Episode Description:
In this special re-release, we revisit our profound conversation with renowned theologian Walter Brueggemann. Known for his influential work on the prophetic imagination, Brueggemann challenges us to envision a world rooted in compassion, justice, and a deep understanding of the Hebrew prophets. Whether you’re hearing this dialogue for the first time or revisiting it, Brueggemann’s insights remain as timely and transformative as ever.
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This episode is enriched with special musical contributions from Forrest Clay and Seabird, whose evocative sounds complement the depth of our discussion.
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An Ohio-based singer-songwriter, Forrest Clay crafts music that delves into the human experience with authenticity and depth. His latest EP, “Recover”, is available now.
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Hailing from Independence, Kentucky, Seabird is an alternative rock band known for their piano-driven melodies and introspective lyrics. Their albums, including “’Til We See the Shore” and “Rocks into Rivers”, have captivated audiences with their heartfelt storytelling.
•Official Website: seabirdmusic.com
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:10 Music.
00:00:10 --> 00:00:13 Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Deconstructionist Podcast.
00:00:13 --> 00:00:16 I'm your host, John Williamson, and I'm so glad that you're here.
00:00:16 --> 00:00:20 This week, we're doing something a little different. As some of you know,
00:00:20 --> 00:00:23 I've been hard at work behind the scenes on something new, something big.
00:00:24 --> 00:00:28 And while that's taking shape, I wanted to take this opportunity to bring back
00:00:28 --> 00:00:30 a few of my favorite conversations from the archives.
00:00:31 --> 00:00:35 Episodes that longtime listeners will hopefully remember fondly and newer listeners
00:00:35 --> 00:00:37 may have missed the first time around.
00:00:37 --> 00:00:41 So for the next few weeks, I'll be re-releasing some of the most meaningful,
00:00:41 --> 00:00:45 thought-provoking, and foundational conversations we've had over the years.
00:00:45 --> 00:00:49 Think of this as a Greatest Hits Month, a way to reflect, revisit,
00:00:49 --> 00:00:52 and re-engage with some of the voices that helped shape this journey.
00:00:53 --> 00:00:56 And I'm excited to kick things off with none other than Walter Brueggemann,
00:00:57 --> 00:01:01 renowned theologian, Old Testament scholar, and prophetic voice for the church.
00:01:01 --> 00:01:05 This episode has stuck with me over the years, as well as Adam.
00:01:05 --> 00:01:09 It's one of our favorites, and I think you'll find it just as relevant and powerful
00:01:09 --> 00:01:12 today. But before we get into that, I've got some big news.
00:01:13 --> 00:01:17 So I'm currently deep in production on a brand new limited series investigative
00:01:17 --> 00:01:22 podcast called Spoiled Fruit, Faith, and Power. That's the name.
00:01:22 --> 00:01:25 It's a project I've been developing for a long time. I've been working on it
00:01:25 --> 00:01:30 for well over a year, and it takes a hard look at the rise of an evangelical
00:01:30 --> 00:01:35 movement and the dangers of empire building within evangelical Christianity.
00:01:35 --> 00:01:39 We'll explore stories of influence, ambition, failure, and the real people,
00:01:40 --> 00:01:43 many of them well-intentioned who were caught in the fallout.
00:01:43 --> 00:01:47 The series will launch in the next couple of months. And so if you want to stay
00:01:47 --> 00:01:51 up to date on all the latest announcements, sneak peeks, and behind-the-scenes
00:01:51 --> 00:01:54 updates, make sure to follow Spoiled Fruit on social media.
00:01:54 --> 00:01:57 Just search for Spoiled Fruit, Faith and Power on Instagram, Twitter,
00:01:58 --> 00:02:01 Facebook, uh tiktok all the rest and
00:02:01 --> 00:02:05 hit the follow button i will also have links to those in the show notes all
00:02:05 --> 00:02:09 right let's get into it with this classic conversation with walter brueggemann
00:02:09 --> 00:02:12 whether it's your first time hearing it or you've listened before i think you'll
00:02:12 --> 00:02:19 walk away challenged and inspired so with that walter freaking brueggemann.
00:02:19 --> 00:02:30 Music.
00:02:30 --> 00:02:35 All right, let's rock and roll. Well, Dr. Walt Brueggemann, we are just delighted
00:02:35 --> 00:02:38 and honored to have you on the Deconstructionist Podcast today.
00:02:39 --> 00:02:41 Thank you so much for joining us all the way from Cincinnati, Ohio.
00:02:42 --> 00:02:44 I'm glad to have a chance to talk with you. Thanks.
00:02:44 --> 00:02:50 Oh, thank you very much, sir. Well, you have entered into a space here with us today that is.
00:02:50 --> 00:02:55 Coming around a lot of people that are going through either a season of doubt,
00:02:55 --> 00:02:57 or maybe it's become longer than
00:02:57 --> 00:03:01 a season, a phrase that we call deconstruction, like a crisis of faith.
00:03:01 --> 00:03:05 And I'm curious, Dr. Brueggemann, have you ever been through something like that personally?
00:03:06 --> 00:03:15 Well, I wouldn't say that I had a crisis of faith in which I fell out of faith, but I have had some,
00:03:15 --> 00:03:25 leaps and chasms that required me to grow and to rethink, and that still goes on.
00:03:26 --> 00:03:31 And I think it is partly it's a matter of maturation and growth,
00:03:31 --> 00:03:39 and partly it is the demands that our society places upon us and the pressures
00:03:39 --> 00:03:43 to tilt our lives otherwise.
00:03:43 --> 00:03:49 We have to keep finding faithful ways to respond to that, and some of the faithful
00:03:49 --> 00:03:55 ways cannot be the old ways. they have to be new ways that we maybe thought
00:03:55 --> 00:03:56 we'd never go there before.
00:03:57 --> 00:04:00 Well, I know about that. Yes. Right. Yeah.
00:04:00 --> 00:04:03 Yeah. I know that. I'm sure you've seen a lot of people enter through this times.
00:04:04 --> 00:04:07 In fact, we have leaned heavily on a lot of your work.
00:04:07 --> 00:04:12 One in particular that we've drawn from quite a bit is the essay that you contributed
00:04:12 --> 00:04:14 to the book, Struggling with Scripture.
00:04:15 --> 00:04:19 Just to launch kind of into that a little bit and draw out some of the material
00:04:19 --> 00:04:22 from that work you've done, which touches on a lot of your other work,
00:04:22 --> 00:04:29 one of the main problems that people have when they sincerely begin to investigate.
00:04:29 --> 00:04:34 Struggle with, enter into a real mature interaction with Scripture,
00:04:34 --> 00:04:39 is that they start to find that it's full of what they will call contradictions.
00:04:39 --> 00:04:43 People from, you know, investigating from maybe an agnostic,
00:04:43 --> 00:04:48 a spiritually curious standpoint, or somebody who's just maturing in their faith
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 and they maybe grew up more fundamentalist, real staunch.
00:04:52 --> 00:04:55 When they seriously start investigating it, they start to see these things that
00:04:55 --> 00:04:58 church or whoever has labeled contradictions.
00:04:58 --> 00:05:02 Now, you seem to have other language for that, for this apparent problem.
00:05:02 --> 00:05:06 And I'd love to hear you invite us into another way of looking at these apparent,
00:05:06 --> 00:05:08 what we'll call contradictions in scripture.
00:05:08 --> 00:05:13 Well, I think at a certain level, there are contradictions, but what I would
00:05:13 --> 00:05:19 say is that the Bible itself is a matrix of interpretation.
00:05:19 --> 00:05:26 And in that matrix of interpretation, there are many interpretive voices that
00:05:26 --> 00:05:32 are shaped by very different theological traditions and theological trajectories,
00:05:32 --> 00:05:38 and they don't all start at the same place, and they don't all end at the same place.
00:05:38 --> 00:05:45 And I think that our Bible reading and our Bible study is an opportunity to
00:05:45 --> 00:05:49 participate in that interpretive conversation,
00:05:49 --> 00:05:53 and obviously none of us come to that conversation innocent either.
00:05:54 --> 00:05:57 We all carry our freight, and we bring our freight to it,
00:05:57 --> 00:06:01 and so we are a participant,
00:06:01 --> 00:06:06 but we may not be always the dominant voice, and we may be corrected by other
00:06:06 --> 00:06:12 voices in the interpretation, and I think that's exactly what went on in the
00:06:12 --> 00:06:14 formation of the biblical text itself.
00:06:15 --> 00:06:25 It's a very dynamic process, and I think that very many people were schooled in a very static,
00:06:25 --> 00:06:31 settled understanding of Scripture, which I believe is a big misconstrual of
00:06:31 --> 00:06:34 its origin or how we are to understand it.
00:06:35 --> 00:06:38 So, you know, just to take an example that I've come across,
00:06:38 --> 00:06:43 I've even heard you talk about before, or I think it's in the book of Kings
00:06:43 --> 00:06:45 and then in the book of Chronicles when David takes a census.
00:06:46 --> 00:06:48 In one instance, it's God...
00:06:49 --> 00:06:52 Coming to David to take the census, and in the other instance,
00:06:52 --> 00:06:55 it's Satan tempting David to take the census, and people would look at that
00:06:55 --> 00:06:59 and then say, hey, look, it's a contradiction, you know, but I've heard you
00:06:59 --> 00:07:01 talk about this before, and I found what you said very helpful.
00:07:01 --> 00:07:06 I wonder if you could go into that a little bit more. Well, it is a glaring and unmistakable,
00:07:07 --> 00:07:13 case where they did this, and as you know, what interpreters tend to say is
00:07:13 --> 00:07:15 that the Chronicles text is later,
00:07:16 --> 00:07:19 and it was under the influence of Persian culture
00:07:19 --> 00:07:25 when the more vivid understanding of Satan began to emerge so that the people
00:07:25 --> 00:07:32 who made that text had available to them certain theological mantras and interpretive
00:07:32 --> 00:07:37 strategies that maybe were not available when the Book of Kings was put together,
00:07:37 --> 00:07:40 so that you can see that
00:07:40 --> 00:07:46 in very many different contexts over the centuries The people who put the biblical
00:07:46 --> 00:07:52 text together had certain interpretive strategies and theological concepts and
00:07:52 --> 00:07:57 theological phrasings that maybe weren't available at another time,
00:07:57 --> 00:07:59 and so they did what we do.
00:07:59 --> 00:08:04 They used what they had available to try to make sense out of what they were doing.
00:08:05 --> 00:08:12 And I think what's important in doing that is not to easily decide that one
00:08:12 --> 00:08:14 reading is right and one reading is wrong.
00:08:15 --> 00:08:21 But to try to think through why that narrative about David's punishment,
00:08:21 --> 00:08:25 why it received more than one interpretation.
00:08:25 --> 00:08:31 And I suppose the reason it received more than one interpretation is that it's
00:08:31 --> 00:08:36 a very difficult narrative report, and it creates a lot of problems,
00:08:36 --> 00:08:40 and interpretation tends to be a response to...
00:08:41 --> 00:08:44 To things that are not easily explained or decoded.
00:08:45 --> 00:08:51 And I think we have to get over the idea that we can just open the text and
00:08:51 --> 00:08:53 its meaning is perfectly clear.
00:08:54 --> 00:08:57 I think it's much more artistic than that.
00:08:57 --> 00:09:02 And it's like trying to understand good music or good painting.
00:09:02 --> 00:09:07 You don't just get it at first glance and write a summary of it.
00:09:08 --> 00:09:13 You just have to live with it, I think. I think that's what we do with the biblical
00:09:13 --> 00:09:16 text at our best. I think we live with it.
00:09:16 --> 00:09:21 Oh, man. Yeah, and actually, it makes me think of one of my favorite quotes
00:09:21 --> 00:09:26 from Struggling with Scripture, where you say, you refer to the Bible as broad
00:09:26 --> 00:09:30 and deep and demanding, utterly beyond us in its richness.
00:09:30 --> 00:09:34 And yet, it seems like the modern Western view, at least, is that it's really
00:09:34 --> 00:09:36 quite simple. You take it at face value.
00:09:37 --> 00:09:41 And what I found interesting, and I was hoping that you could kind of talk about
00:09:41 --> 00:09:45 this a little bit, is the Western view, at least predominantly in the 20th century,
00:09:46 --> 00:09:49 seems to toss around this term inerrancy.
00:09:49 --> 00:09:51 But you used the word inherently.
00:09:51 --> 00:09:54 And so I was wondering if you could go into that just a little bit and explain
00:09:54 --> 00:09:58 what you mean. See, I meant to be a little puckish in doing that.
00:09:58 --> 00:10:03 I think that inerrancy, that is that the Bible doesn't contain any errors,
00:10:03 --> 00:10:08 I think it's an absurdity, and I think it's a 19th century mistake.
00:10:08 --> 00:10:13 Nobody ever used that kind of language until the 19th century when we were busy
00:10:13 --> 00:10:17 trying to compete with science, and we wanted to...
00:10:18 --> 00:10:24 We want to sound scientific, but of course it's bad science to think that it's inerrant too.
00:10:24 --> 00:10:30 So I just wanted to make a play on inerrancy, and since that article uses a
00:10:30 --> 00:10:32 whole bunch of words that start with I,
00:10:32 --> 00:10:39 I thought that inherent means that the believing community comes out at the
00:10:39 --> 00:10:45 Bible with a ready expectation that in some way it is God's live Word to us.
00:10:46 --> 00:10:52 And so that's why I used the word inherent. I wouldn't press that very far,
00:10:52 --> 00:10:54 but I wanted to play with it.
00:10:55 --> 00:11:02 I gave that paper to a community of people, none of whom thought that the Bible was inerrant.
00:11:02 --> 00:11:06 So I had some room for maneuverability about that.
00:11:06 --> 00:11:08 Absolutely. Love it, man.
00:11:09 --> 00:11:12 So one of the things that I love that you say, which again, and you touched
00:11:12 --> 00:11:15 on it briefly, so I'm glad we get to dive into this a little bit.
00:11:15 --> 00:11:20 But you had mentioned this artistic quality or this artistic approach that we even have.
00:11:20 --> 00:11:23 And I wonder if in that essay and in some of your other work,
00:11:23 --> 00:11:28 in fact, all over your work, you're always saying that responsible interpretation requires imagination.
00:11:29 --> 00:11:32 Now, could you explain what you mean by that? Because I know firsthand that
00:11:32 --> 00:11:37 most or a lot of Christians would not think that interpretation requires imagination
00:11:37 --> 00:11:42 because interpretation is supposed to be a science and imagination is very subjective.
00:11:42 --> 00:11:51 Well, in fact, I would say for starters, we inevitably use imagination when we read the Bible.
00:11:51 --> 00:11:56 We do that all the time when we take an ancient text and we try to use it to
00:11:56 --> 00:12:02 argue about a contemporary problem that the text itself is not concerned with.
00:12:02 --> 00:12:06 So make that leap is an act of imagination.
00:12:07 --> 00:12:18 What I mean by imagination is the ability to see that the biblical text entertains
00:12:18 --> 00:12:22 a world other than the one that is in front of us.
00:12:22 --> 00:12:27 One that is in front of us is, we understand it, we can explain it,
00:12:27 --> 00:12:29 we can manage it, we can cope with it,
00:12:29 --> 00:12:38 but the world to which the Bible testifies is very strange by all the reasoning
00:12:38 --> 00:12:43 categories that we use for our contemporary life,
00:12:43 --> 00:12:49 and so it requires us both to use imagination and to recognize that.
00:12:50 --> 00:12:58 The Bible writers themselves are using great imagination, and if we try to be
00:12:58 --> 00:13:02 explanatory in a kind of a one-dimensional way,
00:13:02 --> 00:13:10 I think that we lose the thickness of the text and the capacity to play with it.
00:13:11 --> 00:13:16 So I don't know a lot about classical music, but I go to the symphony,
00:13:16 --> 00:13:21 and then I read the review the next day, and the reviewer says,
00:13:21 --> 00:13:27 well, this was a very mundane performance, and the notes were not played with
00:13:27 --> 00:13:30 the right pace, and it wasn't thick enough,
00:13:30 --> 00:13:36 which means that the conductor was doing an interpretation of the musical score
00:13:36 --> 00:13:39 according to the conductor's imagination.
00:13:39 --> 00:13:44 And I think that's what we do every time we read the Bible.
00:13:44 --> 00:13:51 We render it in a certain kind of way, given our inclination, given our context,
00:13:52 --> 00:13:55 given our emotional energy on that day,
00:13:55 --> 00:14:03 all of that is an act of imagination that causes the text to take on a kind
00:14:03 --> 00:14:11 of a vitality that it wouldn't if we simply treat it as a package of certitude.
00:14:12 --> 00:14:14 And I think that's what we have to resist.
00:14:15 --> 00:14:21 So to go off of what you just said, we love the fact that you brought up this
00:14:21 --> 00:14:24 idea of certainty or certitude found within the church.
00:14:24 --> 00:14:28 On our podcast, one of the things that we talk about is the fact that this idea
00:14:28 --> 00:14:32 of certainty has almost become an idol within the church.
00:14:32 --> 00:14:36 And one of the things that I know you've said previously, I wonder if you could
00:14:36 --> 00:14:39 kind of unpack this for our listeners a little bit, is the church is specialized
00:14:39 --> 00:14:46 in certitude, but the interpretive enterprise does not yield certitude, it yields possibility.
00:14:47 --> 00:14:51 Well, I think that's right, and I think that certitude has become an idol for
00:14:51 --> 00:14:56 us because we live in such an anxious society that feels like everything has
00:14:56 --> 00:15:01 fallen apart, and we'd like to go someplace where it's not falling apart.
00:15:01 --> 00:15:05 But I think it is a category mistake.
00:15:06 --> 00:15:12 Faith does not yield certitude, which is a cognitive category.
00:15:12 --> 00:15:18 What faith yields is fidelity, which is a relational category,
00:15:18 --> 00:15:26 and the truth is that no cognitive category will satisfy our hunger for viable relationships.
00:15:26 --> 00:15:38 So the antidote to certitude is fidelity in relationships between us and the
00:15:38 --> 00:15:43 writers of the text and between all of us in an interpretive community.
00:15:43 --> 00:15:47 That we are trustworthy does not mean that we are right.
00:15:47 --> 00:15:54 It means that we are trustworthy, and we can trust people who continue to be
00:15:54 --> 00:16:02 thinking and interpreting and opening up new possibilities, which never arrive at certitude.
00:16:02 --> 00:16:09 I think that certitude is inimical to the human condition.
00:16:09 --> 00:16:12 And I think the only way you arrive at certitude is to die.
00:16:13 --> 00:16:21 And I think that very many people who want certitude out of the Bible have indeed.
00:16:21 --> 00:16:26 Settled for a kind of a deftliness about the truth of the Bible.
00:16:26 --> 00:16:29 That's what I think. Man. Wow.
00:16:30 --> 00:16:34 Dr. Brueggemann, one of the things that we've picked up recently.
00:16:35 --> 00:16:39 A couple of young guys were total rookies at this, but an idea that we found
00:16:39 --> 00:16:42 fascinating and we're not sure what to do with it.
00:16:42 --> 00:16:46 And we'd love to just hear your own commentary on it is read an essay by N.T.
00:16:46 --> 00:16:50 Wright that he wrote back in the nineties, talking about the authority of scripture.
00:16:51 --> 00:16:55 And he talked about in that essay that essentially what happened during the
00:16:55 --> 00:17:04 Reformation is the church at hand removed the papacy as the authority of the church,
00:17:04 --> 00:17:07 the cohesive authority figure of the church,
00:17:07 --> 00:17:13 and then put in its place a paper pope of the Bible, making the Bible the ultimate
00:17:13 --> 00:17:15 authority of the church.
00:17:15 --> 00:17:19 And then Phyllis Tickle, one of the emergent kind of authors who passed away
00:17:19 --> 00:17:21 recently, picked up that thread from N.T.
00:17:21 --> 00:17:24 Wright and talked about it in terms of church history, that yes,
00:17:24 --> 00:17:33 we have taken the paper pope and replaced him with the paper pope, which is scripture.
00:17:33 --> 00:17:38 Could you just talk about that idea a little bit in your familiarity with scripture and what it is?
00:17:38 --> 00:17:44 I think that's not a very helpful oversimplification.
00:17:44 --> 00:17:52 I don't think that we arrived at what Wright and Tickle call a paper pope until the 19th century.
00:17:52 --> 00:17:57 In the 19th century, the European and American church got very nervous about
00:17:57 --> 00:18:04 science, and it wanted to out-science science with the Bible,
00:18:04 --> 00:18:07 but that was not until the 19th century.
00:18:07 --> 00:18:16 Luther and Calvin, you know, the lead reformers, they did not believe in a paper pope.
00:18:16 --> 00:18:21 They believed that the Church is the responsible interpreter,
00:18:21 --> 00:18:25 but that the Church is no longer to be identified with the pope.
00:18:26 --> 00:18:34 And obviously, Luther and Calvin were themselves very authoritative teachers,
00:18:34 --> 00:18:43 so they sort of offered themselves as the true authorities, but they had a very high view of the Church.
00:18:43 --> 00:18:50 They just thought that Rome had gone rotten and did not represent the faithful
00:18:50 --> 00:18:58 work of the Church, but I think until the crisis of science in the 19th century,
00:18:58 --> 00:19:04 I don't think that the Reformation traditions reduced it to a paper pope.
00:19:05 --> 00:19:11 There was some scholasticism in Lutheranism and Calvinism in the 18th century,
00:19:11 --> 00:19:17 but even that is considerably removed from the Reformers of the 16th century.
00:19:17 --> 00:19:24 So I think it's a quite modern problem in a way that the reformers were not modern.
00:19:24 --> 00:19:29 And I do think that since the 19th century,
00:19:29 --> 00:19:36 that fundamentalism on the one hand, and then what we've now come to call progressivism
00:19:36 --> 00:19:41 on the other hand, I think those were moves toward a paper pope.
00:19:41 --> 00:19:45 But that didn't happen until near the end of the 19th centuries.
00:19:45 --> 00:19:49 So it's a fairly recent problem in my view.
00:19:50 --> 00:19:55 So what then do you think the role of Scripture is, and has the role of Scripture changed?
00:19:56 --> 00:20:03 I don't know whether it's—it takes so many different forms, I don't want to say it's changed.
00:20:03 --> 00:20:12 I would think that it provides the elemental materials out of which we are to
00:20:12 --> 00:20:18 do faithful imagination in our own contemporary context.
00:20:18 --> 00:20:26 And if you think of the Bible as an alternative to the great meta-narratives
00:20:26 --> 00:20:32 of Darwin and Marx and Freud and Adam Smith,
00:20:33 --> 00:20:38 if you take Adam Smith as the father of modern capitalism,
00:20:39 --> 00:20:48 then capitalism in the United States is a big rival for the script of the Bible.
00:20:48 --> 00:20:56 And what the Church is always trying to do is to understand contemporary life
00:20:56 --> 00:20:58 according to the script of the Bible,
00:20:58 --> 00:21:04 rather than the script of Adam Smith or Darwin or Freud or Marx or any of the
00:21:04 --> 00:21:06 others that you might name.
00:21:06 --> 00:21:11 What has happened, particularly with capitalism, is that the Bible has been
00:21:11 --> 00:21:16 largely co-opted into capitalism so that to very many people,
00:21:16 --> 00:21:18 the Bible sounds like capitalism.
00:21:19 --> 00:21:24 Or if you're hot on Darwin, the Bible sounds like a script for evolution.
00:21:25 --> 00:21:32 Or if you're into depth psychology, the Bible sounds like a way of getting to Freud, and so on, so on,
00:21:32 --> 00:21:40 rather than saying this is a script that has its own voice and we have to listen
00:21:40 --> 00:21:48 to it and maintain some critical distance from these other scripts that offer an alternative.
00:21:49 --> 00:21:56 That is, I have seen evidence of that so much just throughout my life that we,
00:21:56 --> 00:21:59 one of the things we talk about on this podcast is the concept of bias,
00:21:59 --> 00:22:02 trying to introduce some of our listeners to this really powerful concept that's
00:22:02 --> 00:22:06 at work in all of us, and it really seems like it ties into a lot of what we're
00:22:06 --> 00:22:09 saying that, you know, we have these unconscious bias.
00:22:09 --> 00:22:13 Specifically, in germane to our discussion, we all have a confirmation bias
00:22:13 --> 00:22:18 where we see what we want to see when we approach the text. That's exactly right.
00:22:19 --> 00:22:22 Yep, we do that. And so then what do we do about that?
00:22:22 --> 00:22:30 Well, I think we need to have all the good critical tools that we can mobilize.
00:22:30 --> 00:22:34 The other thing we have to have is that we have to belong,
00:22:34 --> 00:22:41 as best we are able, we have to belong to a very heterogeneous interpretive
00:22:41 --> 00:22:46 community that represents voices that do not share our biases.
00:22:47 --> 00:22:53 And in the United States, I think that mainly means to be attentive to how people
00:22:53 --> 00:22:54 in the third world read the Bible.
00:22:55 --> 00:23:01 They read it very differently from the way we read it, and we need to pay attention to how they read it.
00:23:02 --> 00:23:10 That functions as a kind of an alert or a wake-up call about our biases that
00:23:10 --> 00:23:12 we do not even recognize as biases.
00:23:12 --> 00:23:17 Wow. What would you say if you could sum up how the third world reads the Bible right now?
00:23:18 --> 00:23:27 Well, the mantra of liberation theology, as you know, is God's preferential option for the poor.
00:23:27 --> 00:23:36 That is that the God of the Bible in both Testaments has a huge partiality toward poor people.
00:23:36 --> 00:23:42 And that, of course, contradicts the way we read the Bible when we are half
00:23:42 --> 00:23:43 committed to capitalism,
00:23:43 --> 00:23:50 because capitalism is a huge bias toward people who have succeeded economically
00:23:50 --> 00:23:53 rather than who have been left behind economically.
00:23:55 --> 00:24:03 And once you get a fix on that interpretive angle, you begin to see the text
00:24:03 --> 00:24:05 differently in very many ways.
00:24:06 --> 00:24:09 Man, my friend David Kappner says
00:24:09 --> 00:24:15 that oftentimes we live in this vicious cycle that where shame produces retreat
00:24:15 --> 00:24:20 into isolation or individualism and that individualism drives us toward capitalistic
00:24:20 --> 00:24:26 consumerism to medicate the individualism and the shame that we feel,
00:24:26 --> 00:24:29 which then drives us into more shame. and the cycle just continues.
00:24:30 --> 00:24:33 And it seems like a lot of what you're saying is, you know, if you're in this
00:24:33 --> 00:24:37 faithful community, it can start to interrupt that circuit.
00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 That's exactly right. Or to use your word, deconstruct.
00:24:42 --> 00:24:45 Man, so one of the things that you said that I think ties into this that I love
00:24:45 --> 00:24:49 is you said that, you know, often we avoid dialogue or interaction with people
00:24:49 --> 00:24:51 whose interpretation may differ from our own.
00:24:52 --> 00:24:56 And this tension, you've actually found it to be a great value because you've
00:24:56 --> 00:25:00 said that it might lead you out of your own view.
00:25:01 --> 00:25:08 That's correct. It functions as a possibility to grow and to read better.
00:25:09 --> 00:25:14 That's right. Man, yeah, that is just, how else can we start to participate
00:25:14 --> 00:25:16 in that? You know, we're coming to a close here.
00:25:16 --> 00:25:19 What advice would you give to people that are in.
00:25:20 --> 00:25:24 One of the terms that we use here is a lot of us feel spiritually claustrophobic,
00:25:24 --> 00:25:29 meaning we know there's a bigness outside of our smallness, but we're nervous
00:25:29 --> 00:25:33 to go outside of it because it's leaving the tribe, leaving the stream,
00:25:33 --> 00:25:36 leaving that one approach you've always taken is a scary thing.
00:25:37 --> 00:25:41 What advice would you have for people? Well, I think it's not easy to do,
00:25:41 --> 00:25:47 but I think it means that church communities need to be in sustained conversation
00:25:47 --> 00:25:54 with people who experience political, economic life differently.
00:25:54 --> 00:26:00 And I'm in Cincinnati, and you're in Columbus, and there are those groups of
00:26:00 --> 00:26:05 people, there are those congregations right in our own towns with whom we need
00:26:05 --> 00:26:08 to make better contact. Wow, absolutely.
00:26:08 --> 00:26:15 And I think that's true across Christian communities, and then when we get really
00:26:15 --> 00:26:20 bold, we can begin to have the same kinds of conversations with Muslim communities
00:26:20 --> 00:26:23 or whoever, but that probably is not the place to start.
00:26:24 --> 00:26:27 Hmm, sure. Dr. Brueggemann, we want to be sensitive to your time.
00:26:27 --> 00:26:30 We could ask you a million more questions.
00:26:31 --> 00:26:33 Your work is so extensive. We want to make sure people know that they can go
00:26:33 --> 00:26:39 to WalterBruggeman.com, read SAC videos, books, blogs, all of that.
00:26:39 --> 00:26:44 And we're hoping if we weren't too tedious and too much of a rookie team here
00:26:44 --> 00:26:49 that maybe in the future, we could talk about things like maybe prophetic imagination,
00:26:50 --> 00:26:52 prophecy, and some of the problems that people have in the Old Testament.
00:26:53 --> 00:26:56 Would you be willing to maybe do this again at a future date?
00:26:56 --> 00:26:58 I'd be glad to do that down the road, yes. Thank you so much.
00:26:58 --> 00:26:59 Oh, thank you, Dr. Bruggeman.
00:26:59 --> 00:27:03 God bless you. Thank you so much for your time. Well, it's good to talk to you,
00:27:03 --> 00:27:06 and I hope your work continues to go well.
00:27:06 --> 00:27:09 Thank you so much, Dr. Brueggemann. Grace and peace to you, friend.
00:27:09 --> 00:27:45 Music.
00:27:46 --> 00:27:50 Oh, my goodness. Dude, we just talked to Walt freaking Brigham in. Yeah.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:57 And by the way, this was months ago because when we interviewed him,
00:27:57 --> 00:28:00 I definitely was still laid up for my foot surgery. I remember. Yeah.
00:28:01 --> 00:28:05 So we've literally been. I can't believe it. Itchy to release this one for so
00:28:05 --> 00:28:07 long. Oh, we've got some other ones we're itching.
00:28:07 --> 00:28:09 Yeah. You guys don't even know what we're sitting on, man.
00:28:09 --> 00:28:14 You know, it's so funny that scripture is such a divisive thing.
00:28:15 --> 00:28:17 Yeah. It's such a problem for so many people.
00:28:18 --> 00:28:23 I was just talking to somebody this week, and this girl was going through a deconstruction.
00:28:23 --> 00:28:27 She's talking to me about how much she loves our show because it's just given her permission.
00:28:27 --> 00:28:30 But then when we kind of started talking about her life and where she was at
00:28:30 --> 00:28:36 again, the problems that she had, even cracking it open in any new way.
00:28:36 --> 00:28:40 And then I just finished reading Mike McCarg, Science Mike's new book.
00:28:41 --> 00:28:44 And after he went through his sort of deconstruction, turned to atheism,
00:28:44 --> 00:28:46 and I always, you know, came back around into the faith.
00:28:47 --> 00:28:51 Approaching scripture was not easy, man, because it's like, I think a lot of
00:28:51 --> 00:28:53 people listening to the show and like, I don't know about you.
00:28:53 --> 00:28:58 I didn't really have this experience, but like they were traumatized by it in a lot of ways.
00:28:58 --> 00:29:01 Like it, there's like a joke in atheism.
00:29:01 --> 00:29:05 Like if you want to make somebody an atheist, just tell them to actually read the Bible.
00:29:05 --> 00:29:10 Yeah. It's a problematic text. And what I love about Brueggemann is he comes
00:29:10 --> 00:29:16 at it With such fresh, new, wonderful, vital, living, breathing,
00:29:17 --> 00:29:23 wild, unpredictable, crazy sometimes insights that it makes you want to dig
00:29:23 --> 00:29:25 back in and go, wait, what? Yeah. That's amazing.
00:29:26 --> 00:29:30 I think the interesting thing, at least the kind of revisiting this episode
00:29:30 --> 00:29:35 after having recorded it, you know, a couple months ago is based off the stuff that I'm reading now.
00:29:35 --> 00:29:39 I'm kind of diving into some like historical and looking back at the,
00:29:39 --> 00:29:44 you know, the early Christians and the ancient Jewish community and kind of
00:29:44 --> 00:29:48 how they interpreted scripture through the practice of Midrash and,
00:29:48 --> 00:29:50 you know, and that sort of thing.
00:29:50 --> 00:29:55 It kind of seems like a guy like Brueggemann is kind of like this new,
00:29:56 --> 00:29:57 looking at it in this new way.
00:29:57 --> 00:30:02 But really, that's the way that the Jewish community always interpreted scripture.
00:30:02 --> 00:30:07 Yeah. I mean, we take this sort of post-Enlightenment literalist interpretation
00:30:07 --> 00:30:11 of scripture as being like, well, this is how it's always been. No. No.
00:30:12 --> 00:30:17 Not at all. You do a little digging and you find out that actually for thousands
00:30:17 --> 00:30:21 of years, there was a completely different way of viewing scripture.
00:30:22 --> 00:30:28 And these communities would read these sacred texts and constantly try to find
00:30:28 --> 00:30:30 new revelation within those texts.
00:30:31 --> 00:30:36 You know, it's so funny because, and I'm not, this is, I can't say this without
00:30:36 --> 00:30:40 sounding a little bit arrogant and I don't mean it to be arrogant at all,
00:30:40 --> 00:30:43 but like there's been several people that have asked me,
00:30:43 --> 00:30:46 you know, now that I've gone through this deconstruction, like, how do I view scripture?
00:30:46 --> 00:30:51 And I'm like, well, I can't answer that question because there's not like one thing I can say, right?
00:30:51 --> 00:30:54 Well, like, well, but do you believe it's the word of God? I'm like,
00:30:54 --> 00:30:57 well, yeah, but like what I mean by that and what you think I mean by that are
00:30:57 --> 00:31:00 probably two different things. Well, no, it should just, you know, be the same.
00:31:01 --> 00:31:04 You know, he, you know, God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
00:31:05 --> 00:31:08 I'm like, no, that's not where I'm at anymore.
00:31:08 --> 00:31:11 And And in fact, that's pretty much if you look at the thrust of history where
00:31:11 --> 00:31:17 nobody's been at except, you know, just some fundamentalist sects in the Western-ized
00:31:17 --> 00:31:22 world for the last 150 or less. Yeah, maybe. Even years.
00:31:22 --> 00:31:26 And it's just, this is a vital, open, you know, breathing thing.
00:31:26 --> 00:31:29 If anybody wants a good place to start on Brighamman's work,
00:31:29 --> 00:31:33 there's a compendium of essays that he sort of headlines. you know,
00:31:33 --> 00:31:36 sorry, Will Placker and Brian Blount.
00:31:36 --> 00:31:39 But like, there's these three guys that write this collection of essays and
00:31:39 --> 00:31:43 the book is titled Struggling with Scripture, which is such an apt title.
00:31:43 --> 00:31:46 And John and I have it laying here on the table and he slid it over to me a
00:31:46 --> 00:31:49 minute ago. And I opened it back up to a couple of things that I highlighted.
00:31:50 --> 00:31:50 And here's just the taste.
00:31:51 --> 00:31:54 It says, anyone who imagines that reading scripture is settled,
00:31:55 --> 00:31:59 that the reading of it is settled and eternally simple, they're not paying attention
00:31:59 --> 00:32:03 to the process in which we are all engaged, liberals and conservatives.
00:32:04 --> 00:32:07 And it's like these people that come up to me that say, well, sola scriptura.
00:32:07 --> 00:32:12 I'm like, yeah, an idea that's not even in scripture. Like, where did you get that?
00:32:13 --> 00:32:16 You know, it's, I just, I love Brighamman, man. Yeah.
00:32:17 --> 00:32:20 There's so much permission in what he says, but like, he's not soft on the Bible.
00:32:21 --> 00:32:23 He's a high view of scripture. Yeah.
00:32:23 --> 00:32:27 Oh, I could go all day. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, that's, that's a great book.
00:32:27 --> 00:32:29 And it's, it's not super long either.
00:32:29 --> 00:32:33 You can, you can get through it pretty quickly, even though it's very dense in content.
00:32:33 --> 00:32:38 So dense. But yeah, I think this is something that we've revisited a couple
00:32:38 --> 00:32:42 of times. this was actually going to be part of another series on scripture,
00:32:42 --> 00:32:45 but we ran out of time this year. Oh man.
00:32:45 --> 00:32:47 So we didn't think we were going to get him.
00:32:49 --> 00:32:53 And we're like, Oh, for our scripture series is already done,
00:32:53 --> 00:32:56 but let's just do a one-off with Walt freaking Brueggemann.
00:32:56 --> 00:33:01 And if you like the music today, as always, we try to give a little plug to
00:33:01 --> 00:33:03 the band that, you know, dude, this is good.
00:33:04 --> 00:33:08 Broke up the, uh, who is this? This is a band called Seabird based out of Kentucky.
00:33:08 --> 00:33:10 I thought they were out of Nashville. I was wrong.
00:33:11 --> 00:33:14 Sorry, guys. You would have just started a fire. I know. They're incredible
00:33:14 --> 00:33:18 guys, like super, super nice and just insane musicians.
00:33:18 --> 00:33:22 I heard them opening for another band a couple of years ago and I remember like
00:33:22 --> 00:33:27 half paying attention, which is a horrible thing to say, but was instantly like, whoa.
00:33:27 --> 00:33:29 That's a lot of times what you do for the opening act and they have to kind
00:33:29 --> 00:33:32 of win your attention. And they did. Oh my goodness.
00:33:32 --> 00:33:36 So go out and check out their, especially their last album. We'll have all their
00:33:36 --> 00:33:39 information and links in the show notes, but incredible band.
00:33:39 --> 00:33:42 Hope you guys are enjoying this. And as always, if you guys have any other artists
00:33:42 --> 00:33:45 or bands that you guys know of that would love a little free,
00:33:45 --> 00:33:47 free promotion, send them our way.
00:33:48 --> 00:33:51 Yep. And please come out and catch us at the ask science Mike live that you
00:33:51 --> 00:33:53 probably heard on the beginning of this show. We will be there.
00:33:53 --> 00:33:58 We'll have drinks afterwards with science Mike himself. And that'll be a really
00:33:58 --> 00:34:02 good time to meet some of you guys and hang out and have a drink and hear your stories.
00:34:02 --> 00:34:07 So, and Oh, And also, don't forget, Pints and Parables with Pete Rollins in Detroit, Michigan.
00:34:07 --> 00:34:10 That's right. That's October like 20th or 22nd.
00:34:11 --> 00:34:17 21st or 22nd. It might be changing. Check his Twitter or check his website for updated dates.
00:34:18 --> 00:34:22 Anything else? No. Man, that was so fun. Always. I love doing this.
00:34:23 --> 00:34:27 We love you guys. We'll catch you soon. We are your hosts. I'm Adam Narlock.
00:34:28 --> 00:37:59 Music.
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