The 'Dangerous Oddness' of Walter Brueggemann

Last week we lost a theological giant: Walter Brueggemann passed away on June 5 at the age of 92.

It would be impossible for me to overstate the profound impact that Brueggemann had on justice-oriented Christians. Not only did he write more than 100 influential books of theology and biblical criticism over the course of his long career, he also wrote dozens of articles for Sojourners. There are very few theologians I can think of who taught me as much as Brueggemann did about how to read the Bible and what a deepened understanding of scripture reveals about God’s heart for justice and our ability to imagine a world beyond empire.

Brueggemann first wrote for Sojourners in November 1983, offering analysis of the lectionary texts for the first two Sundays in Advent. In speaking to the challenge of discarding a status quo from which all too many of us benefit, Brueggemann says: 

Many of us benefit from the marginality of the poor, and we do not want it to change. In the real commitments of our lives, we are deeply in conflict with the new reign. And we are without hope, meaning we do not want, expect, or welcome the new leader. In our moments of honesty, we crave our hopelessness because it lets us keep things as they are. 

But the new sovereign comes on the wind—by the Spirit (Isaiah 11:2, Matthew 3:11, Romans 15:13). That means he cannot be stopped and will not be resisted. The Spirit works through us, among us, and even against us. The Spirit in these days would indeed work against our hopelessness to let us hope. 

It’s an evocative statement that captures the despair many Americans felt in the context of Reagan-era consumerism. And as we look around in 2025, can we claim that American society and our relationship to economic inequality has meaningfully changed?

Yet while facing this difficult truth, Brueggemann offers a powerful and hopeful image of the Spirit on the wind: Sometimes even despite our best efforts, God will challenge us, shaking us out of the despair that perpetuates an unjust status quo. The Spirit not only insists that a better world possible, but – as Brueggemann knew as well as anyone — also prompts us to embody active hope, co-laboring with God to bring that new world about.

Brueggemann’s most influential book is undoubtedly The Prophetic Imagination, which was published in 1978 and has sold more than a million copies. The book is frequently assigned in seminaries and is one that I still recommend to our fellows or anyone who wants a justice-rooted exegesis of the prophets and Jesus. When I first read The Prophetic Imagination in 2004, I had just started at Sojourners as political director. I was struck by how Brueggemann roots discipleship in a radical commitment to act in solidarity with the disinherited, dismantling the evils of empire or, as he would have put it, the “royal consciousness.” Brueggemann pointed out that throughout the Bible, kings and military leaders embodied a way of thinking concerned with the acquisition of power or wealth, often at the expense of those most vulnerable in that society. He noted that this “royal consciousness” was repeatedly rebuked by the prophets and ultimately, Jesus.

Brueggemann writes:

In both his teaching and his very presence, Jesus of Nazareth presented the ultimate criticism of the royal consciousness. He has, in fact, dismantled the dominant culture and nullified its claims. The way of his ultimate criticism is his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity. The only solidarity worth affirming is solidarity characterized by the same helplessness they know and experience.

Bruggemann took this declaration of solidarity even further, exploring what it demands of us in one of the book’s most powerful moments, when he writes:

We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought … the imagination must come before the implementation..”

We are living through a grave moment in our politics today, when Christian faith is being misused and abused to advance nationalism and autocracy. It makes what Brueggeman called God’s “preferred futures” seem farther away than ever. And that’s not accidental; as Brueggemann repeatedly pointed out, one of empire’s key projects is to shrink our imagination until the future we imagine doesn’t threaten its agenda.

I can’t but help but wonder what prophetic words Brueggemann might offer as President Donald Trump co-opts the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army to celebrate his own birthday with a military parade. I suspect he would see this spectacle as an attempt to cement royal consciousness and shrink our ability to imagine and build a different world. I hope that U.S. voters of all political persuasions pay attention to this $45 million vanity project to parade weapons of war through downtown D.C. — weapons our taxpayer dollars fund through a bloated, nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget.

In 2018, Walter was scheduled to give a speech at a leadership gathering Sojourners organized in Washington, D.C. He was unable to travel due to his health, so he presented his speech by pre-recorded video. I’ll admit I was skeptical a video would work out well. But the hundreds of people assembled in the auditorium were absolutely spellbound and as the speech ended, we all — myself included — gave the video a standing ovation. I have never seen something like that happen. It was just that good.

In that speech (which you can read in full), Walter updates the language of a “royal consciousness” and describes empire as “an ideological totalism, that intends to contain all thinkable, imaginable, doable social possibilities.” He said that in opposition to that would-be all-encompassing force, the prophets represent “poetic voices that are dangerous and subversive…because they are voices that come from outside the totalism and that refuse to accept the totalism as normative.” He then charges all of us — as I would charge all of you who are reading his words in this column — with continuing that prophetic legacy in our time, today:

So, the practice of prophetic imagination … requires energy, courage, and freedom, and the sense of being otherwise. And I have no doubt that we are now arriving at a moment when there is no more middle ground. That we either sign on uncritically to the totalism, or we take on this task of dangerous oddness that exposes the contradictions and performs the alternatives. 

Walter’s words here echo the concept of “creative maladjustment,” a turn of phrase from Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that I’ve often used to describe Sojourners’ mission. Re-reading Walter’s speech to us after his passing re-affirms my commitment to insist on a resilient hope for a better world, especially when it feels difficult to imagine outside Trump’s totalism.

As Walter now joins the great cloud of witnesses alongside other departed heroes like Vincent Harding and Dorothy Day, it’s a balm to trust that Walter will still be in our corner, cheering us on. Thanks to his legacy, we can keep prophetically imagining and relentlessly working to build a more just and peaceful world because of our faith in a liberative and redemptive God.