By experiential Brueggemann does not mean personalized or privatized in the immediate time frame. Rather, he speaks of stories that were the public experience of Israel, a notion that is not easy in a culture beset by narcissistic individualism and subjectivity.

For Israel the personal immediate experience was not adequate for life. Some community shapes perception and governs personal experience. To speak of personal experience that is private is to be deceived. “As there is no ‘presuppositionless exegesis’ of the text, so there is no ‘presuppositionless experience’ of life. For Israel these stories were “a counter experience, a subversive alternative to an imperial consensus….Every time Israel told one of its stories, it meant an assault on and refutation of other stories. This point is well lost in the Western Church. We have become gently benign, as though our stories were simply casual alternatives to some others that are also worthy of consideration.” “For Israel their stories meant to dismantle alternative worlds as well as to construct new ones for the listening community.” (The Creative Word, 25-26).