Walter Brueggemann has been so effective for so long precisely because he has consistently called upon the church to see beyond the taken-for-granted realities it confronts by imagining God's alternative reality; to recognize that the bars of its entrapment were social constructs and could just as easily be deconstructed so we could be once again enchanted by God's good news.

To challenge the taken-for-granted reality of the church and to imagine an alternative reality, Brueggemann consistently takes us back to the biblical text. He moves between a description of the reality that appears in front of the church and the alternative that God is preparing for God's people that begins now and moves into God's eschatological future. In so doing Brueggemann seeks to unleash the power of God's words to create a new world—here and now.