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Walter Brueggemann is a noted Old Testament scholar,
and author of The Prophetic Imagination. He will speak on ‘The Church in Joyous
Obedience,’ at the October 8–9 Laing Lectures at Regent
College. Following is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Regent World.
RW: Some have criticized
you for holding the authority of scripture loosely, yet you are speaking on
the topic of obedience. How do we act in obedience to a text that is
subject to, in your words, “human refraction”?
WB: I think it requires a
great deal of courage, and it requires a great deal of imagination, and it
requires an awareness that our best judgments are always provisional and
penultimate. And I think there are very few things about which we can speak
in an absolute voice. And those who criticize me for holding the authority
of scripture loosely, I think believe that you can get to much more
absoluteness than I think you can get to.
So I think we have to make our best judgment for today,
in faithful obedience; but then we know that we're going to have to review
it and revise it, as we see more and as the Spirit leads us. So a major
accent of my research is imagination, and that means we're always making
interpretive leaps that are always in dispute. But I think we have to go on
and make those leaps . . .
RW: What motivated your
choice of Exodus, Jeremiah, and Isaiah as your texts?
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WB: I happened to be
studying those in any case, but I also happened to be studying them because
I think they are particularly pertinent. The latter two, Jeremiah and
Isaiah, they are basically preoccupied with the destruction of Jerusalem in
the Old Testament period – and the way I make that argument is
that the destruction of Jerusalem, for the Israelites in the Old Testament,
was really their 9/11 . . .
People in the U.S. are very preoccupied with 9/11, and
what's come out of that. So I try to make that connection, and when I do
that, why these texts seem to be enormously important and pertinent. So,
that's kind of how my imagination works about this.
October 2008
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