Walter Brueggemann, Irenic Pietist

The surprising spiritual background of a leading Old Testament scholar

In 1902 the German Evangelical Synod of North America (ESNA) organized a new congregation in Tilden, Nebraska, consisting of about 40 German- and Swiss-American residents of a town whose population barely cleared 500. The Friedens Evangelical Church continued to keep its records in German until 1930, the same year that a new pastor arrived. Educated at Eden Seminary, the Evangelical Synod school in St. Louis, Rev. August Brueggemann served in Tilden for five years, overseeing its transition into the Peace Evangelical and Reformed Church after the ESNA merged with the Reformed Church in the U.S. in 1934.¹

One year before, Rev. Brueggemann and his wife had welcomed a son, whom they named Walter. He would go on to teach at his father’s alma mater and become one of America’s leading Old Testament scholars.

As Walter Brueggemann, now into his tenth decade of life, looked back at his spiritual heritage, he learned to identify a “church culture that was passionate and self-aware, but without any hint of theological authoritarianism” as embodying the irenic spirit and missional focus of a religious tradition called Pietism.

Indeed, several of his more recent — and more autobiographical — writings have underscored much of what I cherish in Pietism.