Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam - When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Society, Spirituality, Society & Culture, Sociology, Culture, Science, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Social Sciences, On Being, Arts

4.7 • 10.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets, who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present. "The amazing contemporaneity of this material," Walter Brueggemann says to Krista in this conversation from 2011, and we relive by relistening, "is that the issues are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can't quite see the shape of it." He embodied as much as taught a prophetic way of fearless truth-telling, fierce hope, and disarming language that can break through "human hearts and human hurt.." What is the calling of the Christian in a time like this, and what is the role of the preacher?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, should we just go? Or Chris, yes. Okay. All right, let's just do it. Do you have any questions
0:07.8	of me before we start? No, I'll follow you. All right. I'm going to take off this loud
0:13.0	bracelet. So where I start with everyone is I'd just like to hear a little bit about the religious
0:20.4	background of your childhood.
0:22.3	Yep. I'm a son of a pastor. My father was a German evangelical pastor in rural Missouri,
0:32.7	and I grew up in very much a church culture.
0:43.7	And I think that shaped me, that shaped me not only as a believer, but it shaped me toward ministry.
0:46.4	And that's the flow of my life then.
0:50.4	And that was an antecedent of the United Church of Christ, so that's my home denomination
0:56.8	and has been all my life.
0:59.8	I read somewhere that you remembered the conflict when your father urged his congregation to abandon
1:08.0	German.
1:08.6	Oh, yes.
1:09.2	So it was a German-speaking congregation?
1:11.5	Yeah, well, that crisis really came in the Second World War when you didn't want to
1:16.7	speak German anymore.
1:17.7	So it wasn't a theological decision.
1:20.1	But it's like every immigrant community.
1:22.3	The older people really thought that true theological talk could only happen in your mother tongue.
1:31.2	And my father then preached once a month in German into the 1950s, because the old people needed to hear those sounds.
1:40.4	And his insistence was if you don't move away from that, you will, like every immigrant community, lose the next generation.
1:50.1	So he had some tough nuts to crack about that.
	...

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