Book titles can be misleading, especially when the reader brings preconceived notions. I cannot recall how I stumbled upon this short monograph, but Walter Bruggemann's Texts Under Negotiation: the Bible and Postmodern Imagination seemed to link together two of my major interests.

The text itself is only 91 pages; the remaining 26 pages are comprised of sections on Abbreviations, Notes, and separate Indices for Authors and Scripture references. Following a refreshingly short preface, the text is comprised of three chapters: "Funding Postmodern Interpretation," "The Counterworld of Evangelical Imagination", and "Inside the Counterdrama." Each chapter is further subdivided into several shorter sections prefaced with Roman numerals. While the title of the first chapter seemed straightforward enough, the other two did not make intuitive sense before reading--perhaps not unusual for a book with the word "postmodern" in its title--and I still cannot quite make sense of them after reading.

Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, is quick to point out that he is not on sure footing: "I have no expertise about the historical and philosophical issues involved in the critique of modernity and must take the word of others for some of the argument. Nor do I regard postmodernity as something to welcome, but simply something to acknowledge as the inescapable context in which we live and interpret" (viii-ix). He states more emphatically in the first chapter that he "shall be concerned with more theoretical matters in which [he has] no particular expertise" (2). He doesn't explicitly define "postmodernism", but knows it when he sees it (vii). The first chapter touches on a variety of modern and postmodern authors and references, ranging from Kuhn's to Lyotard's Postmodern Condition (the well-defined Notes section is one of the plusses of this little book), and ultimately Brueggemann is able to articulate "the crisis modernity and postmodernity" as "the shift from hegemony to perspective" (25).

However, Brueggemann's agenda is not one of theory, but of action, focusing on ministry. Even after reading, this does not appear to be the agenda set forth by the title, but is an increasing focus for the rest of the book.

"The formal premise [italics original] I urge is that our knowing is essentially imaginative, that is, an act of organizing social reality around dominant, authoritative images. This means that the assumptions that have long had unexamined privilege among us are now seen to be sturdy, powerful acts of imagination, reinforced, imposted, and legitimated by power.

On the basis of this formal premise, I assert the substantive claim that the practice of modernity, of which we are all children, since the seventeenth century has given us a world imagined through the privilege of white, male, Western, colonial hegemony, with all its pluses and minuses. It is a world that we have come to trust and take for granted as a given. It is a world that has wrought great good, but that has also accomplished enormous mischief against some for the sake of others. The simple truth is that this construed world can no longer be sustained, is no longer persuasive or viable, and we are able to discern no large image to put in its place (18).

Somehow we arrive at a "failure of the imagination of modernity" (19) and thus a "counter imagination of the world" in terms of ministry (not theory) is needed. This is the subject of chapter two. "In a postmodern world where neither the old orthodoxies nor the more recent positivism will hold, the preacher's chance (both task and opportunity) is to construct, with and for the congregation, an evangelical infrastructure that makes a different communal life possible" (26). This is a book not about postmodern readings of the Bible, but the narrower scope of evangelical ministerial practices.

Chapter three is headlined by a "counterdrama" neologism. "What is now required and permitted is a mode of scripture interpretation quite unlike most of that we have practiced heretofore. In seeking to find a mode of interpretation congenial to our actual life in the world, I propose that we 'take' reality as a drama [italics original], and that we see the text as a script for that drama" (64-65). Nearly a quarter of the book (pp 71-91) is then spent explicating six Old Testament texts that seem to have little in common (Brueggemann admits that the texts he chose were "taken almost at random" (71)). "I propose then to take up a number of small texts from a variety of genres and comment on them. My purpose is to reflect upon examples of how texts can be taken up with dramatic freedom if we screen out both the dogmatic grip of the eighteenth century and the historical fascination of the nineteenth century" (71). This could have been more interesting as an originally stated premise (framed by a more descriptive title) followed by supporting explication.

There are elements of this book (notes, references) that rate four stars. But the bulk of it (disconnect between title and actual subject; too brief treatment) rates two. This is the first book I've read by Brueggemann, and judging by the titles of his many other works, this one could be an outlier of sorts. ( )

If you are one of those people who only reads books endorsed by the local christian book store you will not read Brueggemann. And if so you are missing out on a vast vein of ore of precious thought. If you read this book you will realize postmodernism does not lead to the total loss of belief but a free participation in belief. If you read because you enjoy thinking you will enjoy this book. I recommend Texts Under Negotiation as an introduction to belief in a postmodern age. ( )