The God of the Unfinished, with Walter Brueggemann

The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann said, is an old text that simply refuses to stay old. “It reads like it was written yesterday.” For him, God offers no artificial closure, but is active in the meantime, and at peace with the “unfinished.”

Walter Brueggemann died on June 5, 2025, at the age of ninety-two, and his own influence is unfinished. This episode is from the Conversing archives: a conversation Mark Labberton hosted with Brueggemann at Fuller Seminary for the 2015 Fuller Forum “Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God.”

Brueggemann was an Old Testament scholar for the sake of the church, the author of over one hundred books including The Prophetic Imagination, and came to the Bible as a text-wrestler, “comfortable with collisions,” taking the Hebrew text and his own life as an artist with equal and total seriousness. He describes his method of exegesis written longhand, “at the end of his pen,” catching himself speaking the words as he writes them.

Together they discuss the artistry of biblical language and why art is inherently subversive; Abraham Joshua Heschel on the suffering of God in Jeremiah; the pastor as scribe rather than prophet; the violence of God in the Old Testament and what it means to call it recovery; and justice as the “willingness to be inconvenienced.” Brueggemann closes with Psalm 73: “ Whom have I in heaven, and who do I desire on Earth but you?”

Walter Brueggemann was the McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Episode Highlights

• A Scholar for the Church: "It took me a while to figure out that I wanted to be a scholar for the church and not for the academy … you wanna maintain your credibility in the academy, but it's not where you live."
• On the Old Testament: "It's so Jewish, and Jewishness means that it's conflicted and multi-vocal and multilayered and complex, and that's the nature of the text, and I think that's the nature of the God who indwells the text."
• The Everlasting Text: "It is an old text, but I always said to my students, it reads like it was written yesterday … it is an old text that refuses to stay old.”
• On Subversiveness: "Art is inherently subversive because it wants to show us reality in a way that we have never before seen it … what we always wanna do with art or with the Bible is that we wanna cram it into the categories of the familiar."
• On Unfinishedness: "This is a God who stays faithful in the unfinishedness … in some ways, God isn't finished becoming God yet. So there is more light to break forth yet in our midst."
• On Fixing Everything: "Our society is about to forget what it means to be human in a technological, capitalist environment … The dominant value system of our society believes that everything can be fixed."
• Justice as Inconvenience: "I don't mind dying for Christ, but I don't wanna be inconvenienced … so much of justice work is just being inconvenienced."

About Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann (1933–2025) was among the most widely read Old Testament scholars of the past century, author of more than one hundred books, including The Prophetic Imagination and Theology of the Old Testament. Born in Tilden, Nebraska, to a German Evangelical pastor, he studied at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, and Saint Louis University. He taught at Eden from 1961 to 1986 and at Columbia Theological Seminary from 1986 until his retirement in 2003, holding the William Marcellus McPheeters chair in Old Testament. His final book, God of All Promises, was published posthumously in 2026.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Walter Brueggemann's official website: https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/
• In memoriam and Celebration of Life service webpage: https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/2025/06/05/in-memory/
• Brueggemann on X: https://twitter.com/waltbrueggemann
• The Prophetic Imagination, 40th Anniversary Edition, Fortress Press: https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506449302/The-Prophetic-Imagination

Show Notes

• In memoriam: Walter Brueggemann, 1933–2025; died June 5, 2025 at 92
• Recorded at the 2015 Fuller Forum: “Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God”
• A rural pastor father, plain in the pulpit and unmistakable in his passion
• Doctoral study at Union under James Muilenburg, a close friend of Abraham Joshua Heschel
• Choosing the church over the academy, and what that vocational choice cost
• Historical criticism as necessary but never sufficient
• Multivocal Scripture
• The Old Testament's Jewishness as conflict, layering, complexity
• An ancient text that reads like it was written yesterday
• Biblical exegesis in longhand
• Micah 4: beating swords into plowshares
• Ecumenism that doesn't coerce
• Particularity over universal generalization; the scandal of incarnation
• Heschel on the pathos of God
• Jeremiah 8 and 9:  ”Oh, that I had bigger tear ducts because I must cry more than my eyes will permit me.”
• Why aiming at a doctrinal or moral outcome turns interpretation coercive
• Wendell Berry, and the discovery that combinations of words do things
• Art as a refusal of the familiar
• Unfinishedness
• Congregations that want closure, and the anxiety of leaving things open
• Biblical literacy
• The violence of God read as recovery rather than projection
• Justice as planned inconvenience: meetings, showing up, critical mass
• Psalm 73, and coming to oneself in a world of commodity
• Why the pastoral task feels urgent in a society sure everything can be fixed

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Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.