Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, died on June 5 at his Michigan home. He was 92.
Brueggemann was the author of more than 100 titles on the Hebrew Bible and Christian theology and ethics. His 1978 title The Prophetic Imagination has sold more than a million copies, and his final work, Alphabet of Faith: Prophetic Prayers for a Chaotic World, will be published in July by Fortress Press.
Carey Newman, executive editor at Fortress and Brueggemann’s longtime editor, described the theologian as “joyous and serious, affirming yet prophetic, brilliant yet lucid—Brueggemann was generous. He shared his ideas with all faiths, and he published those ideas with many publishers—Fortress Press fortunate enough to be numbered among them. His Prophetic Imagination, now in its 40th anniversary edition, is not only the book that changed the arc of Brueggemann’s career and was a harbinger of what was yet to come, but it has been a book that defined a press.”
In its obituary, Christianity Today called Brueggemann “one of the most widely respected Bible scholars of the past century.” The magazine’s obituary highlighted Brueggeman’s classic work The Prophetic Imagination, which “showed how the biblical prophets, called to imagine a different world, disrupted politics and the dominant culture and its assumptions.” In it, Brueggemann wrote: “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing future alternatives to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
