Dan Schultz Interviews Walter Brueggemann

Dan Schultz, aka "Pastor Dan" co-founder of the Street Prophets weblog, has a valuable interview with Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann on the Religion Dispatches website.

The bulk of the interview discusses the taxonomy of scripts that Brueggemann developed in his Counterscript speech.  Schultz appropriated Brueggemann's taxonomy and expands on it in his recently released book Changing the Script.  The interview also touches on themes found in Brueggemann's latest book Journey to the Common Good.

Since the thought of Stanley Hauerwas and John Yoder has been very influential among Bapist communitarians, Brueggemann's critique of Hauerwas and Yoder caught my eye:

Dan: . . . Let me ask first, you said you had some sympathies with that post-liberal project. Do you tend toward that Hauerwas and Yoder stream of alternative witness within the church?

Walter: Yup, yup, I'm very much influenced by that. What I learned from Doug Hall...a Canadian Reformed theologian. What he said was that the Hauerwas line calls you to withdraw from society. And Doug said that for Reformed people, withdrawal from society is correct, but it's a first move and the second move that Hauerwas does not make, is to move back into society with transformative energy. So disengagement and re-engagement, and I think it's right for our Reformed tradition.

Dan: Right. It's absolutely fascinating how—just to do the intellectual history for a moment—how that comes out of that kind of Swiss and lower German reformation, and not Lutheranism. But it persists and it comes through the Evangelical and Reformed Church, among other places—and the Congregationalists pick up on it in their own way.

It's funny to me, because I think Hauerwas would resist that idea of withdrawing from society very much. He'd say, "No, no, we're not withdrawing, we're engaging in a different way."

Walter: But insofar as he appeals to the Mennonite tradition of Yoder, it is to some extent a withdrawal: we don't participate in the political process. I understand, you maintain another kind of presence, but yeah.