Summary: A genre redefining classic.

I have known of Walter Brueggemann for a very long time, but I have never read anything significant by him. I am sure I read an article or a profile at some point. But I don’t remember it. I picked up Prophetic Imagination years ago when it was on sale. But I didn’t start reading it until I heard of his passing and listened to an old podcast on the Bible For Normal People podcast and then a discussion of him on Homebrew Christianity with three people who knew and worked with him.

The original book is nearly 50 years old at this point. The ideas have been widely distributed and I can see a number of books that were sharing them, some with attribution and some without. At some point, ideas move from being in a book, to being in the ether and just known. I think the main idea that prophetic is not really about future telling, but about creating a vision for the world that exposes us to the ways justice is possible and also revealing where we are blind to injustice. In the essay at the end where he responds to the book 40 years later, he clarifies that while generally he thinks it is okay to use prophetic and social justice in a somewhat synonymous way, the biblical era understood prophetic as a adaptation of a earlier time to show imaginatively how God is judging the current era.

He walks through that by talking about the Dravidic and Solomonic kingdoms, then the later prophets and then finally two chapters on how Jesus, while not only a prophet, did fulfill that role and we are called to as well. The book ends with a summary of the ideas and then some thoughts on how to enact those ideas in the local church and local ministry.

This is a classic book and deserves its place. But in some ways, you may have encountered these ideas enough in others that you don’t need to read the original. However, the original is worth reading. The radical nature of the work of the church in response to centering on the person of Jesus, who was a Jewish man of the 1st century is never going to get old. There are those who challenge some of his ideas at being a bit of an over correction, but I even those who I heard push back, honored his work as changing the field.

He wrote or contributed to over 120 books. He worked up until near the end of his life dying at 96. He was not perfect, as none of are. But he did have influence.

The Prophetic Imagination, 40th Anniversary Edition by Walter Brueggemann Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook