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Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be coopted by the managers of this age

Walter Brueggemann

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Walter Brueggemann
Age: 91
Born: 1933
Born: March 11
Biblical Scholar
Theologian
University Teacher
Tilden
Nebraska
Call
Likely
Age
Handle
Future
Requires
Hope
Fully
Promissory
Must
Careful
Retain
Touch
Tense
Present
Expressed
Doubt
Managers

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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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Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
Walter Brueggemann
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.
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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The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.
Walter Brueggemann
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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
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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Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.
Walter Brueggemann
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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
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