Texts that Linger, Words that Explode. By Walter Brueggemann. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000. 140 pp. ISBN #0-8006-3231-1. $16.00 (Paperback).

In the last generation, Walter Brueggemann has done more than any other biblical scholar in North America to relate the Scriptures in a scintillating one to issues of modern life. In this volume he republishes seven essays that have previously appeared in various venues between 1994 and 1998.

In the first essay, whose title is the same as that of the book, Brueggemann studies a number of texts in Jeremiah that influence the community of faith well beyond their first utterance in Jeremiah. He compares Rachel’s weeping for her children, for instance, with Jonathan Kozol’s recent expose of the fate of the homeless in New York City. In another foray he compares and contrasts Jehoiakim’s cutting up the scroll in Jeremiah 36 with the temptations of Jesus in the New Testament. Brueggemann is a constant advocate for the marginalized and a critic of western imperialism. While the powerful may reduce or diminish the Bible, the biblical text keeps surfacing as a weapon of the weak.

Another essay about words that linger and explode deals with Amos 9:7, a text that asserts that the Philistines and the Arameans had their own Exodus alongside that of Israel. Amos thus denies the monopolistic claim made as the only exodus subject of the only exodus event by the only exodus God. Brueggemann finds in this verse a critique of the notion of God’s elect people as it pertains to both Jews and Christians. The mono-propensities that sound most orthodox may be desperate attempts to reduce Yahweh to safer proportions.

Other essays include study of five texts from Isaiah, the figure of Baruch in Jeremiah, the scandal and liberty of particularity, the prophetic word of God and history, and “Always in the Shadow of the Empire.” In the latter essay, Brueggemann reflects on the fact that Israel was almost always dominated by a great international power. This Israel under threat is never an easy “therapeutic” community, and faith in Yahweh is not a massage. The real battle, he relates, is not between liberals and conservatives, but between baptized Christians and those for whom Yahweh has dropped out of the narrative of the world.

Some of these essays were first oral presentations, a genre in which Brueggemann excels. Throughout he reveals an astonishingly wide knowledge of incisive critiques written about our society and an equally refreshing call of the church back to word and sacrament (the latter understood as bodily acts that dramatize full commitment to the rigors of God’s mission). Readers are reminded again how much they participate in the benefits of the complete triumph of military consumerism in our time.

Ralph W. Klein

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago