(RNS) — I first encountered Walter Brueggemann’s work nearly 25 years ago, when “The Prophetic Imagination” was assigned in a seminary course I was taking. I can’t remember what else we read that semester, but that book — slim, strange, electric — lodged itself in my imagination and never left.
Brueggemann painted the prophetic task not as angry denunciation or mere moral exhortation, but as the deeply pastoral, deeply disruptive calling to nurture grief and kindle hope. He showed that prophets break the silence not to shout down the empire, but to sing out another world.
Among the early responses to Brueggemann’s death Thursday (June 5) at 92, the most often repeated phrase is “he shaped me.” The vision Brueggemann outlined in “The Prophetic Imagination” did just that for me, at a critical moment. I had come to seminary straight out of Bible college, bringing with me the earnest Pentecostal faith of my youth. Like so many seminarians, I found myself caught between the spiritual world that had formed me and the historical-critical tools I was suddenly being handed.
I still remember the moment in college when my Old Testament professor, with scholarly nonchalance, noted: “Of course, Moses didn’t write his own death.” A wry nod to the final chapter of Deuteronomy — and to the now-standard view among scholars that the Pentateuch was stitched together from multiple voices and eras, not authored by Moses alone. It was meant as a footnote, but to a Pentecostal teenager in the 1990s, it felt like someone had hurled a brick through the stained-glass window of my mind. For the first time, I wasn’t sure the Bible could nourish me anymore. It seemed reduced, deconstructed, turned into nothing more than a historical document.
What I didn’t know at the time was that I was in need of what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a second naïveté — a return to sacred texts with critical distance, reading not in ignorance, but in hope. It was “The Prophetic Imagination” that led me to a deeper and more truthful appreciation for Scripture.
Brueggemann wrote as someone who had wrestled with the text in all its complexity and had come out the other side still listening for the voice of God. His prose was academic and lyrical, unsettling and pastoral. Through him, I learned that Scripture could be both historically situated and spiritually alive. He reintroduced me to a Bible that could once again speak to my heart, my mind and to my public witness.
In my own research and writing, I find myself again and again returning to Brueggemann’s commentary on the Book of Genesis, published in 1983. I couldn’t tell you the first time I opened it, but I do remember how it reframed what I thought I knew about beginnings. For someone raised with a literalist approach to the creation stories, his reading was both destabilizing and liberating. He treated the text not as a scientific account or a rigid moral code but as theological poetry — sacred myth that could still speak with truth and urgency.
But nowhere has Brueggemann’s influence been more consistently felt than in my classroom, as I, now a seminary professor, still assign “The Prophetic Imagination” and my students cite it frequently in their writing, sermons and reflections.
As they read more broadly in Brueggemann’s corpus, my students are drawn to his diagnosis of our cultural captivity to what he called the “myth of scarcity,” the belief that there is not enough to go around, and that we therefore need to hoard, compete and fear. Brueggemann called this a “demonic force” that deforms our imaginations and our economics alike. Against this, he held up the biblical vision of abundance — a God who provides manna in the wilderness and invites Sabbath rest as resistance to empire.
Looking over two decades of syllabi, course notes and collected essays, my own and those I’ve assigned, it’s no exaggeration to say that there’s hardly a theological field untouched by Brueggemann’s wisdom. From biblical studies to political theology, from homiletics to ecclesiology, his voice shaped a generation of pastors and scholars. And through them — and often directly — he shaped the church.
What made his work endure wasn’t just his brilliance, though he had that in spades. It was his ability to combine scholarship with pastoral urgency, critique with hope. He was unafraid to name the idols of our age — consumerism, nationalism, white supremacy — and to do so with theological clarity, not as a pundit, but as a prophet. And he did so while remaining, in some deep sense, a preacher of the word.
His was a voice that could thunder and whisper, often in the same paragraph, and that cadence stays with me. When I hear students struggle to find their footing between historical honesty and spiritual depth, I point them toward Brueggemann. When I’m tempted to believe that the task of theology is primarily to explain, I remember his invitation to imagine. When I grieve the state of the church or the world, I hear him reminding us that grief is holy — and that hope is never naïve when it is rooted in the God of both Exodus and Easter.
Walter Brueggemann didn’t just write about prophets; he showed us what prophetic imagination looks like. Now, even in his absence, we are left with his words, his witness and the charge to sing a better world into being.
(The Very Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is senior vice president and dean of the chapel at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City and author of the forthcoming “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” His Substack is “Making Theology.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
