Walter Brueggemann Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  110 Copy quote

• 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

  Interview with Micky Jones, medium.com.

  116 Copy quote

• 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

  107 Copy quote

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

  Walter Brueggemann

  Church, Imagine, Our Lives

  80 Copy quote

• 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 one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Anxiety, Withdrawal, Pharaohs

  Walter Brueggemann (2010). “Journey to the Common Good”, p.26, Westminster John Knox Press

  122 Copy quote

• 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, Yield, Self

  122 Copy quote

• 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

  116 Copy quote

• 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

  "Ignore the Young, Forget the Old" by Tavis Smiley, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 10, 2012.

  119 Copy quote

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

  Walter Brueggemann

  Fiction, Empires, Judged

  111 Copy quote

• 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, Phrases, Stories

  117 Copy quote

• 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

  68 Copy quote

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

  Walter Brueggemann

  Silence, Doe, Needs

  61 Copy quote

• Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Anxiety, Competition, Doe

  81 Copy quote

• Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Sabbath, Pauses

  Walter Brueggemann (2014). “Sabbath as Resistance”, p.45, Westminster John Knox Press

  59 Copy quote

• 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

  68 Copy quote

• 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, Faith, Peace

  64 Copy quote

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

  Walter Brueggemann

  Live By, Possessed

  57 Copy quote

• 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, Doe, Alternatives

  Walter Brueggemann (2010). “The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word”, p.26, Fortress Press

  65 Copy quote

• 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

  59 Copy quote

• God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Order, Gods Will, Casts

  43 Copy quote

• 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

  36 Copy quote

• Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Scarcity, Anxious, Neighborhood

  Walter Brueggemann (2010). “Journey to the Common Good”, p.35, Westminster John Knox Press

  48 Copy quote

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

  Walter Brueggemann

  Agents, Want, Available

  12 Copy quote

• Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Celebration, Celebration Of Life, Sabbath

  Walter Brueggemann (2011). “Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Deuteronomy”, p.69, Abingdon Press

  38 Copy quote

• Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age

  Walter Brueggemann

  Doubt, Age, Tense

  30 Copy quote

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