‘Reading the Bible with Brueggemann’

LOUISVILLE — With his new book “Reading the Bible with Brueggemann: Scripture’s Power to Remake the World” now available in bookstores everywhere, Dr. Robert Williamson Jr., a student and friend of beloved scholar and author Dr. Walter Brueggemann, who died June 5, took to the “Reading Theologically” microphone recently to speak with the Rev. Bill Davis. Listen to their 35-minute conversation here.

Image

Williamson, who studied under Brueggemann at Columbia Theological Seminary, is the Margaret Berry Hutton Odyssey Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Davis is the senior director of Theological Education Funds Development for the Presbyterian Foundation.

“Part of writing this book was grappling with all the influences Walter has had on my life,” Williamson told Davis. “I had a vague sense of call, so I went to seminary to see what was up, but I had no idea who Walter was.”

Williamson said he was fascinated by the way Brueggemann would talk about the Bible “as giving us an alternative way of thinking about the world that challenges everything we do and how we think and live. Then I started taking every class I could with him.”

One day at the end of that first semester, Brueggemann invited Williamson to lunch and told his student he should go to graduate school and pursue a doctoral degree in the Old Testament. “I write in the acknowledgement that he opened up a whole world for me,” Williamson said. “The whole life I have led since 1997 was made possible by that one conversation that he took the time to have with me.”

“What I love about this book is you have taken thousands upon thousands of pages of Walter’s works and condensed them into bite-sized chunks for us,” Davis told Williamson.

Williamson said he chose nine of what he considered Brueggemann’s “seminal works, the pivot points in his career,” and looked at them carefully. Some titles, including “The Prophetic Imagination” and “Theology of the Old Testament,” were obvious picks, Williamson said.

One book that Williamson has “come to see as really important” is a little book Brueggemann wrote in 1993 called “Texts Under Negotiation.”

“It’s the book where he’s trying to make the pivot from historical critical scholarship to postmodern scholarship, what texts can mean regardless of where they’re placed in history,” Williamson said. “That becomes really important in his later work.”

Image

Davis, an artist and musician who dabbles in songwriting, said he loves “letting art speak on its own. In some ways, Dr. Brueggemann is inviting us to consider the text as art, to let it hold the meaning of itself.”

Indeed, Williamson said, the text “is artistically rendered.” For Brueggemann, “the biblical voices are artists who are creating something that has intentionality in its creation.” In addition, “each text speaks for itself. Walter would teach us that when you’re exegeting for a sermon, just imagine the text you have is the only text there is. You can’t check it. You just have to let it be and see what it says to you, and then you have to reintegrate it into the broader theology.”

“Every text needs to say what it’s got to say.”

In his book, Williamson says it’s in “The Prophetic Imagination” that Brueggemann establishes himself both as a scholar of the Old Testament and as a theologian of the church.

“It’s not a given when you are an academic biblical scholar that you should have anything to say to the church. We are trained in graduate school to talk amongst ourselves, and there’s real value in furthering our knowledge as scholars,” Williamson said. Brueggemann “did all the things” around biblical scholarship. “But at the end of the day, he felt that the way his work and our work has value is when it touches the ground among people of faith when they’re trying to live out the text in the world.”

“Early in his career, he was writing for pastors,” Williamson said. “Later in his career, he was writing for pastors and lay people.”

Williamson devotes part of his book to discussing the variety of the psalms, including Brueggemann’s categories of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

Brueggemann borrowed the idea from the French theorist Paul Ricoeur that human life moves in a cyclical pattern. Brueggemann taught that in the psalms that speak to orientation, “you feel that the world is structured and meaningful, simple and straightforward. It’s a little naïve, maybe the way you feel as a child.”

Then something happens to upend everything. Maybe someone close to us dies, or we get very sick or lose our job. “Things happen and the world crumbles, and you spend some time not knowing which way is up. That’s disorientation,” Williamson said.

Somewhere along the way, we find a new way to put the world back together. “It’s not the same world you had before. You’re not back to orientation. You are reoriented,” Williamson said. “You kind of live the same way and say the same kinds of things, but you know now that life can fall apart.”

For Brueggemann, orientation is the praise psalms, “the ones that say that God is great and the world is wonderful,” Williamson said. Examples are Psalm 145 and Psalm 104. Disorientation is the lament psalms, such as Psalm 13 and Psalm 86. Reorientation is thanksgiving psalms such as Psalm 30 and Psalm 40, “where often we look back at past suffering, past disorientation, and give thanks that we’re not there anymore,” Williamson said.

What’s interesting to Williamson is that Brueggemann argues that the psalms function “not just as a hymnal, although maybe it is that, but as a way of moving people of faith through these stages or accompanying them no matter what stage of life they are in,” Williamson said. “Even a psalm like 88 is like, ‘God, you are terrible, and you’ve made my life terrible.’”

“Even if that’s what you feel, there is a psalm that speaks to that,” Williamson said. “The psalms keep people engaged with the community of faith all the way through all these different ways of being. This is the way life is. This is the way our relationship with God is. We are always moving through these different stages of being.”

For Williamson, another valuable contribution by Brueggemann is his essay “The Costly Loss of Lament.”

“When we lament, we say to God, ‘you are not ruling the world correctly right now. My life is terrible and you need to step up.’ The lament psalm is a form in which God hears that and says, ‘yes, I hear you and I will respond to you.’ That is the essence of covenantal relationship.”

“We have a voice, God has a voice, and we’re working this thing out,” Williamson said. “Walter’s argument in that essay was if we can learn to do that with God, we can also do that with earthly rulers. If we can’t do that with God, we become subjects who are going to be trampled over by the whims of a dictator.”

“Reading Theologically” is produced by the Presbyterian Foundation and the Theological Education Fund.