Old Testament Theology according to Walter Brueggemann Part 5 > > Home

Old Testament Theology according to Walter Brueggemann Part 4

Reflections

Posted Thursday, May 22, 2008 by Charlie Trimm
Categories: Old Testament Theology  

I highly enjoyed reading this book due to a variety of factors. The postmodern ignoring of history and discussion about what was going on behind the text was a refreshing change from the usual discussion of OT theology in the guild. There was little of the usual speculation about multiple sources and redactors. Instead, there was detailed study of the text as it stands. This rejection of history certainly causes problems and I am not sure that a fully satisfying OT theology can be done with a completely synchronic approach as Brueggemann, but if the choice is between a synchronic approach and a traditional historical critical approach, I will choose Brueggemann.

Another helpful feature of Brueggemann is his highlighting of the diversity in the Old Testament. His postmodern pluralistic instincts drive him to see not only plurality in interpretation but also plurality in the text itself. While the classical historical critical method tends to assign this diversity to different sources and conservatives tend to ignore the diversity as much as possible, Brueggemann posits that all this diversity was present at the same time. I do think that Brueggemann (often) takes this diversity too far, but feeling some of the tension in the text makes us better readers.

            Brueggemann helpfully points out that the Pentateuch ends on an open note, with the promises unfulfilled. While he applies it to Israel in exile (a moment of weakness of method, I suppose, as he goes back “behind” the text), the open text as it stands is helpful (209-211). Will Israel conquer the land and the promises to Israel be fulfilled? What will happen? This existential openness is helpful for the reader to enter the story, in a sense, and sympathize with Israel in their open circumstances, wondering whether (how) God will fulfill his promises.

Along with many others, Brueggemann rejects the “one idea of the Old Testament” style of doing Old Testament. He appreciates much of what Walter Eichrodt did, but he thinks that trying to fit all of the Old Testament into one idea is reductionistic. But this is not all, as he points out that one idea is overly cognitive and does not deal with the text in its “rich emotional, aesthetic, rhetorical, and cultural reality” (28). I think that this is a helpful reminder for evangelicals who are sometimes overly focused on intellectually understanding the Bible and not going farther than that.

While there are many helpful aspects to Brueggemann’s theology, it also has deep flaws from my perspective. One of the main problems is his pluralism. Brueggemann takes a postmodern approach to salvation, rejecting the exclusive claims of the Christian gospel. For example, he states that “absolutist claims for the Christian gospel are not only practically destructive but theologically inimical to the gospel itself” (112).

As mentioned earlier, Brueggemann focuses too much on diversity in the text. While conservatives might have gone too far at times in harmonizing tension, Brueggemann overly glories in the diversity. For example, Brueggemann sees two OT trajectories in relation to homosexuality: purity and justice. While both these trajectories are legitimate for him, he thinks that the justice trajectory has “decisively and irreversibly defeated the purity trajectory” (196) in light of the gospel. The relationship between God’s desire to care for himself and to care for Israel is another example.

These resolutions appear to me to be characteristically provisional and tenuous, likely to be unsettled in the next crisis, undone by the next text. The reason for this unsettlement is not finally—speaking theologically—that Israel speaks with many voices (which it does), or that Israel cannot make up its mind (which it cannot); the unsettling quality belongs definitionally to the character of Yahweh. In my judgment, the texts permit no overall solution, because self-regard and regard for Israel are not, in the end, the same. (303)

Another problem with Brueggemann’s work is that he is influenced by postmodernism to reject various clear statements of the text. For example, Brueggemann thinks that the incomparability of YHWH “places the accent not on the claim that there is no other like Yahweh, but that Yahweh really is as said” (143). Further, there is something in the world not under the power of YHWH, something untamed and destructive (159). Brueggemann wants YHWH to be the god for everyone, but he does not want YHWH to be too sovereign.

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