An On-Going Imagination

A Conversation about Scripture, Faith, and the Thickness of Relationship

Walter Brueggemann, Clover Reuter Beal, Timothy Beal, Timothy Beal

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781611649413
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has always excelled at making the Bible approachable and engaging. Drawn from a series of public conversations with Brueggemann and his former student and longtime friend Clover Reuter Beal, An On-Going Imagination explores Brueggemann's most influential biblical-theological concepts and methods: Why should we still bother with the Bible today? What is the purpose of prayer, and what can it do for our lives? How is keeping the Sabbath countercultural? What does it mean to say that the God in the Bible is "a God in recovery"?

Intimate, provocative, and challenging, An On-Going Imagination offers an enlightening introduction to Brueggemann's work for readers who want to learn more and a way back into the Bible for people who feel alienated from it by those on the right and the left who claim to have it all figured out. Brueggemann and Beal reawaken us to the fascinating strangeness of biblical tradition and its incredible power to help us imagine new ways of seeing and being in the world.

A NICE PROVIDENTIAL TRAJECTORY

Education

CRB: So you started at Elmhurst College just west of Chicago in 1951. What did you study there?

WB: My major was sociology, but I went to college as what we called in those days a “pre-the,” or pre-theological student. Elmhurst College had a hoard of pre-the students in those days. It was the college of our denomination (United Church of Christ, or UCC) in the Midwest, so that’s where we all went.

CRB: I would have guessed that you were an English major in college, given your very literary approach to biblical texts.

WB: I would have been an English major, but I was a coward. The English teachers at my school were the hardest. I didn’t think I could do that. So I didn’t take many English courses. I should have. My brother was a year ahead of me, and he majored in sociology, so I just kind of followed along. And then I followed him along to seminary as well.

CRB: Did you have any particular mentors in college?

WB: I had two really important college teachers. One was my sociology professor. Elmhurst was a small school, and the department of sociology was a one-man department. This guy had a passion for justice, but he was a very old line teacher. He lectured from old yellow notes, and your work on the exam was to give back things in the order that he had given them to you. That is a way I learned. Now that my son John is a professor of sociology, we talk about all that. As I recall, a great deal of what he was giving us is the same stuff that John operates with, except that Karl Marx was not on my professor’s screen. So he was important; he really shaped me. I never had any kind of personal relationship with him. I think I talked to him once. But I took eight classes from him.

CRB: Really? You didn’t talk with him outside of class, even in a small school like that?

WB: He didn’t talk to you. You could have tried to talk to him, but why would you do that? He was probably in his sixties. This was the 1950s, and he still drove a Model-T Ford. He was a real curmudgeon.

CRB: And who was your other influential professor?

WB: My other major influence was a guy that had come from Germany forty years earlier, and managed to retain a heavy German accent. So I learned Greek from him with a heavy German accent. Years later, when I was a faculty member at Eden, I served on the Admissions Committee. This same professor would write letters of reference for every Elmhurst student that applied to Eden, and the letter always said something like, “This is a not very bright and not very diligent student who doesn’t have much focus in his life. I heartily recommend him for admission.” So those were my two main college teachers.

CRB: I can’t imagine he wrote that about you when you applied! At any rate, you were accepted and went on to Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis in 1955. Was that the pipeline—Elmhurst to Eden?

WB: Yes, everybody went to Eden after Elmhurst. The quip in my church was the “three Es”—Elmhurst, Eden, and Eternity. Thirty of my classmates from Elmhurst went to Eden. This was not good at all because if you got messed up relationally at college then you just carried that on into seminary.

CRB: Were there any women in the program?

WB: Not in those days, no.

CRB: Your brother Ed also went to Eden, right?

WB: Yes, yes.

CRB: But he didn’t go on to graduate school? He was a pastor.

WB: No, my brother did not go to graduate school. Yes, he was a pastor and for many years a bishop-type in the UCC, a very effective leader. He was somewhat averse to books. He had always been a year ahead of me, but then he took a year-long internship after his junior year. So we were seniors together at Elmhurst. I remember we were both in a course on Paul’s letter to the Romans, which was the lynchpin of the pre-the curriculum there. What some class members, including Ed, did not know was that if the teacher planned to call on you in class to read and translate from the Greek, he would forewarn you so you could prepare. When the teacher said, “Mr. Brueggemann, would you read the next verse?” I knew he was calling on me, but my brother panicked because he thought he was calling on him, and he wasn’t prepared.

CRB: Did you have mentors at Eden?

WB: My main teacher, the one who propelled me to graduate school, was Lionel A. Whiston Jr. He himself published very little, but he was teaching me just as the German Old Testament theologian Gerhard von Rad was being translated into English. And it was really von Rad that was generating my excitement. I had never heard of graduate school. I didn’t know anyone went to graduate school. That had never crossed my mind. I guess it was during my middler (second) year at Eden that Whiston started prepping me. My other primary teacher there was a very dynamic systematic theologian who just taught very liberal Reformed theology. He read the entire tradition through the lens of covenant. That was not only a faithful Reformed idea, but it was very hot at the time in ecumenical circles.

CRB: What do you think Professor Whiston saw in you? What made him want to start prepping you for graduate school?

WB: Oh, I don’t know. I guess that he saw that I was a disciplined student, and that I did Hebrew as best I could do Hebrew. At one point, I almost dropped Hebrew. I just couldn’t figure it out. But then one day I sort of got the gestalt of it. So that was Whiston’s doing.

CRB: So he taught you biblical Hebrew at Eden. Did you have another Old Testament professor there?

WB: My first Old Testament teacher at Eden was Allan Wehrli.

CRB: The name is familiar, because you gave my husband, Tim, Dr. Wehrli’s personal copy of Hermann Gunkel’s famous book, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and chaos in origin times and end times). Wehrli’s name is inscribed in it from when he was a student in Gunkel’s class in Germany.

WB: That’s right. He’s the only person I know who studied with both Hermann Gunkel and William F. Albright. I think with Albright late in his life, and with Gunkel when he was really defining his form-critical approach to biblical traditions. When I took Professor Wehrli’s three-term-long introduction to the Old Testament, the whole first term was focused on the Gattungen, or “genres,” that Gunkel had identified. That’s all we did for a whole term. It was a perfect outline of Gunkel. Professor Wehrli also taught me Hebrew grammar, but he wasn’t personally formative for me. I think he published one little book.

Allan Wehrli had a son, Eugene Wehrli, who was a New Testament scholar. He had been my advisor at Elmhurst. Then, before my senior year at Elmhurst, he joined the faculty at Eden. Later, when I was a faculty member at Eden, Eugene was my colleague. We were there together for many years. After I left, he became president of the seminary and served for seven years. He also published very little. Publishing just wasn’t in the air. Nobody cared.

CRB: And why Union Theological Seminary for doctoral work? Why did you choose that school?

WB: Whiston picked Union for me. I had never heard of Union or anyplace else. He said, “You go to Union.” And it was providential, because if I had gone anywhere where the focus was on Israelite and Judean history and archaeology, I probably would not have stayed. But James Muilenburg was at Union, and he was doing biblical-rhetorical criticism, which was a more literary approach, and that worked out perfectly for me. So that whole sequence from studying sociology in college, to Hebrew in seminary, to rhetorical work with Muilenburg at Union was a nice providential trajectory.

CRB: After your adult education class at church this morning, a woman told me she felt like she was just beginning to understand how central social and economic justice are to the gospel and to our work as the church. “I’m sixty-eight,” she told me, “and I’m only just starting to get this!” She asked me if you have always “gotten it” or if it has come to you over time. Have you always “gotten it”? Or were there key moments or key influences in your journey that illuminated your convictions about God’s justice and this alternative world that we confess or need to give witness to? What has been the trajectory for you?

WB: I was a college sophomore, I think, or maybe even a junior, and I didn’t know anything. And somehow I found out about Reinhold Niebuhr. I’d never heard of him before, but I checked out his book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). I can still remember where I was sitting when I read it. I was so shocked that I read it again.

CRB: Say more about that. I think a lot of readers will know a little something about Niebuhr—that he was a prominent public intellectual, and perhaps also that he has influenced political leaders like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as they have struggled to promote social justice within the practical realities of politics and compromise. Some might also be familiar with the idea of systemic evil, that is, the structural nature of social injustice, which means that individuals are shaped by the unjust systems they inhabit more than vice versa. But what really blew you away about that book and made you go back and read it again?

WB: In Moral Man and Immoral Society Niebuhr argued that in one-on-one relationships we are moral people, but when it comes to public conduct we are characteristically immoral people because of the reality of power in all of our relationships. That was a whole new idea to me. An ex-pacifist writing in the years before the rise of Nazi fascism, Niebuhr was a severe critic of the individual idealism that drove much of liberal thought. I suppose I was the kind of liberal to whom he addressed the book. It awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers, as Kant would have put it. So my discovery of Niebuhr was important and on-going.

Then in his great Gifford Lectures in the late 1930s, eventually published in two volumes as The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943), Niebuhr spent a lot of time trying to puncture American arrogance and the sense of being God’s “special chosen people” and all that. He articulated what he came to call “Christian realism.” The Christian part is that he believed the Gospel, and the realism part is that he took more seriously the reality of power in the world.

Niebuhr really was a household name at Eden when I was a student there. All my teachers were good friends with him. Like me, he had gone to college at Elmhurst and then to seminary at Eden. He was the chairman of Eden’s Board of Trustees for twenty-five years while teaching theology at Union in New York. The lore is that Samuel Press, who was Eden’s president at the time, would take the train to New York twice a year and sort of get the guidance he needed from Niebuhr about running a seminary.

Reinhold’s younger brother, H. Richard Niebuhr, was also very connected to Eden. He too had gone to Elmhurst and then Eden. After graduate school at Yale Divinity School, he returned to teach at Eden. He was also president of Elmhurst College from 1924 to 1927 before going on to teach at Yale.

I don’t know whether I’ve told you that I just got the Niebuhr Medal from Elmhurst College last year. I was the first alum to get it. You know, it’s not a big deal, but it’s a nice deal.

An ex-pacifist writing in the years before the rise of Nazi fascism, Niebuhr was a severe critic of the individual idealism that drove much of liberal thought. I suppose I was the kind of liberal to whom he addressed the book. It awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers, as Kant would have put it.

CRB: That’s wonderful.

WB: And I’m increasingly aware of how Niebuhrian I am. On the other hand, I recently reread The Nature and Destiny of Man, and he doesn’t know what to do with biblical text. The only text that I noticed that he cited a number of times is a text from Isaiah about the haughtiness of battle, which he translates as the haughtiness of the United States.

CRB: In terms of you finding your own voice as a teacher, public speaker, and writer, do you remember aha moments, light bulb moments of, “Oh, this is what I need to be doing”?

WB: Yes, but more so in my later years. Before that, earlier in my career as a professor, I just thought it was part of my job. I was very sat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Timothy Beal
• Preface by Walter Brueggemann
• Preface by Clover Reuter Beal
• Party Lines and Church Camps: Early Influences
• A Nice Providential Trajectory: Education
• Luck and Happenstance: Gaining Notoriety
• A Good-Enough God: Personal-Theological Work
• Multilayered and Conflicted: The Bible Makes Different Sense
• Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? What to Call It
• Alternative Literalism: Losing Our Bible Baggage
• Not What It Means but How It Works: Bible as Rhetoric
• Resisting Final Solutions: Bible Study
• Doxological Imagination: Creation, Science, and Truth
• Critical Is Not Enough: Getting to Postcritical
• This Particular Manifestation of Holiness: What Makes the Bible So Special?
• Disjunctive, Contradictory, Hyperbolic, Ironic: Recovering Jewish Modes of Interpretation
• What Kind of World Do You Want? Acts of Imagination
• In, With, and Under: The God of the Text
• Divine Irascibility: An Astonishing and Scandalous God
• God in Recovery: The Bible and Violence
• The Offense of Jesus: Death as the Seedbed of Life
• Doctrinal Overlays: From Jesus in the Gospels to Jesus in the Trinity
• Articulating an Alternate World: Clergy Work as a Life-and-Death Matter
• Funding the Elements of Imagination: Subversive Preaching
• Grief and the Totalism: Confessing Pain and Anger
• The Godness of God: Theology of Sin
• Liturgy versus Empire: Elements of Worship
• Parade of Losses: Eucharistic Empowerment
• Thickness of Relationship: Public Prayer
• Leaning into a Presence That Valorizes: Private Prayer
• Mystery of an Alternate Existence: Sabbath Resistance to Brick Quotas
• Countering Technological Military Consumerism: Neighborliness
• Economies of Extraction: Money and Possessions from Exodus to Today
• What Is Old and What Is New: When Do We Cease to Be Church?
• Believing In: The Relationality of Faith
• Justice and Reformation: What Keeps You Going
• Works Cited and Further Reading