by Doug Bennett, In remembrance and appreciation of Walter Brueggemann (1933-2025)

Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, July 6, 2025

Today I want to talk about Walter Brueggemann, a theologian, and not a Quaker.  He was born in 1933, ordained in the United Church of Christ, and spent his long life teaching and writing, first at one seminary then another.   He died just about a month ago.  That’s a large part of why he’s on my mind. 

Or maybe it’s better to say I want to speak of an idea of his that is important to me, the idea of The ‘prophetic Imagination’.  That is the title of Walter Brueggemann’s most famous book.  The Prophetic Imagination;  it was first published in 1978. 

For me, Brueggemann is important because we are at a particularly difficult time in the United States today.  Brueggemann helps me see how best to understand and to act in the face of such difficult times.  It is all too easy to get swept up into the politics of the moment.  There’s a great deal that seems wrong:  with democracy, with the rule of law, with honesty and integrity, with Russia and Iran, with immigration, with climate change, with medical care, with taxes.  Whichever side you are on in these disputes, there is a huge political agenda in front of us.  It can seem like our pursuing that political agenda is entirely consistent with our religious beliefs.  The two seem to merge.  Brueggemann would have us see things differently. 

What does Brueggemann mean by this : The Prophetic Imagination?  He means a kind of understanding that is an inheritance of ours, through the Bible, from a faith community of many, many generations, and leaders and prophets.  It’s a way of knowing what we are called to do.  Brueggemann thinks this perspective, this prophetic imagination, is an essential richness of the Bible.  Our embracing the prophetic imagination is the door to fully joining with that faith community.  And it’s more than understanding:  going through that door requires us to act. 

Brueggemann’s starting point is the assertion that the faith community of today has lost its way as it so often has done before.  He thinks we have lost our way by embracing the culture around us.  When he wrote the book in 1978, he described that culture around us as “consumerist.” I think that word is familiar enough among us that I don’t need to try to explain it.  Still, I might use different words to describe the culture around us today:  militaristic, individualistic, pleasure-centered, wasteful, short-sighted – these words also come to mind.  You might substitute even others.  (Brueggeman sometimes spoke of the dominant culture as a ‘royal consciousness’.)  We’re lost by becoming lost in that culture. 

Brueggemann would have us act in response to all that is wrong around us.  The key is to stop embracing that culture around us.  In being Christians, good Christians, or just good people, he would have us stand outside that culture.  He would have us take our bearings not from being part of that culture but from some better, some healthier understanding. 

“The task of prophetic ministry,” he says, “is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” (p3)  Our bearings come from an understanding alternative to the dominant culture. 

He argues that stepping outside that dominant culture is more important than any particular cause – more important than working for fair elections or justice for migrants or mitigation of climate change.  So he adds:

“Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated” (emphasis added).

It is the “alternative vocation” that is important to him.  That is prophetic ministry, and it requires a prophetic imagination.  An alternative vocation asks us to take a stance outside the dominant culture. 

Brueggemann would have us find a life stance from the Bible – but from the Bible seen in a certain way.  Brueggemann is important to me because he helped me see how to read and use the Bible.  For me, it’s not history, it’s not timeless rules for conduct, it’s not prediction of the future.  It’s a reflection on the challenges of human beings trying to understand God and of what being faithful looks like. 

Brueggemann would have us find our bearings from the ways of seeing and acting that were developed by the Old Testament prophets, from Moses forward.  The New York Times obituary of Brueggemann says , quoting Conrad Kanagy, his biographer, that “a passage in the Book of Jeremiah had a particular impact on Dr. Brueggemann because it connected knowledge of God directly to service for the poor.”  God says: ‘To care for the poor and the needy, is this not to know me?’ according to Jeremiah.  Understanding these words “was a crystallizing moment for [Brueggemann], as he recognized that the text did not say, if one has knowledge of God, then they will care for the poor,” Dr. Kanagy wrote. “Or that if one cares for the poor, they will get knowledge of God. Rather, it simply declares that ‘the care of the poor is knowledge of God.’”  [Conrad Kanagy, Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography (2023)]

In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann pays particular attention to Moses, but also prophets like Jeremiah and Samuel and Micah — and yes, Jesus, too.  Brueggemann knows Jesus is more than a prophet, but he thinks we will see Jesus more clearly if we place him in this tradition – the tradition of the prophetic imagination. 

So what does this way of seeing and acting look like? 

Well what does Moses see and do?  He sees his people, the Jews, in captivity in Egypt.  They know this captivity isn’t right, but Moses sees them becoming resigned to this captivity.  Egypt is becoming their home.  They are settling in, even coming to worship Egyptian Gods and falling away from YHWH.

So, Brueggemann reminds us, Moses becomes a critic of this captive life.  He is anguished more than he is angry and what he sees his people doing.  He is troubled but also compassionate.  And he becomes more than just a critic.  He imagines something better for the Israelites:  escape, migration, even a Promised Land.  He leads his people out of Egypt.  It turns out to be a long, hard journey, but over years he keeps alive a better hope.  He acts to bring about that better future.  Along the way, he helps his people see God more clearly, the real God, not the gods worshipped by the Egyptians.  He helps them understand being faithful. 

Skipping over other prophets, we can see Jesus in just the same way, and Brueggemann thinks we should.  He sees Jesus as a critic of the culture around him.  And this Jesus imagines something better.  That something better takes even the disciples by surprise in the end, however.  Jesus seems to them like a compelling reformer, perhaps even someone who will lead a movement against the Romans.  Instead Jesus imagines and leads us toward something much more audacious:  not just a victory over the rule-bound Pharisees and Sadducees, not just a victory over the Romans, but a victory over death itself.  Along the way, Jesus helps people everywhere see God more clearly.  And see what faithfulness looks like. 

Criticism and an imagined, better future.  Those are the two parts of the prophetic imagination.  They have to go together.  Criticism without that imagined better future isn’t of much use.  An imagined better future not grounded in accurate criticism also isn’t of much use. 

We need both.  That’s seems simple, doable.  But Brueggemann tells us something else.  In the culture that surrounds us, there are always critics and always people, organizations, movements, parties engaging in criticism and pointing to a way forward.  If we simply follow these parties and organizations and movements, we may find ourselves even more deeply enmeshed in the unhealthy dominant culture.  We need to follow the right prophets, the real prophets, the prophets that are attuned to God.  We need to be careful not to follow the world’s, the culture’s self-described prophets.  We need to grow in our understanding of God and become yet more faithful to where God would lead us. 

In troubled times we will often encounter movements that share this or that piece of our criticism.  They may object to this war.  They may want to reform this policy or that practice.   Immigration or racial justice or gun control or climate change or gender identity or hunger may be their causes, just like these issues are part of our cause – our criticism and our imagined future.  Even so, the road of these social and political movements is not likely to be our road.  Those movements, those parties are not our prophets.  We need to follow prophets who honestly, faithfully and courageously listen to God.  We need to follow prophets who find their leadings in what God is saying to them.  Both Moses and Jesus (and the other prophets) seek justice, but they act with compassion and they support those on the margins. 

Brueggemann was not a Quaker, and I don’t mean to present him as a closet Quaker.  But his conception of a prophetic imagination is very much aligned with what I see Quakers doing when we are at our very best.  His conception of a prophetic imagination is very much aligned with what I see Durham Friends Meeting doing when we are at our very best. 

“Critical” and “energizing”  are key terms for prophetic ministry.  They need to go hand in hand. 

Any given day, any given week, members of this Meeting are engaged in criticism and engaged, too, in energizing work towards a better imagined future.  Immigration, racial justice, gun control, climate change, gender identity, hunger: these may be what one or another of us is working on.  In this work, we may find allies for this action or that protest in this or that organization or this or that political party. 

Nevertheless, we are called to see things more deeply, and to work towards a transformation that is yet more fundamental.  At our best, we are not just interested in social and political change.  Just aiming for social and political change risks staying within the framework of the dominant culture.  As Bruggemann says,

“Social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions” (p8).

Courage and good intentions are not enough.  We are called to go deeper and farther.  Our taproot, our nourishment, lies in faithfulness. 

I’ll just end with this passage from Brueggemann:

We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought … the imagination must come before the implementation.”

Also posted on River View Friend