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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
Present
Expressed
Doubt
Managers
Call
Likely
Age
Handle
Future
Requires
Hope
Fully
Promissory
Must
Careful
Retain
Touch
Tense

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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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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God will recruit as necessary from the human cast in order to reorder human history.
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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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
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Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.
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 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 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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We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.
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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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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Sabbath is the celebration of life beyond and outside productivity.
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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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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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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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
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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