Walter Brueggemann - Interrupting Silence: Gods Command to Speak Out

I NTERRUPTING S ILENCE

Also by Walter Brueggemann

from Westminster John Knox Press

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INTERRUPTING SILENCE

Gods Command
to Speak Out

W ALTER B RUEGGEMANN

2018 Walter Brueggemann

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 2710 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission.

Book design by Erika Lundbom-Krift

Cover design by Mark Abrams

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brueggemann, Walter, author.

Title: Interrupting silence : Gods command to speak out / Walter Brueggemann.

Description: Louisville, KY : Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017047327 (print) | LCCN 2017048884 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611648508 (ebk.) | ISBN 9780664263591 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: SilenceReligious aspectsChristianity. | SilenceReligious aspectsChristianityBiblical teaching.

Classification: LCC BV5068.S55 (ebook) | LCC BV5068.S55 B78 2017 (print) | DDC 248.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047327

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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For
Rolf Jacobson
Carolyn Sharp
Brent Strawn
Christine Yoder

I am pleased to dedicate this book to my friends Rolf Jacobson, Carolyn Sharp, Brent Strawn, and Christine Yoder. They are among the most important voices in a younger generation of Old Testament scholars. They have been generous in giving me access to their work, their methods, and their thinking that runs well beyond my old-fashioned ways. I am grateful for their work and their friendship.

CONTENTS

I AM GLAD TO THANK THE USUAL SUSPECTS FOR BRINGING this little book to completion. David Maxwell first suggested it to me and did heavy lifting to bring it to fruition. The good folk at Westminster John Knox, notably Julie Tonini, have done their usual careful, patient work, and I am grateful.

Beyond these immediacies, I am grateful to the good company of companions who have not only taught me the urgency of breaking the silence but have stood by me through the process of breaking my own silence. That includes a host of teachers, colleagues, and pastoral companions, among them most especially Gerald Jenkins, who saw beyond my silences. Of course our silence breaking is deeply rooted in the biblical tradition of coming to speech, most notably the Hebrew slaves who refused the silence of Pharaoh. Those silence breakers, however, were only an echo of the God who broke the silence of chaos with a command to the light.

We now live in a barbaric world where the stones cry out against the violence that spirals from the top down. Our work is to join their refusal of silence and their brave insistence on voice.

S ILENCE IS A COMPLEX MATTER . I T CAN REFER TO AWE before unutterable holiness, but it can also refer to coercion where some voices are silenced in the interest of control by the dominant voices. It is that latter silence that is the primary focus of the studies that follow.

On April 15, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King Jr. gave an address to Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam titled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence. In that address, King not only spoke vigorously against the U.S. war policy in Vietnam, but he also linked opposition to the war to the crisis of race that he had long addressed. I remember that address; like many others at the time, I feared that in linking the war to the racial crisis King was detracting focus and energy away from the race crisis. But, of course, I, along with many others, was wrong. King understood that the war and race belonged to a cluster of issues, all of which flow together in a collusive silence in which public opinion had silently accepted top-down authority. Kings breaking of the silence was a freighted moment in mobilizing sustainable opposition to the war in a challenge to settled authority.

Kings capacity to break the silence that supported the war is representative of many movements that break the silence of long-protected practices of domination and exploitation. Most recently a number of church bodies have begun, albeit belatedly, to speak out against the churchs pernicious, still-in-effect Doctrine of Discovery that long ago (and until now) cedes the new world to the old European colonizing powers, a ceding that currently feeds white nationalist sentiment in the United States. Such belated protests that work toward abrogation of that long-standing doctrine have come with an awareness that we must not be silent. In fact, many groups are now insisting that we must not be silent any longer, such as many liberation movements, among them feminism and womanism in many varieties, queer theology, Black Lives Matter, and voices of and for the disabled. In the Bible, perhaps the most vigorous character in such silence breaking is the importunate (nagging!) widow in Jesus parable in Luke 18:18. All of these silence breakers have come to see that silence is a strategy for the maintenance of the status quo, with its unbearable distribution of power and wealth. Silence breakers characteristically insist that the old patterns of power must be disrupted and reconfigured. Thus the widow asked for and insisted on justice.