A glad footnote

I first noticed it in personal correspondence. It seemed quaint, maybe even a tad archaic. But the word recurred in all the letters, and often many times in each correspondence.

There it was in his last letter to me. “I am glad you have reissued [Beyond Homelessness] again.” “I have been so glad to reread it.” “I am very glad for our long relationship.”

Glad. Walter Brueggemann was glad.

Glad in an act of scholarly neighbourliness.
Glad in proclaiming the good news.
Glad in a discipleship of obedience.
Glad in worship that liberates.
Glad in a scripture that subverts.
Glad in the face of despair.
Glad in a culture of self-serving anger.

And I am glad for Walter Brueggemann.

Check out the author index in any of my books. No one is cited more than Walter. It could be said that everything I have written since 1990 has been an extended footnote to Walter Brueggemann.

A glad footnote.

And it all begins with imagination.

Walter observed that,

“the key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are all too numbed, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work.”

The crisis of the church, the crisis of biblical scholarship and theology, indeed, the crisis that has always been at the heart of biblical faith “under the shadow of empire,” is the captivity of our imaginations.

Idolatry trades the call for humans to be image-bearers of the Creator for a call to be graven images that reduce us to slaves of the empire, rather than subjects of the kingdom. And so a reformational “worldview” meets a prophetic imagination, and the antithesis of truth and lies becomes a matter of contested imaginations.

Created in the image of God, all of human life, and all human culture, economy, politics, is generated by imagination. The question is, which imagination? Whose imagination? What set of images, metaphors and stories? And here, Brueggemann discerns conflicted imagination within the text itself.

Exodus liberation is transposed to a settled monarchy.
Torah meets royal decree.
Tabernacle becomes Temple.
Covenant is reduced to exceptionalism.
Faithfulness gives way to deceit.
Justice devolves into oppression.
Generosity is supplanted by affluence.

The shadow of empire is long and deep, and those liberated from Egypt begin to look like Egypt all over again.

And so my “redemptive historical” interpretive lens meets a text that bears witness to,
and sometimes manifests, conflicting trajectories.

Always asking the question of what texts actually do, and how texts shape a social world, Walter perceived the kind of tensions that one would expect of a living text, a text written over millennia, from various social and historical locations.

Make no mistake, there are integrating and cohesive themes such as land, covenant, Torah, and … suffering.

Yes, suffering.

There is the point of contention. Whose voice is given priority? Where do the integrating themes converge? What is the test of covenantal faithfulness?

Is the voice of suffering given priority or silenced?
Can the cry of pain break through the royal ideology?
Can the status quo be subverted by lament?
How are the poor treated?
Is there radical hospitality for the stranger?
Is there a jubilee economics of return?
Is there room for all to be at home in the land,
or are some rendered homeless?

And here was another moment of Brueggemannian illumination.

It is all about home.
From the creation story
to the call of Abraham;
from the homelessness of Egypt
to an exodus homeward;
from the gift of home in the land
to the home-breaking dynamics of empire;
from the homelessness of exile
to the promise of homecoming;
it has always been all about home,
there are always cadences of home,
and covenant loyalty is always a practice of homefulness.

And so Walter argues that “the entire life history of the community of faith is a struggle to be a housebuilding, home-making enterprise in a world endlessly productive of homelessness.” The whole story is marked by the gift of home, the production of homelessness through greed, and the radical promise of homecoming.

Home, homeless, homecoming.
Placed, displaced, restoration of place.
Garden, exile, new creation.

Kind of sounds like
creation, fall, redemption.

Or, for that matter,
orientation, disorientation, reorientation.

Herein we meet the seasons of life, the dynamics of spirituality, the path of discipleship, the shape of prayer. It is all a dance–sometimes beautiful, often torturous between a settled worldview, moments of deconstruction, and glimpses of redemption:

from strong foundations,
to a shaking of all things,
to a New Jerusalem,

from confident praise,
to abrasive lament,
to singing a new song.

If we didn’t discover Brueggemann at a moment of disorientation, then he just might have occasioned such a moment in our lives.

Really, without disorientation, without those moments of doubt, of despair, of grief, of confusion, we would be stuck in a secure orthodoxy with no room to grow, or, for that matter, any resonance with a world of sorrow.

And that is really what this is all about.

Resonance.

There is no need for cheap moralisms, or quick “applications” of the biblical text when we read with Walter, because the text itself resonates with our lives. The text, forged in the shadow of empire, will always have liberating overtones in each new imperial moment. The text, so attentive to suffering, will always speak into the specificity of contemporary personal and geo-political suffering.The text that tells a story of homecoming will always address a time of economic, ecological and cultural homelessness.

For Brueggemann, scripture is a generative word, a “world-making” word, a word that sets us free to imagine a world in which God’s restorative presence is embodied, where righteousness is at home.

I am glad that God gave us Walter to open up such a world, such a home.

I am glad to have had my own discipleship deepened by Walter’s vision.

I am glad to have known the generosity and humility of Walter.

And I am glad to offer this footnote in his honour.