In Man We Trust: The Neglected Side of Biblical Faith

By Walter Brueggemann

Book Overview

This book suggests a fresh hearing of the Gospel in the traditions of the Old Testament. Israel's affirmation of faith is many-sided. One of the dimensions which has been largely neglected in our use... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0006XC4CI
• ISBN13: 9780804201995
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Listening carefully to Divine hope in human wisdom

"... It will be necessary to listen carefully to human wisdom in all its forms; to indigenous peoples oppressed by those who have colonized and invaded their country; scientists and philosophers and poets of the modern and post-modern world;..." Wes Campbell, Melbourne University The Renewed Challenge: The idea of changing the language of faith does not strike us as strange - there is a 200-year experiment, which has done just that in the name of history or science or spirituality. Biblical Wisdom takes on new forms in order to express the received faith. In a new postmodern environment where the received faith has all but collapsed, a new vehicle recounts the ancient story in the form of Wisdom; Brueggemann prompts a renewed contemporary encounter with what the ancient narratives tell. The thesis reiterated an attempt of retelling by way of human story, what his predecessors tried to unfold. Beginning with the human: Schleiermacher (d. 1834) turned to the human, which seeks to be theological, drawing quite specifically on the historical resources of the past account of faith within his own lived experience of the Christian community. Roughly speaking, says Wes Campbell, I understand von Rad's thesis to be in general human-oriented writings. "In narratives, human agency moves events along. In poetry and proverb the primary question concerns fulfilled and successful life - with an awareness of its obverse, foolishness and despair." Karl Barth in "Otherness of God" emphasis on the wholly Humanity, was able to present Jesus as God's Wisdom who has joined us in the distance from God, and is our way back to the waiting Father. Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasized, from his prison cell, that only a suffering God can help. While, Jürgen Moltmann defines "God's Wisdom in Jesus death on the cross," as a radical hope in God's beginning of a new talk. Wisdom's new Community Our present economic upheaval is categorized in Georgetown university debate as a consequence of Greed, a human moral hazard, motivated me to retrieve "In man we trust." Walter Brueggemann, is a very thoughtful Biblical exegesist and an articulate Old Testament theologian, who engages his reader, enriching his concepts. In the first chapter, the able author has articulated the five pillars of wisdom in Old Testament books. He supported the Semi-Pelagian teaching of the Church of Alexandria, and the Eastern Orthodox concept of 'Synergy', man's collaboration in his salvation. He wrote, pp. 20, "Third, wisdom affirms that man has primary responsibility for his destiny." In explaining the diversion of Western dogma, he wrote, "The theology that has emerged from the Paul-Augustine-Luther line has spoken primarily of fallen man, one who has had all his powers and abilities crippled so that he is unable to act in his humanness." A Compelling Review: And yet, as Brueggemann's subtitle suggests, we too often neglect this 'human dimension' of Scripture. ... As a result, we have not trusted