Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Question
Grandiose
Present
Announce
Hand
Commitments
Called
Pretension
Hope
Subversive
Hands
Daring
Made
Commitment
Limits

More quotes by Walter Brueggemann

Image
The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
Buechner uses words with such transformative power that any comment on them is like the moon palely reflecting the sun.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
Walter Brueggemann
Image
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
Image
The Eucharist has been preempted and redefined in dualistic thinking that leaves the status quo of the world untouched, so congregations can take the meal without raising questions of violence the outcome is a colonized imagination that is drained of dangerous hope.
Walter Brueggemann