Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

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Walter 0:00

I think the day is over, when pastors can coddle parishioners and work very hard not to offend them. In fact, the gospel is a great offense. And it offends us more the extent to which we are committed to the dominant ideology. I understand how risky that is and how dangerous it is. But that is exactly how risky and how dangerous it was in Germany.

And a very small part of the church had the courage to do that. But I think There are many lay people who understand this as well. And what preachers have to do is to find allies, on lay people, no lay people have succumbed to the dominant ideology very many late people know better than that. And they are waiting to be empowered and, and verified in their hunches about what the gospel requires of us.

Seth Price 1:41

You are listening to the Can I Say This At Church podcast and I'm happy that you are before I get started. If you have not yet done so, go to patreon.com/CanISay ThisAtChurch or CanISayThisAtChurch.com and click the button for Patreon become a supporting person that listens to the show. This show is entirely supported by the listeners. And I am entirely entirely grateful for that. And I would encourage you to do so if you haven't, you get some perks and new things coming. I'm gonna try to do some videos only for y'all. Where I'm just hopefully doing that and you'll hear a bit from me a little bit different flavor, but we'll get there later; today though I am so flippin excited. Today's guest is Walter Brueggemann in he has to be one of the most influential biblical scholars of our time. He's authored over 100 books, and I'll say that again, 100 books many of us have never read 100 books and he's written over 100 books.

His works have greatly influenced me I love the way that he talks about prophecy and what prophetic voices are and what a prophetic imagination is, and what when we think about the Old Testament into scripture as a whole, what the story and the overarching themes are and how that impacts our posture for how we seek to live in the world today as Christians, I really think you're gonna enjoy it. Walter and I had to talk about so at the end of the show, as you're listening please shoot me some feedback. Some comments, let me know what you thought. Share it with your friends. Here we go. Walter Brueggemann roll the tape.

Seth Price 3:51

Dr. Walter Brueggemann, thank you so much for joining me on the Can I Say This At Church podcast. We alluded to it a minute ago before we started but I am very excited to speak with you and thank you for taking the time to be here today.

Walter 4:04

I'm very glad to get to be with you, thanks.

Seth Price 4:06

So normally, I have people introduce themselves a bit, but I'd like to forego that mostly because I feel like you have been prolific enough of a writer and an influence in so much of church and in Christianity, at least in the circles that I'm in that, that I would like to not belabor that point. And so I'd like to start with a slightly different question. Overall today I want to talk a little bit about prophecy, prophetic interpretations of Scripture, and then just kind of what that means for today. But to build that foundation, what do you think, or what purpose does the Bible specifically the Old Testament have for us practically today in quote, unquote, the West but for today's purposes, I guess we could say America, or Canada, but I live in America.

Walter 4:58

Yes, right. Well, The Bible and therefore the Old Testament, I think articulates an alternative narrative of what it means to live responsibly and joyously in God's world. The dominant narrative in our American culture is a narrative of fear, anxiety, accumulation, and violence. And the counter narrative of the Bible provides the foundation for a different kind of life that focuses upon generosity, abundance, and neighborliness. And I think today that our work in Biblical interpretation is to show how the dominant, the primary, narrative of the Bible contradicts the dominant narrative of our culture.

Obviously, there are many, what I would call fake interpreters, who read the Bible as though he had served phenomenal, dominant narrative of our society. But I think that's not an honest case to make.

Seth Price 6:26

What do you mean by that, where they read it in a way that it serves our society specifically?

Walter 6:31

Well, it's all the confusion of God and nation and we read the text as though America is the chosen people and as though our greed has God's will, and so our militarism serves being chosen as God's people, etc, etc, etc. And in fact, it is the same seduction The German church practiced under Hitler, in which it found it easy enough to accommodate the gospel to the claims of national socialism. And I think much of the American church is engaged in the same practice.

Seth Price 7:20

So that's from what I remember reading about your your biography. That is a lot of your background. And so what would you say are two or three similarities, I guess, of the Christian faith in Germany at that time and where we're at today?

Walter 7:36

Well, I think it was the assumption that the main function of Christian faith, and the church, was to legitimate the regime and behind that is, in order enormous anxiety about the collapse of old certitudes that have an economic spin off, and an appeal to authoritarianism, as though somebody is a master who can solve all these problems and work out all these issues, and that we are willing to lose our civil rights in the interest of security and prosperity. I think that's exactly what happened to Germany. Because after the First World War, there was a great failure of nerve in Germany. The economy was not doing well and Hitler presented himself as the one who could solve all these problems, and very many Germans simply signed on for that authoritarianism. I think we're, I think we're moving in the same direction.

Seth Price 9:00

I don't disagree, but it is disheartening to hear that because I have a lot of life left ahead of me. And I would rather that specific chapter in history not really ever repeat itself. But that's probably naive of me to say that it won't because I think you're right things progressively tend to get worse. With that in mind what is the role of a prophet like how do we today know when someone's speaking out; and they're raising their voice, so to speak, and they're finding what they're called to say, how do we weigh and test that—either Biblically, or extra-Biblically, how do we weigh in know that what they're saying is a word that we should heed?

Walter 9:42

Well, it's not easy or obvious, but I think that we have to have a very clear sense of Biblical revelation of the character and will and purpose of God and I have no doubt that the main trajectory of Biblical faith is that a God wills, generous, abundant, peaceful, just neighborliness. And any voice that serves a cause other than that, I think is a false voice. So that is not identification with liberalism or conservatism. I think there can be responsible conservatives and responsible liberals been a Christian conservative or a Christian liberal has to be engaged on behalf of the common good that practices peace on the basis of economic justice. And I don't think it's complex to see the main outline of that plot.

Seth Price 11:01

If you were that voice, giving voice to that, and tomorrow, economic justice was achieved. What does that look like and how does the church pull alongside that in unison?

Walter 11:15

Well, I think the church is very good at neighborly charity and I don't discount that. I think that's really important. But the church also has to be engaged at a policy level urging that we have laws and statutes and regulations that protect the common good, that provide viability for economically vulnerable people. And we are now in a season of political reactionism in which deregulation is unleashing predatory powers and the absurd tax law that was passed simply monopolizes the wealth for the powerful few at the expense of the many who are vulnerable and the church has to be engaged in those issues to redress those cynical acts of injustice.

Seth Price 12:25

Well, I guess here's my question. So if I was a pastor, which I don't think I could ever do, but if I was a pastor, there's a part of me that I don't know that I would have the gumption to stand up and say that in church knowing that the people in that church are probably not going to continue to attend there and so I've got a vested self interest in not doing that.

Walter 12:48

Well, I don't think it's the aim to, to upset or antagonize people and I don't think it's easy. But when a pastor needs is a long range teaching strategy, so that the congregation gets introduced to interpretive categories, so that they can read what's going on in our society differently, which was the task of the prophets. And I think the day is over, when pastors can coddle parishioners and work very hard not to offend them. In fact, the gospel is a great offense. And it offends us more the extent to which we are committed to the dominant ideology. I understand how risky that is and how dangerous it is. But that is exactly how risky and how dangerous it was in Germany.

And a very small part of the church had the courage to do that. But I think there are many lay people who understand this as well. And what preachers have to do is to find allies, on lay people, no lay people have succumbed to the dominant ideology very many late people know better than that. And they are waiting to be empowered and, and verified in their hunches about what the gospel requires of us.

Seth Price 14:27

Yeah, I would agree with that mostly because I hope I'm doing something similar to that in in the effort of this podcast of just voicing and questioning and, and pressing issues that bother me. And I find a lot of pushback but I also find an overwhelmingly more people are like, “Hey, I appreciate you taking the time to wrestle with this because it needs to be wrestled with”, for a pastor preaching on Sunday or Wednesday or whatever day what are some of those categories? You talked about the categories of the profits, what are some of those? Can you drill in on those a bit?

Walter 14:58

Well, the way I formulated lately is that the task of preacher of a prophetic preaching is not to harp on specific issues. But it is to imagine the world as though the God of the gospel were a real agent. And if you if one does that, if you imagine the God, the God of the gospel is a real agent, then we have to identify the things in which we are implicated, this contradict to the purposes of God, that's not very hard to do, we can see what contradicts the God of the gospel.

And what we know is that matters that contradict of god of the gospel, eventually end in profound trouble. So you cannot separate children from families and displace them and not expect outcomes that are negative. That is a contradiction of the God of the golf. That's an easy case.

But you can find many other cases, the whole business of monopolizing healthcare for money people and proposing junk coverage for poor people, that doesn't help people at all with health care. That's a contradiction of the God of the gospel, etc, etc, etc. So it's not it's not scolding, it's not harping. It's teaching people how to think gospel a, about the reality of a world. And we can do some of that because when people come to church, they expect us to talk differently about many things we ought to be doing that we ought not to be an echo of what people thought before they come to church.

Seth Price 17:11

Yeah, and if we are echoing what I'm hearing you say is we need to stop coddling people to make them feel good that that's not the purpose that you come to church.

Walter 17:21

That’s correct. I understand pastoral care. I understand pastoral gentleness. I'm not against any of that. But but that's, that's different than letting the illusions of the dominant narrative become normative for baptized people.

Seth Price 17:41

Yeah. When you said counter narrative earlier, is that what you mean that scripture is speaking out against whatever the current culture is, or a specific culture?

Walter 17:51

Well, I'm talking specifically about our culture. I think you could say the same in many other contexts, but But I'm not interested in that kind of generalization. I am interested in the place where God has put us in the midst of this dominant narrative. Which is a narrative, as I've said, of fear, anxiety, scarcity and violence.

Seth Price 18:17

I agree. Yeah, we did in an adult Vacation Bible School since the parents were already there. And someone brought up in it a few months ago that they wondered why churches don't engage in hard conversations more. And I remember my pastor saying he's like, you know, it's hard to do that, because we're really good at it, scaring people into continuing to come to church, and that he thought maybe or I hope I don't put words in his mouth that, that there may be a certain type of a mentality in churches and pastoral ships that I need you to be a certain level of scared because that's what keeps you coming in, which is the wrong way.

Walter 18:58

Yeah, I don't think it's a matter of scaring people. I think it's a matter of helping people think through what it means to be baptized. And, you know, we, in the Christian congregation, baptized people have signed on for this particular version of reality. And we've not done a good job of helping people think about what that means. So there's there's no scare in it. In fact, it's a gift to come down where you ought to be. And what this teaching does, when it is well done, it helps us get in sync with our true selves, and gives us comfort and ease. But as long as we are committed to practicing the contradiction we are just buying loads and loads of anxiety for ourselves. And there's nobody to talk about that except the church.

Seth Price 20:12

Yeah, if they won't, nobody will. You have used an analogy in the past of and I like it specifically because I've used your I quoted you in the past of you know, when we're reading scripture, we have to make sure that we are at least aware of our own biases reading into the text, but I have my own biases when I read you know, Harry Potter as well, anything I'm reading, the newspaper, the news, Facebook, I have a programmed ingrained bias that I was born with based on the culture that I grew up in. And so when you talk about scripture I've heard you use the analogy that scripture is is should be looked at more like a compost pile. Can you go into that a bit?

Walter 20:50

Well, what I meant is that then a compost pile if you just leave it alone, it will sprout new growth. And the new growth consists in insight and courage and resolve and grace. And the wonderful thing about the compost pile is you don't know how will come out. You don't you don't know what it's going to produce.

So my use of that image is to suggest that the Bible cannot be read as though everything in it had one meaning. It's more ambiguous, it's more open. It's more risky, it's more demanding. It's more imaginative than to think that it is a flat statement that you once get and you're done. Now, the point of all that is to say if we're serious about the Bible, we must be engaged in interpretation, so we can't just read it out as though it's perfectly obvious. And when you get to serious interpretation, that's when our fears and our hopes and our hurts impinge upon us, and cause us to read and understand in certain ways. So it's a very complex process. And I think that what the church needs to do is to invite more people in to that complex process.

What authoritarianism wants to do, whether it's authoritarianism of the government or the authoritarianism of Church orthodoxy, wants people to think that there's one answer to every question and you just get that and then you're done. I'd like to say, it's like having a teenager in the house, and having a teenager in the house means you've got to endlessly renegotiate everything. And that's how it is in Biblical interpretation, which is why we keep at the task of writing new commentaries, and why we have not yet written our final sermon, but we keep writing fresh sermons, because the task of interpretation is endlessly demanding. And we need to equip and empower people to engage in that process, because what that process does is it militates against every authoritarianism.

Seth Price 24:26

How do we deal with texts that have multiple interpretations or texts that are harder than I feel like my pay grade allows me to engage in and I'm thinking of texts, like Ezekiel and waterwheels in the sky and I really struggle with those. So how does someone like myself even begin to engage in that outside of the tried answers of will just read it and pray on it and you know, yeah, that's not gonna be good for me?

Walter 24:50

Yeah, I think you're right. I think some are very hard and there's some that I don't understand, but I always I always like to ask two questions of text like that? One is, can you think of a reason why somebody included in the Bible? What did they think they were doing with that? And that requires imagination. And the second question is if this text doesn't make any sense to me, who can I think of in the world today that might take up this text and find it meaningful? What that does is to break me out of my little cozy interpretation cell to allow meanings other than the ones that are obvious to me. Now that doesn't solve everything. But it can open things up…

Seth Price 25:45

just to clarify that you're meaning not who can I find that can speak with authority on this, but who can I try to put myself in the view of or the culture of and try to read the text that way?

Walter 25:59

That's right. If you take for example, the story of Ruth, Katharine Sakenfeld, an Old Testament scholar, did a lot of work on family structure in Southeast Asia. She spent a lot of time over there. And what she discovered is that they read over there, the people she dealt with, read the story of Ruth as being basically about the tricky interaction between a mother in law and a daughter in law. Well, that's hardly a question comes up in our interpretation of Ruth. So you know, people in different cultural settings, we'll find ways into texts that do not occur to us.

Seth Price 26:51

I recently spoke with a gentleman out of Arkansas who wrote the Forgotten books of the Bible and he dealt with Ruth in that and sometimes And it stuck with me since reading it is, is the role of the “Redeemer” and if there's a vernacular for that, for today's society, like if that role still needs to exist, should it exist and can it exist? And I still don't know if it does exist if there's anything like that. And I feel like if there's not there should be, but I don't know what that looks like.

Walter 27:23

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's worth working on. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Seth Price 27:29

So when I take away certainty, how do I know what I'm reading is true?

Walter 27:36

You test it out by saying…it's a practical test, “What if I lived according to this insight, what would happen to me? What would I do?”, and if it leads to behavior that you sense is not appropriate, then that cannot be truth.

Seth Price 28:06

I wanted to ask so I heard you in an interview, and I feel like it was years ago, before I ever decided to do this, but I can't source where it was. And so I hope I'm not taking it out of context I might be and if I am, tell me and we'll leave it in and I'll eat that crow. Um, I heard you say something that the, that the Old Testament and the destruction of Jerusalem is a parallel or can be made as a parallel to what happened to America on September 11. And when I heard you say that it wasn't off putting, but there's a part of it. That reminds me of those preachers that will say, of course, the hurricane destroyed Florida, there's too many gays in Florida. Or of course, this happened, this calamity happened. So am I wrong in hearing that or did I miss the point when you said that?

Walter 28:52

Well, I don't want to suggest that it's a one to one analogy, and my inclination is not to read from the destruction of Jerusalem to 9/11, but to read from 9/11 back to the destruction of Jerusalem, because what 9/11 suggested to us is that America is more vulnerable than we thought and that was the big discovery in ancient Jerusalem. So, to draw that kind of analogy helps us read the Bible more knowingly, and it may have spin offs. If you if you read it back and forth both ways. It may have spin offs to understand 9/11 differently, because I want to be asking, why was 9/11 such a traumatic event for us because there had been many crises in which many, many more people died? So my reading of that is 9/11 became such a crisis, because of its symbolic value, not because of the actual bodies.

So then I asked, well, what does it symbolize? And what it symbolizes is that America as God's chosen people, is at risk. So that's how the back and forth, it seems to me, helps us at the same time, interpret our circumstance and the circumstance in the Bible about which we're reading. But that is not to say that God sent those airplanes… You know, what do you think about that let it lay there. let it do its work.

Seth Price 31:07

Yeah. Well, I don't like to be uncomfortable. So I don't I don't really want to. Um, I will. But if there's anything I've learned this year, it's, I grow when I'm uncomfortable, and I hate every single minute of it.

Walter 31:21

Of course, of course! Which is why the preacher gets such resistance. Because it's uncomfortable, and I don't want to be uncomfortable.

Seth Price 31:30

It's something I'm wrestling with now. And I spoke with the gentleman that listens to the show yesterday, he just called me out of the blue and something we talked about, how do I wrestle with or how would you recommend someone wrestle with the the counter testimonies that we find in Scripture? So like, I have promises that God will never leave me or forsake me but a lot of places in the Old Testament, he certainly appears to do so like I'm gonna be here and I'll be gone for a bit I'll be back and when I get back, we'll be good. Or like I have, you know, the Old Testament violence of God and I have the love your neighbor version that's not the same. So how do I sit with this?

Walter 32:04

In my old testament theology I’ve tried to lay out the tension between the core testimony and the counter judgment. That's what I called it. And sometimes the the counter testimony of the Bible that tells against the core testimony strikes us as true. So that's also biblical. So, if one is a pastor, and no one is experiencing, the absence of God or the violence of God, the work of the pastor is not to talk them out of that (but) the work of the pastor is to help them live with it, and see what comes of it.

So those texts are really important because they are so close to lived reality. And the Bible is not a it's not an escape hatch that lets us out all the trouble stuff. But what the Bible does is to help us process all that trouble stuff by giving us text that brings that stuff to speech. And it can be brought to speech, then it can be processed. If it is not brought to speech. It will never be processed.

Seth Price 33:25

I agree. And the reason I ask is, often I find when things go wrong, I feel the absence of God like when, I mean, my wife is a pediatric nurse, and she deals with a lot of kids with cancer. And I can't imagine if I put myself in that same mind's eye, if one of my children had cancer, that I would feel the abundant presence of God. And part of me feels guilty for that and the other part of me feels righteous and feeling that way. And so I personally just wrestle with both aspects of that.

Walter 33:53

See, what I think is that the awareness that there are these contradictions in the Bible, what I call a core and counter testimony is a mirror of the contradictions that we are carrying around in our bodies. So we are mixes of faith and unfaith, of certitude and doubt and all of that. And the dominant narrative of our society requires us to pretend that we do not have that unsettlement going on in our bodies. But but that's the truth of the human self, the human self, every human self, is a conundrum of contradictions. And our human work is to process those contradictions. And the Bible helps us do that by bringing the many facets of the conversation To speech. So on different days, in different situations, we resonate with different kinds of texts that give voice to one element of the contradiction that we are carrying in our bodies.

Seth Price 35:19

But that doesn't devalue or de-weight the other voices. They're still present. I'm just not engaging with them right now.

Walter 35:25

That's right. That's right. Yep.

Seth Price 35:28

I like that. I don't know that I've ever heard you say that or read you say that. I like that a lot. I actually got when you were when you're talking about I got. I was trying to write it down. And it didn't work very well. So luckily, we're recording this so listen to it again. So I want to switch gears a bit to prayer. Because I feel like most prayer in America is trite and maybe that's just the circles that I'm in. But I'm finding in this season in my life, that if I spend time intentionally praying that it does change me, and I don't do it regularly enough, but how would you say we can engage as a as a culture and as a religion and as a church and a people in an imaginative view of prayer. And then what I mean before we answer that, what is an imaginative view of prayer?

Walter 36:13

Well, I, as you may know, I have published some prayers. And I think you're right most prayers in the church are pretty flat and unimaginative. So my habit about praying is to find an image or a metaphor and walk around it, and just keep walking around it so that it yields something. So you might, you know, do a tree or a spring water, or an orphan, or a flag, or even many numbers of concrete objects you can think about, or a second strategy that I have found useful is to take a biblical text and pray it back to God.

There's a marvelous example of that I’ll just cite the the text, I won't go into it. But in Exodus 34:6-7 there is this declaration that God is steadfast and long suffering and all that good stuff. And in Numbers 14, word for word, Moses praise that those same words back to God and lays it on God. So I think it's very useful to take Scripture and pray it back to God in ways that are demanding, and honest, and uncompromising.

So that the engagement that we make with God ought to be strenuous and honest. And what you can see about the prayers of the Old Testament is that the human person who prays has a great sense of entitlement in the presence of God. Most of our prayers are excessively deferential to God. And there isn't much of that deference in Old Testament prayers. So you just take Job as an example, Job before God was filled with chutzpah, and I think that's a very healthy way to pray.

Seth Price 38:45

I like that, besides the Lord's Prayer, I've never really tried to…I've done some lectio Divina, but that's not quite the same as what you're saying. So I do like that. I'm going to give that, I'm going to give that ago. Have. So I asked Brian Zahnd many, many months ago, if he thought that America the way that we're currently postured is like a new version of Babylon thinking of Babylon and the biblical text. I'm curious your thoughts on that analogy?

Walter 39:15

Well, I think so. I've, you know, I think the analogs are always complex. But yes, I do think that and if you read the characterization of Babylon in the book of Revelation, I think it's maybe chapter 18 or somewhere there. It rings true, because the accusation that is made of Babylon is that everything and everyone has been turned into a commodity. And that's pretty much the case in capitalist America, everything and everyone has a price and that's how we are Great. So I think there's a lot to that, yes.

Seth Price 40:03

Thinking of America, and this is a question I posed actually on Facebook last night, which has gotten a bit of traction and more than I thought it would. Do you feel that we will I feel like I know what your answer is going to be but but humor me, do you feel like we idolize currently in the culture and the political climate and m the Empire saturation that we have in America, the Make America Great Again, as an idol, that it is become elevated above the Bible, above Jesus, above the kingdom of God. And that has become the focus on what we should inform our opinions of other people and our policies in our direction.

Walter 40:43

Yes! And I think that slogan is profoundly racist. The “Great Again”, that's being talked about is white supremacy. I do think it is an idol and I think it's very seductive among us.

Seth Price 41:02

Yeah, I fully agree with that it was only great for a very small subset of human beings that happen to live here it was not great for everyone for most, actually. So how do we unwind that then? Is it realistic to think that America is going to be able to unwind itself from its love affair with Empire? And its lust for greed? Or is it inevitable that we just run our course and explode like Rome did? Which oddly enough, one of the comments on that question was an analogy to making Rome great again, and he made the similar correlations of you know, how someone's elected the appeal to Empireism, the appeal to Nihilist thoughts, there was a lot of correlations that I never thought about before. Do you think it's possible for us to unwind ourselves or is this just inevitable that we explode?

Walter 41:51

I think that depends on good teaching and good preaching, and that requires a great deal of courage, but I think it's art ask whether whether it will succeed? I don't think we know. But I say I think we have to do a lot of teaching about American history. That's why there is such a battle about textbooks. And that's why so called Christian Schools want to shellac black American history. They don't want to tell the truth about slavery, about Native Americans, about American history being essentially the history of brutality, etc, etc, etc. And we have a great deal of work to do about that.

Seth Price 42:40

Yeah, I want to ask you just a final question because I'd like it to affect the way that everyone listening helps to raise the next generation. And so in my experience, I always feel like the generation before me feels like they have the quote unquote, true theology. And if I'm honest I think most of the time I feel like where I'm at is true because it is for me. And so with that in mind, how do we posture ourselves toward Scripture in the Bible in such a way that we don't lose the next generation? Because all signs seem to point that they are not interested in engaging in any way, shape or form in any long term format of church. So how do we course correct that?

Walter 43:23

I don't know the answer to that. Well, what I was going to say before you said your last sentence is, I think the problem for young people is not testimony in Scripture, if the institution of the church and the church will have to find very different and very fresh ways of living out his life. And that really is beyond my competence to know about that but it's going to be radically new forms. That will feel very really uncomfortable and displacing for very many of us. Yeah.

Seth Price 44:05

Well, as we alluded to earlier, the uncomfort is usually when you grow, but I don't like it either. So that's right. It's right buckle up, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a horrible ride. And hopefully the end is good. Who do you think besides yourself are for those listening and we'll close with this are some some poetic or prophetic voices that are currently in our purvey now that people that want to get engaged in imaginative views of Scripture and imaginative use of prayer, or just other viewpoints? Who would be some people, including yourself that you would that you would direct people to?

Walter 44:41

Well, Jim Wallace at Sojourners is certainly one. Michael Lerner who is the editor of the Jewish journal Tikkun. But I don't I don't keep a list like that. I think William Barber who was leading the Poor People's March I suspect Bishop Curry of the Episcopal Church is out in front and stuff like that.

Seth Price 45:16

One of the thoughts that I'm liking in that list is they're not all Baptists. They're not all Catholic. They're not all Protestant. Like they're, they're different channels, which I think is a beautiful picture of ecumenism.

Walter 45:29

That’s right.

Seth Price 45:31

Yeah. Well, but engaging in that forces you to deal with Scripture in a different viewpoint in and of itself, because they're coming from a different background. So I like that part of that list. Dr. Brueggemann, thank you so much for coming on today; it was a pleasure, a genuine pleasure, to speak with you. So I'm so thankful for you coming on.

Walter 45:51

Well, it's great to talk with you.

Seth Price 45:57

All right. So you're all here with me, mmmm…so good. Walter Brueggemann is one of the smartest people I've ever spoken with. And I'm so thankful that he was able to come on, I hope that you got as much out of that as I did. Specifically thinking about it in terms of this election cycle, and what the counter narrative of Scripture is, and how we should really posture ourselves to not just the Old Testament, but the New Testament and the underlying over arching theme of Scripture. So, so thankful that I was able to talk with Walter.

Another thing I'm thankful for. So this show is about to hit its annual anniversary and I have no signs that will be slowing down anytime soon. I am so excited for that. so thankful for that and honestly so blown away, that so many of you were engaging in the show, I would encourage you to share the show on social media. Tell your friends family, please rate and review the show.

And as a second bonus a few episodes back with Paul Thomas about the butterflies book and the overarching love story of God in the Bible and Scripture and what that means for humanity as we try to relate to the divine. Paul has quite a bit of knowledge about El Salvador and a bit more knowledge of Latin America and the history there and the culture there because he's spent some time there. And I just don't have that knowledge. And I've learned so much from talking with Paul. And so he offered to talk a bit about the canonization and all the services that went around in the fall, for the beautification of Oscar Romero into (into Sainthood). What that looks like in the context around the socio political climate, what the church climate time, guerrilla warfare just so much there, and the feedback from the first part of that bonus episode that many of you have heard has been amazing and so as an appreciation gift and token to all the Patreon supporters, the other parts of that on patreon.com/canisaythisatchurch . I'm trying to find many different and engaging ways to thank you for your end like better way To give y'all just some special nuggets that you won’t get elsewhere. You are one of the reasons that this show continues to be here a year later. And I'm so thankful for you and I would in any way or capacity if you're not, I still love you. And I'm thankful that you're listening each week. And I'm so happy at the growth of this show, and I can't wait to see what happens next year. And so here we go a few minutes of part two of the Oscar Romero bonus episodes, just to give you a taste of what you'll hear on Patreon.

(begin Oscar Romero clip from bonus on Patreon)

Paul Thomas 48:30

So there we are. We've got this oligarchical class of overlords and they start to hate Romero. He is a thorn in their side. They want to kill him. In fact, when the assassination happens, they turned it into a little fundraiser. They had a little lottery where people pitched in some money, and then they drew straws to see who would have the privilege of murdering the Archbishop of their country.

On the evening, before Romero was assassinated, he addressed the armed forces, you know, the soldiers of the Armed Forces directly, and he told them that it's their own people that they're killing. And that no soldier is obliged to obey a command that is contrary to the command of God, “Thou shalt not kill” and talking directly to the members of the armed forces. he famously said, he said,

In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise up to the heavens every day more tumultuously I beg you, I beseech you, I order you stop the repression.

Now the government's looking at him and he's saying, “No, he's stepping too directly on our toes. From a government perspective, he was a guerrilla sympathizer” and they had very little voice, in order to have their voice heard. They marched into the city and they took over the cathedral downtown where Romero said mass on Sunday. And Romero empathize with them in a sense, I mean, he he was of the opinion, look, if this is a constitutional democracy, then we have to let people participate in it.

If we don't give them a voice at the ballot box if we don't give them the right to assemble, if we don't give them the right to form up and become and get elected to the Legislative Assembly so they can express their opinions and the whole legislature can vote on them like you do in a civilized country. If we don't give them that then the only way they have to express themselves is taking over the cathedral. So if they do that, you know what I'm going to do. I hope people listen to them. I'm going to go say mass at the church down the road. And the government sees that is oh he really he loves the People and now he's talking to our people.

Seth Price 51:08

The music and today's episode was brought to you by artists band musicians, called Shofar Band from the new album that launched in 2018 entitled Behold. You can find more info you can find more information about the band at as always, you can also find the music featured in today's episode on the Can I Say This At Church Spotify playlist.