Sabbath as Resistance, New Edition with Study Guide: Saying No to the Culture of Now

Short and book with a lot of thought provoking ideas. The study guide helps a lot .

Walter Brueggemann writes a brilliant yet concise definition for Sabbath which makes me want to keep Sabbath for the beauty of what it brings to my relationship with God, and myself.

Well written, good things to say. The think I didn't like was each topic in each chapter is usually stressed 3 times, so each chapter could have been 1/3 the size and still conveyed the essential message

This book is part of my curriculum for my Masters program. It was well written and the Sabbath was thoroughly explained.

We read this book as a Lenten book study in our church. It is a short book full of thought provoking ideas. The author writes about the importance of Sabbath in this busy world in which we live and the resistance of Sabbath by society. In addition he provides a fascinating look at the Ten Commandments in the light of Sabbath. I recommend this book to everyone who struggles to rest and still the mind; isn't that all of us?

This book is a gem. I picked it up in a preparation for a study for a series I’m going to preach on the 10 Commandments. I was not disappointed. Redundancy is at a minimum in word pictures of bound. He has profound insight that Treece is the root of the fourth commandment in the first one. As Tim Keller has says we don’t break the other nine commitments until we break the first, that Of idolatry. I love the way he melted together the first and the fourth commandment and then also tied the fourth commandment into the final six. Masterful job. I will never think about the Sabbath the same way.

Brueggemann does an excellent job of bringing the 10 commandments, especially the 4th on Sabbath keeping, into a modern context. I found his links with our anxiety driven society especially helpful.

In this book, Walter Brueggemann lays out a familiar Sabbath theme within Evangelicalism and elaborates on an unfamiliar one. Both of them, for Brueggemann, contain an economic tone that helps neighbors recenter their community in God. The book’s familiar theme is well summed up by the following quotes:“[Sabbath] declares in bodily ways that … we will not be defined by busyness and by acquisitiveness and by the pursuit of more, in either our economics or our personal relationships or anywhere in our lives. Because our life does not consist in commodity” (31–32).“In U.S. society, largely out of a misunderstood Puritan heritage, Sabbath has gotten enmeshed in legalism and moralism and blue laws and life-denying practices that contradict the freedom-bestowing intention of Sabbath” (20).“Those who participate in [Sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to the awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competitor” (27–28).The book’s unfamiliar theme hinges upon a portion of the fourth commandment that requires that others “may rest as you do” (Deut 5:14). Here Sabbath keeping is the quintessential worship act of neighborliness and an invitation into the awareness of the exploitation of others:“The fourth commandment on Sabbath compels rest for all members of the household, all members of the community, human and animal. As such it looks forward to the last six commandments that concern neighborly relations (Exodus 20:12–17). The fourth commandment anticipates a peaceable household and neighborhood and sets out a discipline and limit that will serve that peaceable news. The six commandments that follow on neighborliness reach a climactic point in the tenth commandment on coveting that is presented, perhaps, as the act that is the ultimate destruction of the neighborhood, for coveting generates mistrust and sets neighbor against neighbor” (69).“Sabbath is the great day of equality when all are equally at rest.… This one day breaks the pattern of coercion, all are like you, equal—equal worth, equal value, equal access, equal rest” (40–41).“Sabbath represents a radical disengagement from the producer-consumer rat race of the empire. The community welcomes members of any race or nation, any gender or social condition, so long as that person is defined by justice, mercy, and compassion, and not competition, achievement, production, or acquisition.… [Sabbath is] work stoppage with a neighborly pause for humanness” (54–55).Sabbath is “the pause that refreshes … transforms” (45); it helps reconnect worship with “the well-being of the neighborhood and the protection of the vulnerable” (61; cf. 63, 83–85). For the believer is better defined by the quality of their relationships and the well-being of the neighborhood than the quantity of their possessions (124; cf. 69–89).“Sabbath is the practical ground for breaking the power of acquisitiveness and for creating a public will for an accent on restraint.… an arena in which to recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities” (84–85).

This was my read of Brueggeman. I prepared myself for a difficult but rewarding read. Only one of those assumptions was correct.A remarkably easy read without sacrificing depth. A refreshingly different but very helpful approach to sabbathWell worth it

Hasta donde recuerdo, todos los libros de Brueggemann han sido de una calidad superior. Este libro no decepciona. De hecho, descubrí que ya tenía el volumen sin Study Guide. Pero ahora que lo leí con el guía me pareció incluso un libro superior. Dios nos conceda aprender de la teología del sábado como debe escucharse adecuadamente.

This is the best book I have ever read on the Sabbath because it goes beyond religious arguments and focuses on social, humanitarian, and justice perspectives that gives the day deep relevance and existential significance.Recommend it!

Very thoughtful content explained clearly with practical ways of resisting trends in our current consumer culture.