Top 100 Walter Brueggemann Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.”

— Walter Brueggemann

52. “Since we now live in a society – and a world – that is fitfully drifting toward fascism, the breaking of silence is altogether urgent. In the institutional life of the church, moreover, the breaking of silence by the testimony of the gospel often means breaking the silence among those who have a determined stake in maintaining the status quo.”

— Walter Brueggemann

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Breaking the silence” is always counterdiscourse that tends to arise from the margins of society, a counter to present power arrangements and to dominant modes of social imagination.”

— Walter Brueggemann

56. “Hans Walter Wolff has suggested that the Sabbath is the great equalizer, for that day is a foretaste of the kingdom when all-great and small-are reckoned to be exactly equal .2′ All-masters and slaves-are to engage in this most godlike activity of being at peace.”

— Walter Brueggemann

57. “There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are “speeched” to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, “finally comes the poet”-finally.”

— Walter Brueggemann

58. “Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know.”

— Walter Brueggemann

59. “The crowd, in its uncritical political engagement, is not always discerning about new possibility that comes with risk and often votes in fear for the status quo.”

— Walter Brueggemann

60. “In his great act of humility and washing, he broke with all the models of humanity that are visible in our own time and place: the rat race of productivity, the fear for survival, the frenzy of accumulation, and the deathly sense of self-sufficiency.”

— Walter Brueggemann

61. “It is no obvious or “natural” matter to resituate our lives with reference to the holy power and purpose of God. But that is what we do in prayer.”

— Walter Brueggemann

62. “In that world where jingles replace doxology, God is not free and the people know no justice or compassion.”

— Walter Brueggemann

63. “It is the silence-breaking cry that begins the process that turns pain into joy.”

— Walter Brueggemann

64. “The most remarkable observation one can make about this interface of exilic circumstance and scriptural resource is this: Exile did not lead Jews in the Old Testament to abandon faith or to settle for abdicating despair, nor to retreat to privatistic religion. On the contrary, exile evoked the most brilliant literature and the most daring theological articulation in the Old Testament.”

— Walter Brueggemann

65. “Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:.”

— Walter Brueggemann

66. “When we suffer from amnesia, every form of serious authority for faith is in question, and we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice unauthorized ministries.”

— Walter Brueggemann

67. “I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”

— Walter Brueggemann

68. “The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity.”

— Walter Brueggemann

69. “The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.”

— Walter Brueggemann

70. “We have nearly lost our capacity to think ihcologicafly about public issues and public problems.”

— Walter Brueggemann

71. “The story of the Syro-Phoenician makes women’s contribution to one of the most crucial traditions in early Christian beginnings historically available. Through such an analysis, the Syro-Phoenician can become visible again as one of the apostolic foremothers of Gentile Christians. By moving her into the center of the debate about the mission to the Gentiles, the historical centrality of Paul in this debate becomes relativized.”

— Walter Brueggemann

72. “The outcome is to delegitimize and deconstruct the kings in effective ways in order to show that while they occupy the forms of power, they lack the substance of power.”

— Walter Brueggemann

73. “Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.”

— Walter Brueggemann

74. “Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon.”

— Walter Brueggemann

75. “As we go to the places where we are called by God – sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, always in anxiety – we are drawn into the newness of God’s future.”

— Walter Brueggemann

76. “The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh. 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

77. “But this is real prayer, down and dirty. It is not nice church prayer that refuses to ask anything because we mostly do not believe that prayers are heard or answered.”

— Walter Brueggemann

78. “To be “defiled” by empire is to be robbed of a distinct identity that permits freedom against dominant culture. “Fasting” as alert abstention may be the order of the day that will make the asking of prayers more serious and compelling.”

— Walter Brueggemann

79. “The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.”

— Walter Brueggemann

80. “As the church in reform draws closer to its core confession, it inescapably embraces its most radical vision that violates and contradicts conventional practice in its social context. What makes such reform difficult, moreover, is the fact that while we ponder the radical core claims of faith, we ourselves are variously enmeshed in conventional practices that are inimical to the gospel.”

— Walter Brueggemann

81. “Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology. Abraham.”

— Walter Brueggemann

82. “Silence and tacit consensus always, without fail, protect privilege. That is why the privileged are characteristically silencers.”

— Walter Brueggemann

83. “Gathering God, draw us out beyond our cramped circles of care. Draw us toward the neighbor, the other, the outsider, the hurting one. May we practice compassion. Amen.”

— Walter Brueggemann

84. “It is too embarrassing to name and own one’s deep failings; as long as they are unvoiced, we may be allowed to pretend it is not so.”

— Walter Brueggemann

85. “The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation.”

— Walter Brueggemann

86. “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.”

— Walter Brueggemann

87. “Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go.”

— Walter Brueggemann

88. “As a result, legitimate indignation is regularly siphoned away from speech with God to be acted out in other, perhaps more destructive ways. Such speech of rage addressed to YHWH is credible only when the worshiping community has confidence that the covenant God addressed is both willing and able to intervene in contexts of unbearable suffering.”

— Walter Brueggemann

89. “Cynicism always comes clothed in “realism”. The alternatives to begin with an act of imagination. Can we imagine another way?”

— Walter Brueggemann

90. “The conclusion affirmed by the narrative is that wherever YHWH governs as an alternative to Pharaoh, there the restfulness of YHWH effectively counters the restless anxiety of Pharaoh.”

— Walter Brueggemann

91. “The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.”

— Walter Brueggemann

92. “Reeducation comes from voices that dissent from the unexamined comfort zone, from those who abrasively shock our comfort zones with voices from outside that violate the consensus that has been silently accepted.”

— Walter Brueggemann

93. “Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.”

— Walter Brueggemann

94. “The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.”

— Walter Brueggemann

95. “The world does not need the church to talk about what is already possible. The work of the church is to battle the world’s definition of what is believable and unbelievable.”

— Walter Brueggemann

96. “One Way to think of the market ideology and the empire is that it produces alienation and loss of human vitality. The culture flows from the assumption that the accumulation of commodities will make us safe and happy.”

— Walter Brueggemann

97. “The old pattern of silencing served old-time religion, and old-time religion is in the service of old-time politics of domination and old-time economics of privilege. Strict constructionism and originalism are always in the service of old-time religion, old-time economics, and old-time politics. The breaking of that silence for women and for many others depends on Re-imagining, More Light, and Still Speaking. It turns out that these emergent new readings place everything “old time” in jeopardy.”

— Walter Brueggemann

98. “No establishment figure wants to tolerate affrontive poetry that exposes the failure of the totalizing system and claims it contradicts God’s will.”

— Walter Brueggemann

99. “Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.”

— Walter Brueggemann

100. “The burden of what Jesus says is this: give it away. Give it away gladly. Make friends by your generosity. The door to a gospel future is by generosity, outrageous, intentional giving away in the present to create a viable future. That seems to me such an urgent word, because we are so deeply caught in cycles of greed and affluence and self-indulgence and acquisitiveness of a fearful kind that will yield no human future.”

— Walter Brueggemann