How and Old Testament Scholar Answered the Question, "Is there no balm in Gilead?"

At a difficult time in my life, and in the church where I was pastor, I discovered there is a balm in Gilead. By which I mean I found someone who opened up and interpreted with honesty and passion and razor sharp learning, those ancient documents which we call the Old Testament. And he did so in ways that helped me understand and respond to life situations with a faith more honest and less insecure. Walter Brueggemann is someone to whom thousands of pastors and Christ-followers owe the same debt of being helped to find a faith that is resilient, faithful, utterly honest before God, and not spooked by the angularity and strangeness of Old Testament faith and theology.

I know perfectly well that "There is a balm in Gilead" is an African American spiritual, and the balm is applied by the Great Physician, Jesus. The song has a Christological focus, and is amongst the most beautiful works of devotional solace ever sung. If you need convincing, listen to this link with Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqlDbqKaFks   The words come from Jeremiah, and they answer one of the most poignant questions in the whole blessed Bible:"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? (Jeremiah 8.)

Such questioning sorrow, and struggle of faith, such protest and supplication, seeks a theology robust enough to sustain and inspire the imagination that kindles hope. "Hopeful Imagination" is one of the great gifts Walter Brueggemann unwraps and displays for those who read and wrestle with him. With its companion volume Prophetic Imagination, the theme runs like a platinum thread through Brueggeman's entire opus. Ever since reading those two books, Prophetic Imagination and Hopeful Imagination, I have read, pondered, argued with, been thankful to God for, and been led to pray by the sentences and books of Walter Brueggemann. He is not the only writer to have decisively shaped my faith, but he is uniquely the scholar who has given a thorough education in the persuasive power of a faith without pretence, with open eyes, and with a capacity for hope rooted and grounded in the faithful mercy of God. 

Back to my own first encounters with this then little known Old Testament Professor from some place called Eden Theological Seminary.After being in Baptist ministry for a few years, various life events and more than one quite intractable difficulty began to take their toll on health, spirituality and capacity for good work. As with many of life's problems I tend to try thinking my way through them, around them, seeking both understanding and an inner resolution that, by God's grace and Spirit, makes it possible to live into and then beyond them. The person who has helped me to do that for the past 40 and more years is Walter Brueggemann.

I mention all of this simply because Walter Brueggemann is now 90, and I've passed the biblical entitlement of years myself! So I'm revisiting one or two of those early books, and discovering that Brueggemann's take on God and suffering, 'hesed' and faith as hopeful imagination, Psalms as the faithful believer's playbook and prayer book, - those exegetical stepping stones that help us cross the Jordans that seem uncrossable - they still convince, persuade, reaffirm, and unsettle in a creatively reassuring way. 

The treatment of Genesis 1-3 in his commentary is a rich exposition of what the text is about in telling what God was and is about in creating. This isn't science or history, it is proclamation of God as Creator and creation as that to which God binds himself in a covenant of love, mercy and purposes of goodness leading to life. This is a third read of those 50 pages and I'm not sure I know of a more succinct and theologically sensitive exposition of the doctrine of Creation. These 50 pages would make a brilliant slim paperback with a title like "Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed." 

Oh I know other interpretations of Genesis are available - from Gordon Wenham to Terence Fretheim, from Gerhard von Rad to John Goldingay, and Claus Westermann to Derek Kidner (still a brilliant wee Tyndale commentary). But Brueggemann's Genesis was one of the places I found theological reassurance when life was falling in.

He wrote things like:

[In Genesis 1-3] the news is that God and God's creation are bound in a relation that is assured but at the same time is delicate and precarious." (p.27) 

Or this:

"As a result, our entire world can be received and celebrated as a dimension of God's graceful way with us." (p.27)

And again:

"Creator creates creation. The accent is finally on the subject. And the object must yield, not to force, but to faithful passion. Both the strange resistance of the world and the deep resolve of the creator, persist in the text." (p.20) 

Creation is God's love affair with all that is. The broken world is not left broken. Neither are our hopes and desires for life as God intends. The good news of Genesis is that Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer are words freighted with the eternal purposes and persistent mercies of God, culminating in the great unveiling of that loving purpose when "The Word became flesh and lived amongst us", when "God so loved the world that he gave his only son", and when "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself."

I'm not sure I could have written that paragraph exactly like that if I hadn't enrolled in Walter Brueggemann's distance learning class 40 years ago, and learning to read and ponder the stories that make up the story of "the strange resistance of the world and the deep resolve of the Creator."

Comments

[Angela Almond]

You cannot pray like Peter,
You cannot preach like Paul
But you can tell of Jesus
And say he died for all

[John Rackley]

I am about to start researching a spirituality of struggle and thank you for the phrase ‘a faith more honest and less secure’