Obituaries for Walter Brueggemann published in major newspapers highlight his work on prophets, imagination, and power structures viewed through a sociological lens. While these descriptions are not wrong, we—two of Walter’s Old Testament colleagues at Columbia Theological Seminary—think they overlook too much of his life’s work. For Walter, the biblical text was everything: potent and piercing literature, a site of dynamic encounter, and a source of conflicting theological perspectives through which to perceive the world.
Along with other scholars, Walter shifted academic study of the Bible away from compositional history of texts and its relentless parsing of sources. For him, historical scientific methods of the last centuries could contribute only minimally to interpretation because narrow concern with the texts’ creation offered neither sustenance nor solace to the Church. Scholarship’s singular focus on written and oral sources left the text barren and believers thirsty. Walter sought his inspiration elsewhere.
Initially, he turned to the rhetoric of the text, to close readings of what the text says and how it says it. He studied genres, especially narrative and poetry with their subdivisions and language in wealthy abundance. Walter expanded his exploration to study the Jewishness of the Old Testament in both its practices and modes of thinking. He asked what texts might say to historical audiences who produced them: how texts shaped imagination, motivated behavior and, above all, invited relationships with God, the world, and its inhabitants. Walter studied Jewish and Christian reinterpretations of texts to show how multiple meanings emerged from and for different contexts. By dramatizing compelling stories and flawed human characters, as well as the benefits of praise, complaint, and lament, Walter brought the Bible alive and invited readers into the Bible’s conflicts and weighty disputes about theological ideas.
Perhaps at the heart of Brueggemann’s work was his exploration of the character of God. Biblical texts, by their very multiplicity of experiences and viewpoints, their unresolved testimony and counter-testimony, portray an uncontainable God. Across Walter’s work, he insisted that God is at once radically sovereign, righteous, giver of steadfast covenant love (hesed), and immersed in the fray of human existence. God appears in contradictions as generous, mysterious, conflicted, fearsome, hidden, present, punishing, and weak. The Bible names God in numerous ways yet God remains unnamable. Because Walter recognized the literary and historical character of biblical texts, literalism had no home in his work. God never settles into one set of theological names or formulations.
Walter Brueggemann had an amazingly integrative mind. He read and used everything significant that came across his path: literary criticism, poetry, newspapers, psychology, philosophy, political viewpoints, novels, history, as well as theology. Often we spotted him walking across Columbia’s campus carrying stacks of books, by far the most prolific user of the library and interlibrary loan. He reveled in the arts, including classical and jazz music, theater, and movies (especially on Friday afternoons). These expansive habits gave Walter ample material for his preaching and teaching and provided him with surprising connections among diverse disciplines and biblical texts. His popular descriptions of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation, to name functions of the psalms, for example, drew from philosopher Paul Ricoeur. And Walter laced his lectures and sermons with psychotherapeutic insights gleaned from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and D.W. Winnicott.
Walter’s disciplined study and interdisciplinary work burst forth not only in publications but also in performance. He was a performer of texts. In the classroom he did not simply narrate or comment on a text; he enacted it. Columbia students surely remember Walter marching back and forth, pushing the imagined Philistine donkey cart as if it were a modern golf cart carrying the captured ark of the covenant. Or his poignant depiction of David’s grief at the death of his son Absalom. “Absalom, Absalom, my son Absalom!” Or his commentary about David’s ability to keep his hands clean from political crimes much like a mafia boss in a contemporary movie.
These classroom enactments involved carefully paced speech. This was evident immediately with the opening prayer, usually crafted that morning on a manual typewriter, where Walter used the language and challenges of the assigned text to offer thanksgiving and petitions for the day. Then, in his lectures, he would move through the text unit by unit, swearing, yelling, and then, in an instant, whispering words of denouement. He lingered over verbs and repeated phrases and key words for emphasis and insight. He underlined the force and effect of Hebrew terms with chalk dust flying. His enormous vocabulary and attention to the poetic power of words gave his performances shape and meaning. With high energy, he made the details of the text immediate and memorable and, by doing so, brought into relief possible implications of the text that were vital and urgent.
Walter’s work on prophetic imagination broke new ground because he pressed beyond analysis of individual oracles and historical settings. He embraced a broader vision of the prophetic vocation. He saw prophecy functioning to overturn hardened worldviews and give birth to alternative social visions of just societies. But beyond this early major work, Walter Brueggemann wrote more than 100 books, many of them also major contributions to other areas of biblical studies. About the abundance of his publications, he often joked, quoting imaginary incredulous colleagues, “What are you calling it this time?”
His books include commentaries on Psalms, Jeremiah, Genesis, and Isaiah. He revived laments for churches that had long since stopped praying them as faithful expressions of loss and grief. He interrogated power structures created by Saul, David, and Solomon, who usurped power from local leaders and constructed royal systems and oppressive worldviews. Walter’s many studies of Exodus highlight the metaphoric power of the brick yard and the liberation of slaves as a potent narrative that prepares for the Passover liturgy and covenant living according to the law of Moses. And then there is his magisterial Old Testament Theology. There Walter exposes across the canon conflicting testimonies about the character of God, historically constructed perceptions that are in unresolvable conflict yet always push toward faith in God.
Beyond his many volumes, Walter composed numerous essays, articles, book reviews, and collected volumes of sermons and prayers. He presented papers and participated in panels at professional meetings. He drew his ideas from liberation theology, feminist theology, black theology, postmodern theories, and critical analyses of consumerist culture. In his academic work, Walter conversed with and sought directly or indirectly the wellbeing of the Church and world. He wrote in ways that reached diverse audiences, crossed denominations, and challenged conventional thinking about faith and culture. Threaded through his work are favored themes of radical justice and divine care for the poor, the afflicted, and the oppressed.
Much of this vast amount of writing Walter accomplished on yellow legal pads, now archived in over 150 banker’s boxes of published and unpublished work in the C. Benton Kline, Jr. Archives at Columbia Seminary. To our continual astonishment, Walter wrote in full sentences and complete paragraphs, though only a few people could decipher his handwriting. For good or ill, his hand and brain were connected directly, Walter would say, and for him to work on a computer interfered with his flow of thought. Scrawled out, his writing was nearly publishable before the ink dried.
Walter’s brilliance and creativity as a scholar, preacher, and lecturer garnered him widespread respect, about which he hardly said anything to his colleagues. He served as the President of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1990. He was awarded a Niebuhr Medal from Elmhurst College. He was one of the first prestigious Henry Luce III Fellows in Theology, and he received eight honorary doctorates.
Despite the ways he expended his energy as a scholar and teacher, he was an engaged institutional citizen and a friend and colleague to so many. He came prepared to meetings concerned with the good of the institution. He argued with his colleagues and often saw larger implications of plans and projects. He could also occasionally be gruff, abrupt, and dismissive of ideas. We two always experienced Walter as a most supportive colleague. He made a point of sharing articles or books with us and others that he thought might be of interest or support research we were doing. He mentored generations of biblical scholars and was often a pastoral presence to students. He was renowned among us for his handwritten notes and emails to celebrate, grieve, and appreciate life’s moments, as well as to comment on committee developments and offer jokes for the day. He wrote thank you notes for thank you notes. His energy seemed boundless, for even as he was teaching, writing, and serving Columbia, he also engaged with local churches on a regular basis as his own worship home and as an extension of his commitment to theological education. It was great fun to be around him in our offices in Richards Center, where he said repeatedly that what we did was better than working. We laughed a lot. About news, the churches, the absurdities of life. Despite invitations to take appointments elsewhere, Walter chose to abide at Columbia, perhaps because his commitment to forming pastoral leaders for the church was a top priority. He took seriously the life of a theological educator.
We are deeply grateful for the privilege and joy of having known and worked with Walter Brueggemann. We stand with the great cloud of witnesses who grieve and remember him. And we are certain that his work matters now more than ever to the Church and the world. Rest in peace, good and faithful servant.
Find out details about the celebration of life service for Dr. Walter Brueggemann including a link to live stream the service.
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The archives contains recordings of lectures at Columbia and correspondence, writings, and notes from his time at both Eden and Columbia.
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