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1933—

Shalom

Walter Brueggemann is the most insightful Old Testament scholar the United States has produced. Many of his sixty-odd books are required reading in seminaries and religious studies programs across the nation. One of them, The Prophetic Imagination (1978), has become a classic.

But Brueggemann isn’t only a scholar. Ordained in the United Church of Christ, he’s also an astute Christian commentator on current social and political issues who frequently draws parallels between them and lessons from the Old Testament prophets. One of his most valuable contributions has been to remind Christians and others of the deep meaning of the ancient Hebrew word shalom, or “peace.”

In the minds of many today, peace is just an interval between war. But Brueggemann points out that the Old Testament notion of shalom is much richer. It is the “persistent vision of joy, well-being, harmony, and prosperity” often expressed in words such as “love, loyalty, truth, grace, salvation, justice, blessing, and righteousness.” Shalom is a recovery of creation’s wholeness fragmented by violence and cruelty between humans. It is, says Brueggemann, “a dream of God that resists all our tendencies to division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery.”

What Brueggemann’s analysis suggests is that even though shalom is the natural order of things, its recovery depends in part upon the willingness of humans to practice lifestyles that express it in concrete terms. Shalom, he says, is an “incarnational” word. The only shalom we can imagine is one that responds to specific historical realities. To think of it in abstract terms is to fail to take it as a real possibility. But this doesn’t mean that shalom is exclusively situational, much less relative.

Consider the Babylonian captivity, for example, that historical period when, after Babylon conquered the Kingdom of Judah, two generations of Jews endured bitter exile “by the waters of Babylon.” During this period, the prophet Jeremiah recommended a shalom to the captives that spoke specifically to their predicament but that also pointed beyond it to a more general understanding of peace. He advised them to seek the shalom of the city—Babylon—in which they dwelt, for in its shalom they would find their own (Jer 29:7). When it came to the particular historical period in question, Jeremiah’s point was that the Jews could create peace by forgiving and reconciling themselves to their captors. The broader lesson we can take from Jeremiah’s advice is that the willingness to seek reconciliation whenever one has been violated is a necessary condition for shalom. But the specific contours of the reconciliation are fashioned case by case.

In Brueggemann’s hands, the Old Testament notion of shalom becomes an active striving towards community and well-being, which in turn sets the stage for the later Christian understanding of the kingdom of God. In either case, peace, the “dream of God,” is the fulfillment for which all creation yearns. It is our ultimate hope.