Truth Speaks to Power Quotes

“The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“At the center of the requirements of the scroll is the provision for “the year of release,” the elimination of debt after seven years (Deut. 15:1–18).5 This teaching requires that at the end of six years, debts that remain unpaid will be cancelled. This most radical teaching intends that the practice of economy shall be subordinated to the well-being of the neighborhood. Social relationships between neighbors—creditors and debtors—are more important and definitional than the economic realities under consideration and there should be no permanent underclass in Israel, so that even the poor are assured wherewithal to participate in the economy in viable ways.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The outcome is to delegitimize and deconstruct the kings in effective ways in order to show that while they occupy the forms of power, they lack the substance of power.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“Pharaoh is clearly a metaphor. He embodies and represents raw, absolute, worldly power. He is, like Pilate after him, a stand-in for the whole of the empire. As the agent of the “empire of force,” he reappears in many different personae.9”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The same subversion of power by truth is evident in the way in which Luke begins his account of Jesus of Nazareth. Luke is at pains to put his readers on notice that this is no ordinary history. He has an angel anticipate cousin John by saying, “with the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him” (1:17). He has Gabriel declare that “nothing will be impossible with God” (1:37). He offers us an alternative genealogy that refuses the royal recital of Matthew and provides a list of the uncredentialed, rather like Roots by Alex Haley that traces a genealogy that the plantation masters never suspected (Luke 3:23–38).6 In the midst of this playful subversion, Luke has John go public in the empire. He does so by locating the reader amid all the recognized totems of power:”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“It occurs to me that the situation of the church in our society, perhaps the church everywhere always, is entrusted with a truth that is inimical to present power arrangements. The theological crisis in the church—that shows up in preaching and in worship as elsewhere—is that the church has largely colluded with the totalism of the National Security State. Or more broadly, has uncritically colluded with Enlightenment reason that stands behind the National Security State that makes preaching Easter an epistemological impossibility.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“rage. They got up, drove him out of town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. (vv. 28–29) It”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits. The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, “What is truth?” And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: “‘We must obey God rather than any human authority’” (Acts 5:29).14”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The news enacted by Elisha is reperformed by Jesus. It is, subsequently, performed in many other venues, sometimes by the followers of Jesus, sometimes by others who stand alongside the faithful followers of Jesus. In every such performance of the news, it is Gospel truth enacted as practical transformation that settled power can neither enact nor prevent.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The initial triad in this oracle consists of wisdom, might, and wealth; these are most fully embodied, in ancient Israel, in Solomon who had so much about which to boast. That Solomonic triad, however, is countered by the prophet with the covenantal triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness. The poet sees that the deep contest of the human enterprise is summarized in these elemental terms. Solomon’s awesome achievement is celebrated … and terminated.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“peasant truth is closely linked to lived reality and mostly kept hidden from the practitioners of official truth.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“God’s truth stands on the side of the weak, the poor, and the excluded.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“it places in question any agenda that protects the privilege of some at the expense of others.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“God is not reducible to human power agendas”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“God is a magnet who draws pain to God’s own self.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“Until that moment of utterance, every objective analysis of economic production in Egypt would have concluded that the pain of the peasants is a necessary, normal, even natural arrangement of labor—the cost of doing business.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“This story begins wherever there is enough courage and freedom and daring and sensibility to acknowledge that the pain of ruthless exploitation is not normal and cannot be borne.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“power is not free to disregard truth.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The store-house cities are an ancient parallel to the great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us. That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of peasants, must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“he is never named because he could have been any one of a number of candidates, or all of them. Because if you have seen one pharaoh, you have seen them all. They all act the same way in their greedy, uncaring, violent self-sufficiency.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“It is astonishing that critical scholarship has asked forever about the identification of these store-house cities, but without ever asking about the skewed exploitative social relationships between owner and laborers that the project exhibits”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“the church is, in my judgment, called to its public vocation to practice neighborliness in a way that includes both support of policies of distributive justice and practices of face-to-face restorative generosity.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“truth” as an “army of metaphors.” By that he meant that truth is not a given, but it is an elusive, contested act of interpretation that emerges and makes claims through many twists and turns.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The narrative knows the way in which hungry peasants, in need of food from the monopoly, will pay their money, then forfeit their cattle, and then finally give up their land, because Pharaoh leverages food in order to enhance his power. In the end, the peasants are so “happy” that they asked to be “owned”:”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“subversives in the face of totalism have always had to speak twice in the same utterance, once for the official record and once for the truth of bodily reality.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture

“The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only “my God who saves.”
― Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power: The Countercultural Nature of Scripture