Every now and then, when preparing for a sermon, I like to look through some of my books by Walter Brueggeman. There are two that I keep coming back to which I find enormously helpful — Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes and Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann.
I’m looking forward to downloading this year’s Laing Lectures from Regent College. Walter Brueggemann will be speaking on The Church in Joyous Obedience. In a recent interview, Brueggeman was asked the following:

All three of your lectures will address, in one way or another,
issues of public life and social justice. In fact, you frequently
address these topics in other contexts. Why does an Old Testament
scholar engage in this sort of public theology?

WB: Well, there are lots of ways of being an Old
Testament scholar…and there are people upon whom I depend—much more
technical critical work, and I use their work. But my mind works
basically to try to make connections, because my primary audience…are
pastors and church people, and while you have to do the technical
critical stuff, by itself that doesn’t really give any payoffs to
pastors and churches. So I want to work at those connections, I think
partly that’s my social vocation, and partly that’s how my mind works.
But the other side of it is, if you study the Old Testament
theologically, you can’t help but be driven to public questions—they’re
all over the text. The challenge is to try to make connections between
those ancient public questions and our contemporary public questions,
and that’s what I try to do.

Since your primary audience consists of pastors, and those on
the street doing theology, let me ask you this: since the Old Testament
is sometimes ignored by those you identify as your primary audience,
have you come across any tension in that area, or any objection to your
work?

WB: Of course, of course! A lot of people say back
to me that if you get to the hard parts of the Old Testament: “Haven’t
Christians gotten past all that?” And the answer that I make to that is
that what we call the Old Testament was the scripture for the early
church, and I think that if we don’t study the Old Testament then the
New Testament is bound to be misinterpreted and misunderstood. And as
they say, there’s a lot of that going around. One of my continuing
passions is that the church really has to recover the Old Testament as
an important part of our scripture. You can’t avoid it, I think.”