Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291974 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Customer Reviews

Standing against the mainstream
Prolific American scholar Walter Brueggemann has for many years been an important, if slightly discomfiting, voice from that nation's pulpits. In this latest offering, he issues an invitation to the contemporary American church to move away from its embrace of the `cocky, new sound of religion in politics', with its shrill certainties, and towards `openness to wonder' and `awe in glad praise' (1). He does this in a series of sermons and talks that explore the theme of countercultural lifestyle through Old Testament/Hebrew Bible texts - on being for neighbourliness and against acquisitiveness, for Sabbath rest and against the frantic need to be (seen to be) busy, for example. Brueggemann offers some very important and timely reflections, nowhere more so than in the final chapter ('Some Theses on the Bible in the Church'), where he ranges himself against the prevailing cultural norms of `therapeutic, technological, consumer militarism that permeates every dimension of our common life' (192).

Somewhat surprisingly, Brueggemann doesn't propose an easy alternative to all this, a God who has all the answers. The great strength of his position, it seems to me, is that he acknowledges that the alternative `script' we seek to live by is ambiguous and disjunctive, its Key Character `elusive and irascible'. It is precisely in the ambiguity and the uncertainty that the supposed people of faith, both conservative and liberal (or `red' and `blue') can once again become genuinely faithful - people of constantly-evolving trust, not once-for-all, decided certainty.

So why only three stars ? Partly because this is a book for an American church readership, largely treating themes less directly relevant to the UK or European church. But I also felt Brueggemann was less than honest with aspects of Deuteronomy and Joshua, which for all their undoubted `openness' and call to countercultural difference, are also exclusivist and exterminative in intent, seeking to eradicate difference in a way the author doesn't adequately get to grips with. The book's also in need of further editing and better organisation: a work not without its faults, then, for all its undoubted inspirational value in calling for Christians to stand apart from mainstream culture.