501 - Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity and the Making of History

Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity and the Making of History

By Walter Brueggemann

Louisville, Westminster/John Knox, 1991. 94 Pp. $8.95.

Using the historical psalms (Psalms 78, 105, 106, and 136) as a take-off point, the author launches into a

502 - Abiding Astonishment: Psalms, Modernity and the Making of History

trenchant analysis of Old Testament hermeneutics. Conceding that the Heilsgeschichte approaches of Gerhard von Rad and George Ernest Wright have been seriously criticized, Brueggemann nevertheless pursues von Rad's remarks concerning the recital of history as presented in the historical psalms.

Eschewing fundamentalistic biblicism and supernaturalism on the one hand, and feeling uncomfortable with post-enlightenment, agnostic, secular reconstructions of Israel's history on the other (one thinks first of J. Alberto Soggin's A History of Israel), Brueggemann appeals to the "abiding astonishment" (a phrase of Buber's), which is inextricable from the psalms and all biblical statements that rehearse God's actions on behalf of Israel, as well as Israel's responses of gratitude or disbelief. In fact, to reconstruct Israel's history according to modernist canons is to side with the power structures then and now. To let all biblical passages speak for themselves is to let the disenfranchised be heard in their cries of pain and hope.

I have ordered up a block of this book for my course on the Pentateuch. My students, I hope, will be as stimulated by it as I have been.

Mark Hillmer, Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, St. Paul, Minn.