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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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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Comment
Uses
Sun
Moon
Words
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Power
Transformative
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Reflecting

More quotes by Walter Brueggemann

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The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
Walter Brueggemann
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When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.
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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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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Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
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
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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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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
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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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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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Personal voice- prophesy- disrupts the state of communal numbness in which most of us exist.
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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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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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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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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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
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Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
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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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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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