Top 100 Walter Brueggemann Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.”

— Walter Brueggemann

3. “Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.”

— Walter Brueggemann

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

— Walter Brueggemann

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.”

— Walter Brueggemann

9. “Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.”

— Walter Brueggemann

10. “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

11. “We live our lives before the wild, dangerous, unfettered and free character of the living God.”

— Walter Brueggemann

12. “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

13. “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

14. “We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.”

— Walter Brueggemann

15. “Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.”

— Walter Brueggemann

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Lent is rather seeing how to take steps into God’s future so that we are no longer defined by what is past and no longer distracted by what we have treasured or feared about the present. Lent is for embracing the baby given to old people; resurrection to new life in Easter; and the offer of a new world made by God from nothing.”

— Walter Brueggemann

19. “Intercession, that is, intrusion into the courts of power on behalf of another, is central to the church’s action in prayer.”

— Walter Brueggemann

20. “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.”

— Walter Brueggemann

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.”

— Walter Brueggemann

24. “Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion and justice cannot be faithful worship of YHWH. The offer is a phony Sabbath!”

— Walter Brueggemann

25. “Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So.”

— Walter Brueggemann

26. “But Sabbath is not only resistance. It is alternative. It is an alternative to the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising and its great liturgical claim of professional sports that devour all our “rest time.”

— Walter Brueggemann

27. “Sabbath becomes a decisive, concrete, visible way of opting for and aligning with the God of rest.”

— Walter Brueggemann

28. “God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.”

— Walter Brueggemann

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

— Walter Brueggemann

30. “Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms. Whereas Israelites are always tempted to acquisitiveness, Sabbath is an invitation to receptivity, an acknowledgment that what is needed is given and need not be seized.”

— Walter Brueggemann

31. “In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”

— Walter Brueggemann

32. “Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.”

— Walter Brueggemann

33. “When we live according to our fears and our hates, our lives become small and defensive, lacking the deep, joyous generosity of God. If you find some part of your life where your daily round has grown thin and controlling and resentful, life with God is much, much larger, shattering our little categories of control, permitting us to say that God’s purposes led us well beyond ourselves to live and to forgive, to create life we would not have imagined.”

— Walter Brueggemann

34. “In both his teaching and his very presence, Jesus of Nazareth presented the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness. He has, in fact, dismantled the dominant culture and nullified its claims. The way of his ultimate criticism is his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity. The only solidarity worth affirming is solidarity characterized by the same helplessness they know and experience.”

— Walter Brueggemann

35. “To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ.”

— Walter Brueggemann

36. “If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life.”

— Walter Brueggemann

37. “The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence; the outcome is a “colonized imagination” that is drained of dangerous hope.”

— Walter Brueggemann

38. “There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal.”

— Walter Brueggemann

39. “Sabbath is the practice of letting life rest safely in God’s hand.41.”

— Walter Brueggemann

40. “In my judgment, the church in the United States must now face hard decisions such as we have not faced for a long time. We have indeed bought in as individual persons, even as a church, on consumerism, aimed at self-indulgence, comfort, security, and safety. We live our lives out of our affluence, and we discover that all our self-indulgence makes us satiated but neither happy nor safe.”

— Walter Brueggemann

41. “Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.”

— Walter Brueggemann

42. “Faith is both the conviction that justice can be accomplished and the refusal to accept injustice.”

— Walter Brueggemann

43. “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

44. “As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent.”

— Walter Brueggemann

45. “It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, “faith” has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into “belief,” which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy – which guards cognitive formulations – that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.”

— Walter Brueggemann

46. “There will be no peace without a lowering of consumerism to match the banishment of arms. For the arms serve primarily either to usurp what belongs to others or to guarantee an arrangement already inequitable. The arms cannot be given up without abandoning swollen appetites as well.”

— Walter Brueggemann

47. “Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.”

— Walter Brueggemann

48. “The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production and so dispatched, as we used to say, as “hands” in the service of a command economy. Rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. All of that is implicit in the reality and exhibit of divine rest.”

— Walter Brueggemann

49. “The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. “Pharaoh” reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.”

— Walter Brueggemann

50. “The dominant ideology of our culture is committed to continuity and success and to the avoidance of pain, hurt, and loss. The dominant culture is also resistant to genuine newness and real surprise. It is curious but true, that surprise is as unwelcome as is loss. And our culture is organized to prevent the experience of both.”

— Walter Brueggemann