Stephen D.

Lowe, Review Article: “Theology of the Old

Testament” by Walter Brueggemann
globaljournalct.com/review-brueggemanns-theology-of-the-old-testament/

Book Review

Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, by Walter Brueggemann.

Fortress Press, 1997.

Reviewed by Stephen D. Lowe, Ph.D., Dean, Department of Christian Education, Trinity

College & Seminary; 75413.77@compuserve.com

Many of us who are fond of the work of Walter Brueggemann have waited a long time for his
magnum opus to appear. Well, now it’s here in all of its 700 plus pages of powerful and
persuasive writing. Brueggemann sets out a biblical theology of the Old Testament that is
comprehensive without being too general and detailed enough to provide solid exegetical
support for his Old Testament paradigm of “testimony.”

Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia

Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Previously he served on the faculty at Eden
Theological Seminary in Missouri (his home state). Although Brueggemann has eloquently
represented the liberal perspective in most of his academic career, he is difficult to label and
file. This is not because he doesn’t know his own mind or because he is a theological
chamaeleon but because he courageously follows the text and the God it faithfully presents
wherever it may lead. For this reason, he can at times castigate his liberal colleagues for
their theological and philosophical provincialism, as he does in Retrospect 1 and 2 which
opens his book. And at other times he can rail against conservatives who too easily justify
their versions of theological truth with dogmatism that is ugly and sub-Christian. This is
probably the reason why I like Brueggemann so much: his honesty with himself and the text.
He is willing to let the chips fall where they may because he is committed to something
higher and more compelling than passing fancies and theological fads.

He continues his courageous pursuit of the truth in this massive volume that explicates his
vision of a grounded biblical theology of the Old Testament. He grounds his proposal in the
deep soil of solid exegesis and profound exposition of his texts. Unlike many liberal scholars,
Brueggemann takes the text seriously without turning it into an idol as some in more
conservative circles have done. By taking the text so seriously, he parts company with many
on the theological left who prefer a more robust “higher critical” approach to the text. But by
following his exegetical nose in this way, he has unearthed a profound and empirically
grounded conception of what the Old Testament is all about: testimony, dispute, advocacy.

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Brueggemann understands the Old Testament to be about God and Israel’s encounter with
him and the subsequent “speech” that provided the basis of Israel’s “core testimony” about
this God, what he had said and done for Israel (Part I). The core witness included a host of
verbs, adjectives, and nouns to describe in great detail what God had said and done. Israel
balanced this visual and verbal disclosure of God with visual and verbal testimony that
involved and included a host of strategies, methods, and means, all designed to
communicate to two primary audiences who serve as recipients of Israel’s witness.
Brueggemann identifies these two audiences when he writes, “The testimony of Israel
concerning Yahweh is always of two kinds, one to reorder the internal life (his) of the
community in ways faithful to Yahweh, the other to invite the world out beyond this
community to reorder its life with reference to Yahweh” (747).

These two kinds of witness have two distinct audiences. The witness to the community is
directed to Israel as the people whom God has called. The witness to this community of faith
is designed to facilitate deeper and stronger faith in God. The other audience consists of
everyone else outside this community of faith who needs to “reorder” themselves in
accordance with the knowledge of God provided by Israel’s witness. Brueggemann falls short
of calling this “invitation” a call to repentance or conversion but what else can it mean? It
certainly cannot be just a call to political correctness for the nations that expects that they will
follow Jewish norms of ethics and morality. Now, to be sure, this too must be in place, but the
textual evidence warrants a deeper and more profound call being made by Israel to the
nations of the world. The “blessing” anticipated in the covenant with Abraham was certainly
understood by the Apostle Paul as a proeuanggelian (first gospel) that included faith in God
and in the promise he had made by extension to Israel and the world (Galatians 3:8)

In addition to the core testimony, Brueggemann also finds in the Old Testament a “counter
testimony” of dispute and advocacy that quarrels with the more settled convictions expressed
in the core testimony (Part II). Brueggemann finds this testimony most eloquently set forth in
the Wisdom literature and especially the Psalms. Here Brueggemann displays his
commitment to a more Jewish reading of the Old Testament. His explanation and
interpretation of the disputatious sections of the Hebrew Bible, are congruent with a more
Hebraic orientation to the relationship between God and Israel. This tradition appreciates
more thoroughly than do Protestant interpreters that the covenantal relationship between
God and Israel meant that as partners in the covenant both had an equal right to complain
about the other. Protestant interpreters often see the covenant in more one-sided terms with
Israel always being on the receiving end of things as one finds in the rib (lawsuit) texts in
which Israel is hauled into court by God and confronted with all of her covenantal failures.
Sometimes, especially in the Psalms, one finds articulated a different type of speech that is
defiant, abrasive, confrontational, and blunt. In many of the Psalms of “disorientation” (see
Brueggemann, Praying the Psalms) when Israel is at a loss to understand God’s ways with
her, one encounters language that challenges God and boldly asserts covenantal privilege.

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This mode of speech is different from that encountered in the core testimony sections of the
Old Testament in which God acts and Israel is acted upon. Brueggemann writes in this
regard that

“The partners in turn break out of the role of object, and, on occasion, become an active
subject and agent face-to-face with Yahweh . . . .These relationships evidence a dimension
of mutuality that speaks insistently against any notion that Yahweh is transcendent beyond
Israel. This quality of relationship (conveniently referred to as “covenant”) is what makes
Yahweh a most peculiar God and makes the Old Testament endlessly interesting,
generative, and unsettling” (409-410).

The God of this kind of covenant is always seen in the Bible as “Yahweh-in-relation” to Israel,
to partners, to nations, to creation and to individual persons.

In Part III, Brueggemann explores Israel’s “unsolicited testimony.” This kind of speech is used
to fill in the details of Israel’s witness and is often not part of the staged question and answer
of the lawcourt scenes so often depicted in Scripture.

Part IV presents Israel’s “embodied testimony” reflected in the Torah, the king, the prophet,
the cult, and the sage. He understands the Torah as a “guard against idolatry,” kingship
permits a more public declaration of Torah in a “mode of communal existence” (697), the
prophets arise during times when the covenant is in danger of being lost and call Israel back
to covenant fidelity, the cult in Israel serves as “a place wherein Israel is assured of Yahweh’s
presence” (697), the sage serves “to make available to Israel a sense of . . . coherence”
(697). Brueggemann suggests that this mediated witness employed a daring combination of
verbal and visual strategies and regularly scheduled meetings and assemblies with elaborate
pageantry and exquisite beauty. The tabernacle, the temple, the festivals and all the other
convocations were richly embellished with visual stimuli designed to not only make a point
but to convey a message. Brueggemann artfully refers to this as a “pedagogy of saturation”
(722). This term hearkens back to an earlier work, The Creative Word (Fortress Press, 1982)
in which Brueggemann, articulated a biblical theology of Christian education grounded in the
Old Testament practice of witness as instruction. Referring to this critical aspect of Israel’s
witnessing task, Brueggemann writes, “This work of parental authority, instruction, and
nurture, surely to be understood here as a multi-generational matter in an extended family, is
not unlike what has in old-fashioned religious terminology been phrased ‘the nurture and
admonition of the Lord’ . . . All of these together constitute a way in which the family
proceeds with intentionality to keep its life-world intact, functioning, and authoritative into the
next generation” (683).

This aspect of Israel’s witnessing task is the most crucial. Because if Israel does not
preserve herself from generation to generation, she faces the real possibility of spiritual
extinction. She came close to this as indicated in that troubling text from Judges 2:10-12a:

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After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up,
who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in
the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their
fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt.

The failure here in this text must be put squarely at the feet of the parents of “that whole
generation” who lived under the leadership of Joshua. The reason for this is because the
responsibility for teaching about “the Lord and what he had done for Israel” or God’s
redemptive deeds (sidqoth), is a parental duty incumbent upon each new generation of
parents. The Book of Deuteronomy and the Psalms both express this task in numerous texts
that do in fact suggest a “pedagogy of saturation.”

The final section of his work (Part V) serves as a dialectic prospect to the opening
retrospective and seeks to anticipate what the debates and discussions in biblical theology
may be about. He sees a new perspective emerging in biblical scholarship that is more
“pluralistic” and less “hegemonic” because with a return to a concern for the message of the
texts, as they stand in their canonical tradition, interpreters will see the obvious pluralism
imbedded in the textual tradition. Brueggemann insists that we must live with this inherent
textual tension and put aside our traditional stances of “Cartesian skeptic” and “Kantian
knower” (708). The tension manifests itself in the text as “dispute and accommodation” (710).
There is a certain uncertainty that is reflected in the textual witness that wishes to leave
open-ended our relationship with God and where it is going. This process invigorates Israel’s
relationship with God “whereby Israel always arrives afresh at Yahweh” (712). Therefore,
biblical theology “need not and dare not be coercive, because it does not aim at a consensus
conclusion. It aims, rather, at an ongoing, contested conversation about the character of
Yahweh” (717). As a result of this approach, Old Testament theology must abandon its
previous dependence upon a “theological skepticism” that wanted to “date everything in the
Old Testament late” or wanted to find the God “who is outside and beyond the text” (721). By
contrast, Brueggemann counters “that we must examine . . . how Israel could rely on such a
lean resource (the text), but why that utterance now seems to us so untrustworthy and
flimsy” (722). While taking issue with previous contributions to the task of Old Testament
theology, Brueggemann also resists the conservative tendency to absolutize and coerce
interpretation of a text that may be held in higher esteem but may still be in danger of being
domesticated by dogma. Brueggemann does not want the text neutered either by
postmodern epistemology or fundamentalist dogmatism. For this reason he insists that
“absolutist claims for the Christian gospel” are counterproductive and inhibit the stance of
openness that one must assume when interpreting the Old Testament text since it does not
“mandate . . . a specifically promised future” (112). Of course, Evangelicals are going to take
issue with Brueggemann at this point, and rightly so. Although we must be kind, considerate,
humble and gracious in our witness, we cannot eliminate the abrasive quality of the Christian
gospel. Whether this gospel is proclaimed to Jews, Muslims, White Supremacist or United

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Methodists (my denomination), it will have a confrontational quality simply because it
confronts our sin and autonomy with the claims of God in Christ. It is hard to get away from
this in the New Testament text.

Brueggemann’s work is exquisitely written, appropriately nuanced, fortified with ample notes,
where warranted, and substantiated with sound exegesis. Although he offers his work as a
significant contribution to the existing literature of biblical theology, and as a way to counter
some of the less than helpful previous approaches, his volume will certainly be appreciated
by Christian educators because of the obvious implications that follow from his explication of
the model of testimony (witness). It is a model weighted with educational overtones. The
model of witness lends itself to a direct application to education settings in which the verbal
mode predominates and the visual accentuates what is being taught. His model suggest the
way in which Israel went about the task of religious instruction. By a variety of methods and
strategies, all designed for one purpose, Israel witnessed not only to the nations about what
the Lord had done for Israel, but also to her own children. When Israel followed this God-
ordained formula she experienced God’s blessings. When she wandered from it, as in
Judges 2, she paid a heavy price. The strength of Brueggemann’s model is that it begins
with the text of Scripture and allows that text to grow its own pattern. So often when Christian
educators write these kinds of books, they co-opt the text to make educational points. I don’t
think Brueggemann had any intention of writing a biblical theology of Christian education, but
in fact he has given us one if we will read it with a discerning eye and a receptive heart.

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