Walter Brueggemann The Prophetic Imagination
You said somewhere in another interview — I’m always a little bit careful about quoting other interviews because they don’t always get written down correctly. But I wanted to ask you about this because it’s very intriguing — that some of these sexual issues that are so galvanizing and so polarizing in our time in churches and outside them — you said that you really don’t think that’s about particularities of guilt or sin, but about a sense of impending chaos, which goes back to that first prophetic text you read. Are you saying that people have a sense of impending chaos, and for some reason, maybe because these things are so intimate, this is what they latch onto?
Mr. Brueggemann:That’s exactly what I think. I’ve asked myself why, in the church, does the question of gays and lesbians have such adrenaline. I’ve decided for myself that that means most of what we’re arguing about with gays and lesbians has nothing to do with gays and lesbians. It is rather that the world is not the way we thought it was going to be. I think what has happened is that we’ve taken all of our anxiety about the old world disappearing, and we’ve dumped it all on that issue. I have concluded that it’s almost futile to have the theological argument about gays and lesbians anymore because that’s not what the argument’s about. It is an amorphous anxiety that we are in freefall as a society. I think we kind of are in freefall as a society, but I don’t think it has anything to do with gays and lesbians particularly.