Walter Brueggemann, an influential theologian who used biblical exegesis to argue against nationalism, racial injustice and ignoring the poor, died on June 5 in Traverse City, Mich. He was 92.
His death, in a hospice facility, was announced on his website and by the Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., where he was a professor emeritus.
Dr. Brueggemann was a rare scholar of the Bible who combined close textual analysis of the Hebrew prophets with a sociological consciousness. Just as these prophets denounced Pharaoh and the oppression of their time, he argued, latter-day prophets should oppose the oppressive traits, like consumerism, militarism and nationalism, that dominate American life.
His best-known book was “The Prophetic Imagination” (1978), which has sold more than a million copies, according to Publishers Weekly. But there were dozens of others, including collections of his sermons and guides to studying the Old Testament. Dr. Brueggemann’s work, while little known to the general reading public, is widely used in seminaries.
Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelist and theologian who heads Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice, said in an interview that Dr. Brueggemann was “our best biblical scholar of the prophets — and he became one himself.”
“There are court prophets, prophets who just speak to what the king wants them to say,” Mr. Wallis said, “and then there are the biblical prophets who speak up for the poorest and most marginal.” Dr. Brueggemann, he said, was akin to the second kind.
Born to a pastor in the Evangelical and Reformed Church, an ancestor of the latter-day United Church of Christ, Dr. Brueggemann grew up in modest circumstances. His grandparents were Prussian immigrants, and his family arrived in the Midwest via New Orleans. He remained an active member of the church throughout his career, speaking frequently at conferences.
A small-town Missouri boyhood baling hay and working at service stations gave him a natural sympathy for the underdog, Conrad Kanagy wrote in “Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography” (2023).
Dr. Brueggemann’s reading of scripture was unusually pointed and critical of establishment churches, shaped by what Dr. Kanagy called his “German evangelical Pietism.”
“The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act,” Dr. Brueggemann wrote in “The Prophetic Imagination.”
For him, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Bible, is “a real character and an active agent,” he said in a lecture in 2023 — a God that is disappointed in mankind’s failings and yet promises “a new world that is possible.”
In “The Prophetic Imagination,” Dr. Brueggemann drew a sharp contrast between this God and the gods of the empire. The God of Moses, he wrote, “acts in his lordly freedom” and “is extrapolated from no social reality.” Unlike Pharaoh’s gods — who were invented to legitimize power and preserve the status quo — Yahweh disrupts it, calling people toward justice, liberation and hope.
Yahweh “is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes,” Dr. Brueggemann wrote.
“At the same time,” he added, “Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion.”
For Dr. Brueggemann, Dr. Kanagy wrote, “the biblical text was meant to be a free document that told the story of a free God who related to a free people past and present.”
The church’s role thus seemed clear to the theologian. “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us,” Dr. Brueggemann wrote.
It was, in his view, the church’s role not to reinforce established social realities but to question systems of power and inequality at every turn — just as, say, the church leaders of the American civil rights movement had done by invoking scripture to confront racism and injustice.
A passage in the Book of Jeremiah had a particular impact on Dr. Brueggemann, Dr. Kanagy wrote, because it connected knowledge of God directly to service for the poor.
God says: “To care for the poor and the needy, is this not to know me?” according to Jeremiah.
Understanding these words “was a crystallizing moment for Walter, as he recognized that the text did not say, if one has knowledge of God, then they will care for the poor,” Dr. Kanagy wrote. “Or that if one cares for the poor, they will get knowledge of God. Rather, it simply declares that ‘the care of the poor is knowledge of God.’”
Dr. Brueggemann taught generations of seminarians, first at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis and then in Decatur. On a blackboard, he would lay out patterns and repetitions of biblical text for his students.
“He was famous among students for jumping up on tables, mimicking the Almighty, and doing just about anything to help students make connections with the text,” Dr. Kanagy wrote.
Walter Albert Brueggemann was born on March 11, 1933, in Tilden, Neb., the youngest of three sons of August and Hilda (Hallman) Brueggemann. He grew up in rural parsonages in Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, according to his website, but mostly in Blackburn, Mo., where his high school had 30 students and one shelf of books, which he “read and read again,” Dr. Kanagy wrote.
He received a B.A. from Elmhurst College (now Elmhurst University) in Illinois in 1955; a bachelor’s in divinity from Eden Theological Seminary in 1958; a Doctor of Theology degree from Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan in 1961; and a Ph.D. in education from Saint Louis University in 1974. He taught at Eden from 1961 to 1986 and also served as dean there. He became a professor of Old Testament at Columbia in 1986 and retired in 2003.
Among his other books are “Cadences of Home: Preaching Among Exiles” (1997), “A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming” (1998), “The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education” (1982), “David’s Truth: In Israel’s Imagination and Memory” (1985) and “The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann” (2011).
He is survived by his second wife, Tia (Ehrhardt) Brueggemann; two sons, James and John; and five grandchildren. His first marriage, to Mary Bonner Miller, ended in divorce in 2005.
Throughout his career, Dr. Brueggemann called for a questioning of, and a pushing back against, the status quo, with a focus on those on the margins of society.
“It was a biblical matter for him, to be ignoring the poor while rewarding the rich,” Mr. Wallis of Georgetown said.
“We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation,” Dr. Brueggemann wrote in “The Prophetic Imagination.”
He added, “It is the marvel of prophetic faith that both imperial religion and imperial politics could be broken.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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