Bits and Pieces Database

Significant words

Keyword: Bible Study
Expression:

"This text does not require 'interpretation' or 'application' so that it can be brought near our experience and circumstance.  Rather, the text is so powerful and compelling, so passionate and uncompromising in its anguish and hope, that it requires we submit our experience to it and thereby reenter our experience on new terms, namely the terms of the text.  The text does not need to be applied to our situation.  Rather, our situation needs to be submitted to the text for a fresh discernment.  It is our situation, not the text, that requires a new interpretation.  In every generation, this text subverts all our old readings of reality and forces us to a new, dangerous, obedient reading."

Voice: Walter Brueggemann
Circumstance: Author
Citation: Walter Brueggemann, "A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming" (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), 18, his emphasis.
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A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming