By Trip Jennings
Walter Brueggemann died last week. You likely have never heard his name.
But to a small population of biblical scholars whom he influenced over half a century, his many seminary students and fans at church congregations around the country, Walter Brueggemann was the closest thing to a rock star in the esoteric world of biblical scholarship.
I met Brueggemann in a seminary classroom in the mid 1990s as one of his students. By then, his classic book Prophetic Imagination had been out for nearly 20 years and I had heard the stories about his classroom presence.
Wildly waving arms, impassioned speaking voice, the joke was, ‘Don’t sit in the front row during his lectures’; otherwise, the forecast called for a strong chance of a saliva shower, testament to the passion with which Brueggemann taught his subject matter.
Some of his students — my Presbyterian minister mom among them — compared his teaching style to what they imagined the ancient Hebrew prophets’ pedagogical tendencies were. Brilliant but slightly unhinged, passionate, loud, and ready to debate all comers. Thanks to a wooly beard and deep-set eyes, others swore he resembled the ancient troublemakers whom people like Martin Luther King Jr. and countless others have quoted for centuries as they sought to change entire societies.
There is no disputing Walter Brueggemann was charismatic and mesmerizing to watch in the classroom.
But it was his questions in the quarter century since I departed seminary that have lingered. One that has shaped me more as a person and as a journalist than almost any other is, “Who is my neighbor?”
It is a natural question for a seminary professor to ask, especially if your students are acquainted with Jesus’ response to the religious authorities of his day who put to him the question, ‘What is the greatest commandment’: Jesus responded, To honor and love God and to treat your neighbor as yourself. Jesus refused to separate one from the other, as if he were saying to love God, one must also love your neighbor.
But who exactly is that?
Brueggemann talked differently than many of my childhood pastors and Sunday School teachers about neighborliness. In his definition, all humans are kin to whom we were ethically obligated. The neighbor next door, and the neighbor halfway across the globe whom I’d never met. “Radical neighborliness,” he called it.
For a kid raised on individual salvation and an obsessive focus on a relationship with God to the detriment of our obligations to one another beyond our next-door neighbors, family, and friends, such a simple question has provoked a surprisingly rich, dense conversation with myself over the past 25 years, including in the journalism I like to pursue.
I suspect many people understand neighborliness as I understood it before seminary. Be polite and friendly. Easy peas-y. But that’s not what Brueggemann meant.
Jesuit priest ,Gregory Boyle, in Los Angeles talks about “radical kinship” the same way Brueggemann speaks of “radical neighborliness” when he tells the origin story of the nonprofit he founded in the 1980s, Homeboy Industries, to get gang members off the streets by giving them gainful employment.
“We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that they day will come when we stop throwing people away,” Boyle writes in his book, Tattoos on the Heart. “Kinship is what God presses us on to, always hopeful that its time has come.”
Father Boyle is Walter Brueggemann’s kind of guy.
Walter Brueggemann also helped to widen my understanding of the Hebrew prophets. Growing up in the Southern Baptist tradition, prophets were more often prophesiers of Jesus’ coming, always pointing to the future.
When Walter Brueggemann spoke of Jesus belonging to the Hebrew prophetic tradition, he reminded us that the tradition was full of town criers and busybodies that as frequently as not spoke truth to power, leading to quite a few being punished and murdered by ancient kings. In that way, I began to understand Jesus’ death in a different light than how I was taught as a child: Not merely as an act of self-sacrifice to save the world from sin but as an execution by a powerful empire, Rome, that feared sedition and disruption.
But angry denunciations weren’t the extent of the prophets’ message, Brueggemann repeatedly said in his lectures and in his books. They also were clarions of hope.
Perhaps it’s best to let Walter Brueggemann in his own words speak of their most potent weapon, as he did in Prophetic Imagination.
“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because 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 conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
Today, I am thankful for the life and legacy of Walter Brueggemann.
Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.
