Spirituality of the Psalms (Facets)

Rating:
Summary: Brueggemann Shines Again
Review: Barbara and I both avidly admire The Psalms and Dr. Brueggemann. Our greatest expectation for the summer is to hear him preach and teach at the Presbyterian Conference on Music and Worship at Montreat. I am deeply indebted to him for his keenly inspired commentary on GENESIS. For two quarters of Preaching Genesis, I have tuned-into his studies in depth to prepare several sermons and hear young students at MERCER/McAFEE School of Theology preach their sermons inspired by Brueggemann.

This little gem of a book is the abridged version of The Message of Psalms. In his final chapter of the shorter version, he focuses on God's Justice. There he sites his thesis of three dimensions of 'orientation, disorientation and reorientation:'
* It is pathological to challenge the present order of economic and political power.
* It is pathological to suggest that God may be unjust.
* It is pathological to speak, as some of these psalms do, in a voice of disorientation.

Brueggemann inserts 'imprisonment' as one crisis in which the seven psalms of disorientation are best addressed. Here is the one place in all of his books on Psalms where I have read his clearest views on the issue of theodicy. "The struggle of the oppressed against the unjust, when cast theologically, is the issue of theodicy."

Only recenty in someone's sermon I read that, "God prefers the losers in life." While serving as the Chaplain in Georgia's Diagnostic Center, I often wondered if this is not the case for a very few of the choicest and often long-termed inmates. I did often repeat the points of Brueggemann's sermons to the inmates for the Sunday evening sermons. One or two were read back to me by inmates in their rehabilitation group discussions. When I repeated that incident one day in a chance meeting with Prof. Brueggemann, he smiled and replied: "Gee, Thanks!"

Never before as minister, chaplain or teacher have I discovered so many profound yet simple books by one commentator, especially focused upon the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Thanks and WOW!
Chaplain Fred W. Hood