaking the same things from the

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pulpit that I say in the classroom.

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And, so I was interviewing Brueggeman for our webinar,

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and, I asked him if he had a biography

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that I really needed his story, and he said, no, I don't.

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And so I emailed him right afterwards

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and said, can I write it?

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And he said, you may. So I knew about Bru Goodman's work

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from my own sociological research

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and surveys of religion in America.

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My church, my research interest is really re religion in

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America and global Christianity.

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And so I had used his work to outline some of my

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own sociological work.

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He was a sociology undergraduate at

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Elmhurst College in Chicago.

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And I, we had this kinship when I would read his material

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that I knew I was connecting with someone

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who understood the sociological perspective.

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Now, he calls it the prophetic imagination.

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And he always describes it very simply this way.

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And I heard him over and over again in our interviews.

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It is the capacity to see an alternative reality to the one

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that lies in front of us.

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That is a, that is a sociological statement, meaning

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the sociological perspective consistently

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challenges the taken for granted reality

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that appears in front of us.

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We are always saying, what is, what, what appears in front

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of us is only the surface.

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There must be more to the surface.

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And so when I ask Walter if I could write his story,

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he said, there's nothing very interesting about my life.

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Someone who has written a hundred

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books sold millions of copies.

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There was something interesting about his life.

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And so I went in as a sociologist saying,

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what's in the basement of Walter Brueggeman?

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What is at the core of this individual?

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And everybody I asked, including family and friends

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and colleagues would say to me, we don't know.

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We don't have a clue. He's bright. He works hard.

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He, he reads across disciplines.

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He has a photographic memory, all of which are true,

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but don't account for

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the success he has had over six decades.

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The man has been writing for 60 years.

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And, and his work today is as relevant as is

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as it was 60 years ago.

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Uh, incredibly unusual individual.

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And so the sociologist in me wanted to get into the basement

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of Walter's, life to find out what was it

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that had caused this explosion In 1978,

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in the prophetic imagination, he had been teaching

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as a seminary professor from 1961 to 1978, had written four

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or five books, nothing, nothing big.

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And then in 78, this explosion happened.

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And so my question was, why?

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What was happening in the church in America and globally?

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Because he's very popular in Great Britain,

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what was happening in the church in the Western church

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that this book took off the way it did?

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So he grew up,

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his grandfather migrated from Germany along

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with 8 million other Germans,

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in the 18 hundreds up the Mississippi River, up

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to Missouri River and into Missouri.

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And they settled this land

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that they called the New Rhineland.

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And he had brought, they brought with him this German,

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what was called German Evangelical pietism,

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which was a result of the Prussian Union,

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that brought together reform folks

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and Lutherans, in an effort

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to end the quarrels in the conflict.

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That along with famine

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and disease, had wiped out half of the German population.

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So they came here, committed Sam to not quarrel.

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They came here with a very irenic kind of theology

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that said, love God and neighbor.

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Those are the two great commandments.

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And they also agreed

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that they would accept three catechisms,

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the Westminster Catechism, the, the Lutheran Catechism

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and, Heidelberg.

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And if they disagreed on those, they'd,

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they'd accept the Bible as an alternative.

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It was just this kind of neat little,

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we're gonna be ecumenical, we're gonna be irenic,

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we're gonna be peace loving, have a simple faith.

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And they were very uneducated.

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And so, the, the German

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and Sw Swiss mission houses, which were separate from the,

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church hierarchy, they were kind

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of their own independent mission houses that trained folks

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to be missionaries and pastors without a,

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without a high degree of education.

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They were a reaction to the scholasticism of Lutheran,

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of Lutheran Church and Reform Church.

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And they, they cranked out these pastors

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who had very little levels of education,

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and they sent them to Missouri.

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And those became about 150.

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Those folks became the first pastors

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of these German immigrants.

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And again, the focus was really on this kind of pietism

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that came out of these German

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and Swiss mission houses that, that said,

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religion is this heartfelt,

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it's almost like the Wesleys, John Wesley.

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It's this heartfelt experience with God

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that is more than just ahead.

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And it's also a very simple, tolerant faith.

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That's the soil, the stew that Walter grew up in.

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Um, and it still explains his progressiveness.

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Um, but he would say he is not a progressive.

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I heard over and over again from him how disappointed he is

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with progressives because he

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says they've given up on the Bible.

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He does not see himself as a progressive,

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but he sees himself as one who has this simple,

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tolerant faith that was combined with growing up

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as a really poor pastor's child,

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who saw the church abuse his father.

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His father would work for 50 weeks each year as a pastor,

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and then for two weeks would go to Nebraska

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and would work on the wheat harvest

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and would earn more money in two weeks than he earned all

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50 weeks as a pastor.

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And he just watched his father grow up in this,

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with this kind of experience.

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Uh, he watched his family being marginalized,

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and even he tells the story of going to,

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a little black church, group of African Americans

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who had a church in Blackburn, Missouri where he grew up,

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and he would sneak off

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with his brother to go to this church.

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So very early on, he was sensitized to those on the margins.

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And he would say that that formed his, concern

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for the poor and marginalized.

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And, and,

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and lgbtq plus he was supporting gay pastors by the 1970s.

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He says that's what formed him.

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Uh, and he sees evidence for that support

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and support for that formation in the scripture where God,

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and then in the Old Testament,

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Jesus in the New Testament was always reaching out

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to the marginalized, always reaching out to the poor.

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Uh, and that's, so that's,

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that's a really important part of this formation.

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James Milberg at Union Theological Seminary was the,

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was the greatest influence on him,

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because at that point, historical criticism in both Europe

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and the United States was, was

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what was driving the interpretation of the biblical text.

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It was about the language. It was about the people.

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It was about the geography.

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It was about the facts of the text.

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Uh, but it was not about the God of the text.

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And I've heard over and over again from folks that brigman,

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almost single-handedly changed the direction of biblical,

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the interpretation

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and ex Jesus by his focus on the God of the text.

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And so when I would ask Walter, how do you do your exegesis?

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He said, I do the historical, I do the historical work.

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I look at what was happening.

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But then I add to that sociology.

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I look at how God was interacting with the people

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and how the people were interacting with God.

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And then he said, I add theology to that.

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How was, how was what was happening then

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and what God was up to then relevant

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to what's happening in the world today.

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It's this neat little model of history, sociology

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and theology that he has worked with.

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In fact, in 1968,

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I found a little essay in his archives written

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to Sunday school teachers

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that essentially describes the same thing.

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He said, when we teach children about the Bible,

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we should not teach them about the biblical

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characters as heroes.

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We should teach them about how they responded

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to God's call in the midst of crisis.

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So for him, it's all about what God is up to,

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what God was up to then and what God is up to now,

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and how those two relate to each other.

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What was going on in the church in the

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sixties, seventies and eighties?

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That was so that Walter says the things were swirling in the

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church and world, what was going on in the church,

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that this message, which he did not anticipate, would take,

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would get traction.

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Why did it get traction?

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This book called The Prophetic Imagination,

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published in 1978 by Fortress Press in Min in Minneapolis.

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Why did it take traction?

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And the reason it took off, I think, was that the church

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and its pastors in the white church

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and the white pastor, white pastors did not know how

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to handle the turmoil that was coming about

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because of Vietnam.

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The Vietnam War, Watergate, the Civil Rights Movement.

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Uh, they were at different pastors were always at different

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places than their members in terms of civil rights

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and advocacy for civil rights.

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The women's movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, all

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of this was creating change in the American scene

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and globally, that pastors trained in seminaries

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that were looking at historical criticism as the, the model

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for theology didn't know what to do with

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Walter says historical criticism was more abundant.

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It was dead. He said, it offers nothing.

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It offered nothing to pastors.

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In the midst of this change, we should not discount

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what God is up to now, that God is able to do something

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that is an alternative to what was what seems to be into us.

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And that took hold because it offered hope to pastors,

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and, and leaders, and became really the fundamental,

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it became the fundamental message

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that Walter would write a hundred more books out of that is

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that God is offering an alternative to what is in front

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of us to the turmoil that seems to be in front of us.

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He wrote an interesting essay recently.

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I I say he's writing some of the best work he's ever done,

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yet he still writes a blog post a week.

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He reads seven to eight books a week.

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He's writing four books a week, a year, now his editor

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for the next three books, he is,

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he is tremendously interdisciplinary.

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And so one of the things that was happening to, in this,

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in sociology in the 1960s was sociologists didn't know where

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to turn either to explain the inequality

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and conflict that was happening.

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So they turned to Karl Marx

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and they turned to liberation theology.

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Well, not theology, but to sociology.

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Brugmann was so connected to what was happening in sociology

10:15.665 --> 10:19.315
that he early on as a theologian, also turns to mark,

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to Karl Marx and to Liberation theology.

10:22.925 --> 10:25.905
And that makes him relevant on the theological scene

10:26.565 --> 10:28.545
in a way that no other theologian was.

10:28.925 --> 10:31.025
So he was influenced by Miranda.

10:31.245 --> 10:32.865
He was influenced by Karl Marx.

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He was influenced by James Milberg,

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who was using rhetorical analysis rather

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than historical criticism.

10:38.725 --> 10:40.465
He was influenced by Abram Hessel.

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Abram Hessel was the Jewish theologian who was at,

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across the street at the Jewish Seminary

10:45.935 --> 10:47.305
from Union Theological.

10:48.065 --> 10:49.425
Len Bergen Hessel were good friends.

10:49.525 --> 10:52.185
Hessel influences Brueggeman introduces him

10:52.185 --> 10:55.185
to Jewish theology, and that those were some

10:55.185 --> 10:57.585
of the major influences on Bru Goodman's life at that point.

10:57.895 --> 11:00.345
He's much less of a ma, he still is a mystery

11:01.095 --> 11:02.945
because he doesn't like to be reduced.

11:03.895 --> 11:06.315
But he said to me when I wrote the book,

11:06.315 --> 11:08.675
when it was finished, he said, this has given me a sense

11:08.675 --> 11:11.355
of my life as a whole that I never had before.

11:12.095 --> 11:14.595
He said, anything anyone else writes about me

11:14.825 --> 11:15.875
will be a footnote.

11:16.655 --> 11:18.075
He, he also said one other thing.

11:18.075 --> 11:19.235
He said, it's clear to me now

11:19.235 --> 11:21.155
that every teacher God brought into my life was

11:21.155 --> 11:22.435
given to me by Providence.

11:23.495 --> 11:26.955
It provided a sense of clarity and wholeness for him.

11:27.415 --> 11:30.395
And so if the subject at 90 years of age says it,

11:30.415 --> 11:32.675
it gave him a sense that his life was no longer

11:32.825 --> 11:34.195
just a black box either.

11:34.505 --> 11:35.875
That there really was something

11:35.875 --> 11:37.235
very interesting about his life.

11:37.775 --> 11:39.715
And so, I think I would say two things.

11:41.115 --> 11:43.135
The answers that this book provides are connected

11:43.335 --> 11:45.695
to the formation in the first 20 years of his life

11:46.435 --> 11:47.855
and also his life with God.

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So the prayers in the book, he,

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he's written tremendous number

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of prayers that have gotten less

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Play than his theology.

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But I have said if the only thing we had left at Brigham

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and were his prayers, he'd still be on the front pages

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because prayers represent his theology

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and his life with God.

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So the book includes nine new prayers that he wrote for,

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for me at my request, which are just rich.

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And I think help us to understand

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who Walter Brigman really is.

00:00 - I, was in trouble as a pastor because I was preaching messages during covid, about racism. I'm a college professor and also a pastor, and, also diagnosed with Parkinson's disease seven years ago,

00:12 - and decided at that point I better become authentic, speaking the same things from the pulpit that I say in the classroom. And, so I was interviewing Brueggeman for our webinar, and, I asked him if he had a biography that I really needed his story, and he said, no, I don't. And so I emailed him right afterwards and said, can I write it? And he said, you may. So I knew about Bru Goodman's work from my own sociological research

00:35 - and surveys of religion in America. My church, my research interest is really re religion in America and global Christianity. And so I had used his work to outline some of my own sociological work. He was a sociology undergraduate at Elmhurst College in Chicago. And I, we had this kinship when I would read his material that I knew I was connecting with someone who understood the sociological perspective.

01:01 - Now, he calls it the prophetic imagination. And he always describes it very simply this way. And I heard him over and over again in our interviews. It is the capacity to see an alternative reality to the one that lies in front of us. That is a, that is a sociological statement, meaning the sociological perspective consistently challenges the taken for granted reality that appears in front of us. We are always saying, what is, what, what appears in front

01:29 - of us is only the surface. There must be more to the surface. And so when I ask Walter if I could write his story, he said, there's nothing very interesting about my life. Someone who has written a hundred books sold millions of copies. There was something interesting about his life. And so I went in as a sociologist saying, what's in the basement of Walter Brueggeman? What is at the core of this individual?

01:50 - And everybody I asked, including family and friends and colleagues would say to me, we don't know. We don't have a clue. He's bright. He works hard. He, he reads across disciplines. He has a photographic memory, all of which are true, but don't account for the success he has had over six decades. The man has been writing for 60 years. And, and his work today is as relevant as is as it was 60 years ago.

02:14 - incredibly unusual individual. And so the sociologist in me wanted to get into the basement of Walter's, life to find out what was it that had caused this explosion In 1978, in the prophetic imagination, he had been teaching as a seminary professor from 1961 to 1978, had written four or five books, nothing, nothing big. And then in 78, this explosion happened. And so my question was, why? What was happening in the church in America and globally?

02:41 - Because he's very popular in Great Britain, what was happening in the church in the Western church that this book took off the way it did? So he grew up, his grandfather migrated from Germany along with 8 million other Germans, in the 18 hundreds up the Mississippi River, up to Missouri River and into Missouri. And they settled this land that they called the New Rhineland.

03:02 - And he had brought, they brought with him this German, what was called German Evangelical pietism, which was a result of the Prussian Union, that brought together reform folks and Lutherans, in an effort to end the quarrels in the conflict. That along with famine and disease, had wiped out half of the German population. So they came here, committed Sam to not quarrel. They came here with a very irenic kind of theology

03:28 - that said, love God and neighbor. Those are the two great commandments. And they also agreed that they would accept three catechisms, the Westminster Catechism, the, the Lutheran Catechism and, Heidelberg. And if they disagreed on those, they'd, they'd accept the Bible as an alternative. It was just this kind of neat little, we're gonna be ecumenical, we're gonna be irenic,

03:49 - we're gonna be peace loving, have a simple faith. And they were very uneducated. And so, the, the German and Sw Swiss mission houses, which were separate from the, church hierarchy, they were kind of their own independent mission houses that trained folks to be missionaries and pastors without a, without a high degree of education. They were a reaction to the scholasticism of Lutheran, of Lutheran Church and Reform Church.

04:16 - And they, they cranked out these pastors who had very little levels of education, and they sent them to Missouri. And those became about 150. Those folks became the first pastors of these German immigrants. And again, the focus was really on this kind of pietism that came out of these German and Swiss mission houses that, that said, religion is this heartfelt,

04:38 - it's almost like the Wesleys, John Wesley. It's this heartfelt experience with God that is more than just ahead. And it's also a very simple, tolerant faith. That's the soil, the stew that Walter grew up in. and it still explains his progressiveness. but he would say he is not a progressive. I heard over and over again from him how disappointed he is with progressives because he says they've given up on the Bible.

05:04 - He does not see himself as a progressive, but he sees himself as one who has this simple, tolerant faith that was combined with growing up as a really poor pastor's child, who saw the church abuse his father. His father would work for 50 weeks each year as a pastor, and then for two weeks would go to Nebraska and would work on the wheat harvest and would earn more money in two weeks than he earned all 50 weeks as a pastor.

05:32 - And he just watched his father grow up in this, with this kind of experience. he watched his family being marginalized, and even he tells the story of going to, a little black church, group of African Americans who had a church in Blackburn, Missouri where he grew up, and he would sneak off with his brother to go to this church. So very early on, he was sensitized to those on the margins. And he would say that that formed his, concern

05:57 - for the poor and marginalized. And, and, and lgbtq plus he was supporting gay pastors by the 1970s. He says that's what formed him. and he sees evidence for that support and support for that formation in the scripture where God, and then in the Old Testament, Jesus in the New Testament was always reaching out to the marginalized, always reaching out to the poor. and that's, so that's,

06:20 - that's a really important part of this formation. James Milberg at Union Theological Seminary was the, was the greatest influence on him, because at that point, historical criticism in both Europe and the United States was, was what was driving the interpretation of the biblical text. It was about the language. It was about the people. It was about the geography. It was about the facts of the text. but it was not about the God of the text.

06:43 - And I've heard over and over again from folks that brigman, almost single-handedly changed the direction of biblical, the interpretation and ex Jesus by his focus on the God of the text. And so when I would ask Walter, how do you do your exegesis? He said, I do the historical, I do the historical work. I look at what was happening. But then I add to that sociology. I look at how God was interacting with the people and how the people were interacting with God.

07:11 - And then he said, I add theology to that. How was, how was what was happening then and what God was up to then relevant to what's happening in the world today. It's this neat little model of history, sociology and theology that he has worked with. In fact, in 1968, I found a little essay in his archives written to Sunday school teachers that essentially describes the same thing.

07:33 - He said, when we teach children about the Bible, we should not teach them about the biblical characters as heroes. We should teach them about how they responded to God's call in the midst of crisis. So for him, it's all about what God is up to, what God was up to then and what God is up to now, and how those two relate to each other. What was going on in the church in the sixties, seventies and eighties?

07:55 - That was so that Walter says the things were swirling in the church and world, what was going on in the church, that this message, which he did not anticipate, would take, would get traction. Why did it get traction? This book called The Prophetic Imagination, published in 1978 by Fortress Press in Min in Minneapolis. Why did it take traction? And the reason it took off, I think, was that the church and its pastors in the white church

08:23 - and the white pastor, white pastors did not know how to handle the turmoil that was coming about because of Vietnam. The Vietnam War, Watergate, the Civil Rights Movement. they were at different pastors were always at different places than their members in terms of civil rights and advocacy for civil rights. The women's movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, all of this was creating change in the American scene and globally, that pastors trained in seminaries

08:52 - that were looking at historical criticism as the, the model for theology didn't know what to do with Walter says historical criticism was more abundant. It was dead. He said, it offers nothing. It offered nothing to pastors. In the midst of this change, we should not discount what God is up to now, that God is able to do something that is an alternative to what was what seems to be into us. And that took hold because it offered hope to pastors, and, and leaders, and became really the fundamental,

09:23 - it became the fundamental message that Walter would write a hundred more books out of that is that God is offering an alternative to what is in front of us to the turmoil that seems to be in front of us. He wrote an interesting essay recently. I I say he's writing some of the best work he's ever done, yet he still writes a blog post a week. He reads seven to eight books a week. He's writing four books a week, a year, now his editor for the next three books, he is,

09:49 - he is tremendously interdisciplinary. And so one of the things that was happening to, in this, in sociology in the 1960s was sociologists didn't know where to turn either to explain the inequality and conflict that was happening. So they turned to Karl Marx and they turned to liberation theology. Well, not theology, but to sociology. Brugmann was so connected to what was happening in sociology that he early on as a theologian, also turns to mark,

10:19 - to Karl Marx and to Liberation theology. And that makes him relevant on the theological scene in a way that no other theologian was. So he was influenced by Miranda. He was influenced by Karl Marx. He was influenced by James Milberg, who was using rhetorical analysis rather than historical criticism. He was influenced by Abram Hessel. Abram Hessel was the Jewish theologian who was at,

10:43 - across the street at the Jewish Seminary from Union Theological. Len Bergen Hessel were good friends. Hessel influences Brueggeman introduces him to Jewish theology, and that those were some of the major influences on Bru Goodman's life at that point. He's much less of a ma, he still is a mystery because he doesn't like to be reduced. But he said to me when I wrote the book, when it was finished, he said, this has given me a sense

11:08 - of my life as a whole that I never had before. He said, anything anyone else writes about me will be a footnote. He, he also said one other thing. He said, it's clear to me now that every teacher God brought into my life was given to me by Providence. It provided a sense of clarity and wholeness for him. And so if the subject at 90 years of age says it, it gave him a sense that his life was no longer

11:32 - just a black box either. That there really was something very interesting about his life. And so, I think I would say two things. The answers that this book provides are connected to the formation in the first 20 years of his life and also his life with God. So the prayers in the book, he, he's written tremendous number of prayers that have gotten less

11:53 - Play than his theology. But I have said if the only thing we had left at Brigham and were his prayers, he'd still be on the front pages because prayers represent his theology and his life with God. So the book includes nine new prayers that he wrote for, for me at my request, which are just rich. And I think help us to understand who Walter Brigman really is.

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