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Walter Brueggemann was a Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. A graduate of Elmhurst College, Professor Brueggemann went on to study at the Eden Theological Seminary, receiving his Doctorate of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. from St. Louis University. He has devoted his life to a passionate exploration of Old Testament theology. An unequaled passion for his subject has resulted in the publication of more than 58 books and hundreds of articles. My introduction to Dr. Brueggemann was through a course I took on Old Testament Poetry, for which my teacher, Dr. Joe Martin (who studied under Brueggemann), used The Message of the Psalms.

Recently, I listened to a ten minute statement of 19 Theses (click here to listen to it). Also, I found a transcript of the recording (originally on this site) and have reproduced it below.

1. Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognized or unrecognized, but everybody has a script.

2. We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialization, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3. The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socializes us all, liberal and conservative.

4. That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5. That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6. Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, too enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

8. The task of de-scripting, relinquishment and disengagement is accomplished by a steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we say can make us happy and make us safe.

9. The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and is enacted through the tradition of the Church. It is an offer of a counter-narrative, counter to the script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.

10. That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature, its key character – the God of the Bible whom we name as Father, Son, and Spirit.

11. That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.

12. The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless. [I think the writer of Psalm 119 would probably like too try, to make it seamless]. Because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated. [This is my polemic against systematic theology]. The script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must betaken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.

13. The ragged, disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel among themselves – liberals and conservatives – in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so too debilitate the focus of the script.

14. The entry point into the counter-script is baptism. Whereby we say in the old liturgies, “do you renounce the dominant script?”

15. The nurture, formation, and socialization into the counter-script with this illusive, irascible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation, and socialization by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality, and neighboring of all kinds.

16. Most of us are ambiguous about the script; those with whom we minister and I dare say, those of us who minister. Most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-script. Most of us in the deep places are vacillating and mumbling in ambivalence.

17. This ambivalence between scripts is precisely the primary venue for the Spirit. So that ministry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that invokes resistance and hostility.

18. Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is crucially present among liberals and conservatives in generative faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of [the] old script and embrace of the new script.

19. The work of ministry is crucial and pivotal and indispensable in our society precisely because there is no one [see if that’s an overstatement]; there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and too manage a way through it. I think often; I see the mundane day-to-day stuff ministers have to do and I think, my God, what would happen if you took all the ministers out. The role of ministry then is as urgent as it is wondrous and difficult.

There is so much here that is worth considering. In particular, #4 stuck out to me: the notion that the popular script of “technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.” That one statement takes 10 seconds to read, but a good 10 minutes to unpack. There is no doubt in my mind that the powers that be are producing a script which through the media, through conversation, through books, through the air we breathe in 21st century western civilization, is propounded relentlessly in order to convince us that if we just have the best technology, the right psychological help, the most/newest stuff, conquer enough “enemies,” we will finally be happy and at rest (inner and outer peace). But this is a lie. It is one of the distinct privileges of the church to announce and expose this modern fable. These things will not make us happy, they will not give us peace, they will make us selfish, greedy, and violent–qualities that in turn, fuel our appetite for technology, therapy, stuff, and violence. The solution is apparently to not only expose the emperor and his invisible clothes, but also to drape him in true garments of royal silk. So, the work must begin, not on getting the “right” systematic theology (that has been done endlessly without success because that way of thinking squeezes the Bible and lops off all the rough bits), but in getting the right script (or should I say getting a right script, apparently there are a plurality of them in Scripture). But what is the counter script? What is the script Jesus lived by? Did the apostles live by the same one? Should we, twenty centuries later, update the apostolic script? Perhaps it is too big of a question to ask what the script is; perhaps we should ask the question, “What are the necessary ingredients of the script?”