Noted Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann is speaking this week during our School for Leadership Training at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, where I teach.  Something like ten years ago, while I was director of the London Mennonite Centre, London, England, I wrote a few paragraphs about Brueggemann basically for in-house use for our book service, in order to promote Brueggemann’s books.  I happily did this because I believed what I wrote:

No one writing on the Bible is more consistently provocative, interesting, challenging, and imaginative than Walter Brueggemann. I imagine there is no Scripture scholar in America who sells more books or informs more sermons. For those Christians who yearn for serious, biblically informed engagement with our contemporary world there is no one more stimulating to read than Brueggemann. The man rarely writes a boring page. He is thoroughly knowledgeable as an Old Testament scholar–not to mention reasonably informed on theology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and several other fields–and yet he writes with such verve that he is a joy to read.

One of the most famous American preachers once said at a conference on preaching that if there was only one book every preacher should have, it was Walter Brueggemann’s The Message of the Psalms. I would almost go so far as to say that if there is any one author every preacher should have in her (or his) library, it should be Walter Brueggemann. Any preacher who does not use Brueggemann as a companion in preparation of sermons is cheating herself and her congregation! (more…)

A former student suggested “Anabaptist Nation” as the name of my blog.  There are various reasons I’m fine with that name.  However, I begin this blog with the most famous quote from Menno Simons, the sixteenth-century Anabaptist whose name was adopted by one of the groups that has carried on the Anabaptist heritage.  I follow this brief excerpt with the full paragraph from which the excerpt is drawn, thus appropriately complexifying the excerpt, beginning to locate the brief quote in a larger theological context.  The whole paragraph is a wonderful set of challenges to live with.  The excerpt and the paragraph from which it is taken begin, in various ways, to name some of my central passions today. 

Menno:

“For true evangelical faith is of such nature that it cannot lie dormant, but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love . . . it clothes the naked; it feeds the hungry; it comforts the sorrowful; it shelters the destitute; it aids and consoles the sad; it returns good for evil; it serves those that harm it; it prays for those that persecute it; teaches, admonishes. . . it binds up that which is wounded; it heals that which is diseased and it saves that which is sound; it has become all things to all people.  The persecution, suffering, and anguish which befall it for the sake of the truth of the Lord is to it a glorious joy and consolation.”

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