🕊️ Walter Brueggemann - In Memory

March 11, 1933 - June 5, 2025

This week, we honor the life and legacy of Walter Brueggemann, one of the most influential biblical scholars of our time. His passing is not only a loss for the academy but for every preacher who has ever opened his commentaries, wrestled with his challenges to the text, or found new courage in his unflinching call to prophetic ministry.

Brueggemann was more than a scholar. He was a truth-teller. He held the tension between faith and reality, history and hope, orthodoxy and imagination. He taught us that the Bible is not flat or fragile. It is alive. It breathes. It disrupts.

In Real World Faith, Brueggemann challenged us to view the Bible not as a collection of ancient tales but as an urgent summons to live faithfully and differently in the here and now. His work called us to take Scripture seriously enough to let it shape how we move through the world and how we love our neighbor, speak truth to power, and practice justice in real time.

What set Brueggemann apart was his insistence on biblical accuracy without biblical idolatry. He revered the text but never at the cost of honesty. He taught us to wrestle with Scripture the way Jacob wrestled with the angel, boldly, prayerfully, wounded, and blessed.

He showed us how lament is sacred. How tension in the text is not a problem to be solved but a truth to be embraced. He urged us not to clean up the messiness of Scripture but to let it speak in its raw, unvarnished voice. Because in that honesty, God speaks.

Brueggemann was not afraid to speak about the social dimensions of faith either. He challenged the church to see beyond its walls, to stand in solidarity with the suffering, and to reclaim its prophetic vocation in a world of despair and denial. He reminded us that faith was never meant to be privatized or sanitized but lived out in community with courage and compassion.

Walter Brueggemann did not give us easy answers. He gave us better questions. And in doing so, he shaped a generation of preachers to stand in pulpits with both reverence and responsibility.

His voice now joins the great cloud of witnesses. But his words remain. His books still line our shelves. His insights still stir our spirits. His faithfulness to the Word still challenges us to be faithful in ours.

Thank you for giving us the truth about the truth.

We will miss him. But we will also carry him with us every time we open the Bible and dare to tell the truth.

Rest well, Dr. Brueggemann. You helped us see the text. And through the text, you helped us see God.