The Thick & Thin Man
Walter Brueggemann’s Penumbral Notions & Theatrical Sense
by Mark Tooley
It is a long journey from the eighteenth-century Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards to modern deconstructionist Walter Brueggemann. But the latter, ordained in the United Church of Christ that descends from Edwards’s Congregationalists, is becoming as big a name in American church circles as the former was in his day.
New Awakening
A professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, Brueggemann writes clever and winsome commentaries about the faithful and enduring relationships found in the Bible, between God and his people, and among people themselves. He has gained a surprising following among some liberal Evangelicals and other orthodox believers, thanks to his critiques of American nationalism and the free market.
Recently lecturing in Edwards’s native Northampton, Massachusetts, where Edwards helped ignite the First Great Awakening, Brueggemann offered his own version of a great awakening. He wants to lift up the “thick narrative” of the Bible and preserve it against the “thin” interpretations that the church and society have too often preferred.
By “thin,” he means the “ideology” that the church has tried to impose on the Scriptures. This ideology, which is “bias without interest in data,” often reveals itself in “nationalism” and the “idolatry of the free market system” and has long been used by the church, and is being used now, to oppress women, racial minorities, and homosexuals.
The Bible is “perverted” when seen as an “answer book,” he warned in The Bible Makes Sense (2001). To understand it that way is to ascribe to it a “static absoluteness that presumes the fixity of what is proper” and to place it “beyond the demands and pressures of historical existence.”
He is often vague, but he seems not to view the Bible as a historically reliable narrative of God’s interaction with fallen humanity. That would be the thin reading. Instead, it is a rich collection of lore about faithful relationships, and it is an indictment of social injustice. That is the thick reading.
By “thick,” he means a theology that understands the Scriptures as being about “faithful relationships” rather than “right morality, right piety, or right doctrine,” as he put it in The Bible Makes Sense. These relationships cannot be “reduced to formulae” but “live always in the free, risking exchange that belongs to covenanting.”
Discard ideas about the Bible containing “flat certitudes” and “eternal myths,” Brueggemann urged in his book. Instead, look at it as “trust[ed] memory, a dynamic image, a restless journey,” an “open question” that invites “new dimensions of fidelity,” not an “object” to study but a “partner with whom we dialogue” and a tradition “surging among us.”
Mark Tooley directs the United Methodist committee of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.ird-renew.org) in Washington, D.C.
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