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The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

Walter Brueggemann

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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Empire
Empires
Judged
Gospel
Fiction

More quotes by Walter Brueggemann

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If the church is to be faithful it must be formed andordered from the inside of its experience and confession and not by borrowing from sources extenal to its own life.
Walter Brueggemann
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We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
Walter Brueggemann
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And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.
Walter Brueggemann
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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
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Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
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Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
Walter Brueggemann
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The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.
Walter Brueggemann
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The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.
Walter Brueggemann
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We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.
Walter Brueggemann
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The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.
Walter Brueggemann
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The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. We have to see how much of that dangerous idea we can perform in our own lives. There is nothing innocuous or safe about the Gospel. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.
Walter Brueggemann
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There are buoyant powers of healing at work in the world that do not depend on us, that we need not finance or keep functioning and that are not at our disposal.
Walter Brueggemann
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Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural, but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.
Walter Brueggemann
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On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.
Walter Brueggemann
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People notice peacemakers because they dress funny. We know how the people who make war dress - in uniforms and medals, or in computers and clipboards, or in absoluteness, severity, greed, and cynicism. But the peacemaker is dressed in righteousness, justice, and faithfulness - dressed for the work that is to be done.
Walter Brueggemann
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Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.
Walter Brueggemann
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Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
Walter Brueggemann
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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 conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Walter Brueggemann
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Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.
Walter Brueggemann
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Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.
Walter Brueggemann