Subversive Obedience

Book excerpt: Walter Brueggemann has been one of the leading voices in Hebrew Bible interpretation for decades; his landmark works in Old Testament theology have inspired and informed a generation of students, scholars, and preachers. Those who serve as truth-tellers in the church, like those who listen to the truth-telling in the church, are a mix of yearning and fearfulness, of receptiveness and collusion. In the end, the work of truth-telling is not to offer a new package of certitudes that displaces old certitudes. This truth to be uttered and acted, rather, is the enactment and conveyance of this Person who is truth, so that truth comes as bodily fidelity that stays reliably present to the pain of the world.