The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word
Overview
Against the easy assurance of a too-enculturated religion, Walter Brueggemann refocuses the preaching task around the decentering, destabilizing, always risky word that confronts us in Scripture—if we have the courage to hear. These powerful essays, previously available only in journals, are here combined with a newly composed preface and introduction. Includes a foreword from the Reverend William H. Willimon.
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Key Features
- Provides provacative insight about preaching to the modern world
- Demonstrates how truly biblical preaching will always subvert the status quo
- Highlights the power of the biblical message in your preaching
Contents
- Introduction: At Risk with the Text
- Preaching as Reimagination
- The Preacher, the Text, and the People
- Ancient Utterance and Contemporary Hearing
- An Imaginative “Or”
- That the World May Be Redescribed
- The Social Nature of the Biblical Text for Preaching
- The Shrill Voice of the Wounded Party
- Life or Death: De-Privileged Communication
- Preaching to Exiles
- Preaching a Sub-Version
- Truth-Telling as Subversive Obedience
Top Highlights
“There are always rival and competing texts, in the face of which the biblical text may be a countertext that does not primarily describe but subversively redescribes reality.” (Page 24)
“narcotize the congregation and assure them that nothing odd will happen in this hour of utterance.” (Page 4)
“in the preaching moment, the congregation may see itself as among the characters in the drama.” (Page 30)
“Yhwh is the great Equalizer who creates safe space and overrides the threat of dominant claims” (Page 61)
Praise for the Print Edition
Brueggemann provokes an emergency and shames an accommodated, culture-bound, tamed, therapeutic church with his fecund prophetic re-descriptions and creative transpositions that speak the biblical word into our time and place. Unintimidated by the disestablishment of the American Protestant church, he always hears something for us to say that the world is literally dying to hear. He thus gives testimony to a ceaselessly interesting God who speaks, reveals, and discloses, a God who is accurately known only through God’s Word, only through a gaggle of Spirit-filled, evangelical preachers whom the Word has made militant.
—William H. Willimon, from the Foreword
About Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann (ThD, Union Seminary, New York; PhD, St. Louis University) is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He was previously professor of Old Testament at Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis. He is the author of many books, including The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power, and Weakness.