Praise for The Prophetic Imagination, 40th Anniversary Edition
“Years ago, as I struggled to envision a ministry that would engage both the prophetic and the pastoral, Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination gave the world a fresh vision of the role of imagination in the inevitable confrontation between what Howard Thurman terms ‘the religion of Jesus’ and what Brueggemann calls ‘the royal consciousness.’ In the years since that revelation, yesterday’s dilemmas birthed today’s crises, which now loom as tomorrow’s catastrophes. Even amid these shadows, Brueggemann still emboldens us to endure and even to overcome these troubles, not merely by the tenacity of blues lamentation and the transcendence of gospel communion, but also by prophetic improvisations that jazz the song of Joshua and crumble the walls thrown up by the politics of domination.”
— William J. Barber II,
author of The Third Reconstruction
“Few authors have influenced my spiritual formation more than Walter Brueggemann, and few books more than The Prophetic Imagination. Brueggemann is one of the greatest theologians we have alive today. If you have not read this book, please do. If you have read it before, read it again. The Prophetic Imagination is precisely what the church needs right now.”
— Shane Claiborne, activist and author
of Executing Grace and Red Letter Revolution
“When I first read The Prophetic Imagination in college, it changed my life. Now, forty years after its initial publication, Brueggemann’s book remains as timely as ever, retaining all of its power, insight, and daring. This anniversary edition—beautifully introduced by Davis Hankins—ensures that this classic work is available to inspire another generation to resist the static triumphalism of Pharaoh (in countless contemporary incarnations), to criticize the dominant totalizing consciousness, and to energize the people of God in the face of profound grief.”
— Brent A. Strawn, Emory University
“Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination has drawn many a student, seminarian, preacher, and more than a few laypeople on the strength of the title alone, resonant with much of black preaching where the ‘sanctified imagination’ is regularly engaged. This text has guided generations of biblical interpreters to take the prophetic encounter and vocation as more than protest or religiopolitical disagreement in and beyond the text. The book remains relevant—eminently readable and teachable.”
— Wil Gafney, Brite Divinity School
“At a time when tradition seems to have become the property of the status quo, this book is more relevant than ever. As tradition shifts sides, it becomes subversive of the dominant religious, political, and economic developments, and so new energies are set free that push toward liberation. While this has been going on for thousands of years, the increasing challenges of the past forty years since this book was written—threatening to destroy both humanity and the planet—underscore its ongoing importance.”
— Joerg Rieger, Vanderbilt University
“Essential reading for generations of scholars and pastors, The Prophetic Imagination has been catalytic for those yearning to understand biblical prophecy and strengthen their own prophetic witness. Over against the hopelessness generated by repressive ideology, Brueggemann insists that we can choose as the prophets did: neither denial nor acquiescence, but visionary resistance. Brueggemann presses a brilliant case for prophetic imagination as the only choice that will not leave us co-opted by the relentless manipulations of empire.”
— Carolyn J. Sharp, Yale Divinity School
“Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination is timeless; yet, at the same time, it feels as if he wrote it ‘for such a time as this.’ The convicting yet hopeful voice of Brueggemann is much like the prophets he writes of from the Hebrew Bible—indeed, he is the conscience of our time.”
— Cynthia Shafer-Elliott,
William Jessup University
“The Prophetic Imagination opened our eyes and ears to the power and purposiveness of the prophets’ vision. Practicing prophetic imagination is no less urgent a vocation today, in the face of the omnipresent calculus of human expendability. That this slender book seems both as inspiring and as unerringly realistic today as forty years ago is testament that Walter Brueggemann has described that vocation with precision; this new edition frames his argument as a word on target for a time that critically needs it.”
— Neil Elliott, author of Liberating Paul and The Arrogance of Nations
THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION
40th Anniversary Edition
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN
Foreword by Davis Hankins
FORTRESS PRESS
Minneapolis
THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION
40th Anniversary Edition
Copyright © 2018 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [email protected] or write to Permissions,
Fortress Press, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.
Biblical quotations are translated by the author.
Cover design: Brad Norr Design
Frontispiece: Door jamb figure of Jeremiah. St. Pierre, Moissac, France.
© 2001 Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Used by permission
Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-4930-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-4931-9
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
For sisters in ministry
who teach me daily about
the power of grief
and
the gift of amazement
Contents
Foreword by Davis Hankins
A Note about the 40th Anniversary Edition
Preface to the Second (Revised) Edition
Preface to the First Edition
1. The Alternative Community of Moses
2. Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture
3. Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
4. Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement
5. Criticism and Pathos in Jesus of Nazareth
6. Energizing and Amazement in Jesus of Nazareth
7. A Note on the Practice of Ministry
A Postscript on Practice
In Retrospect (PI at Forty)
Abbreviations
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Scripture Index
Foreword
The bibliography of works by Walter Brueggemann is astounding, surely unparalleled among his peers. He has published at a dizzying pace on a vast array of subjects in multiple genres, including works of critical scholarship, reviews, sermons, poetic prayers, and more. That so much of Brueggemann’s variegated and sprawling corpus is already anticipated in this slim book is therefore astonishing. In his “Preface to the Revised Edition” (2001), Brueggemann declares that this book was his “first publication in which I more-or-less found my own voice.” At the risk of oversimplification, I think that the argument that he voices here involves a few clear steps.
Brueggemann approaches exploitative societies as sustained by various ideologies. Such ideologies silence any actual or imagined threats to the reigning inequities that consolidate wealth and power for the benefit of a few to the exclusion of others. The prophetic task begins with grief that names the realities within such a social situation of pain, loss, fear, resentment, and antagonism. Such mourning enables a community to break
through the denial, numbness, and inhumanity of exploitation. As the prophetic cry loosens the grip of dominant ideologies, it also energizes and empowers a community out of indifference into action. Now engaged, hope becomes possible not only for healing but also for an alternative mode of life, which prophets must articulate and enact with artistry potent enough to resist domestication. Prophetic imagination proceeds through these three basic steps: (1) it refuses denial and penetrates despair with honest cries over pain and loss that result from social injustices; (2) it overcomes amnesia by drawing on ancient, artistic traditions that energize the community to imagine and live into a more just order; and (3) it ends in hope and gratitude for the surprising gift of an emancipated future. These steps have remained paradigmatic in Brueggemann’s subsequent work to an extent that, while it may appear that Brueggemann has written scores of books, one might also suggest that he has never stopped writing The Prophetic Imagination.
I believe there are two main reasons why The Prophetic Imagination has needed four decades of ongoing, still unfinished development. First, the approach to the biblical materials that it adopts is so broad, rich, provocative, and unlike most biblical scholarship that some of its deepest insights needed further intellectual development in order to be fully appreciated. This is not simply a matter of Brueggemann being ahead of his time, although I think that he was; it also seems true that this book was ahead of its author. Brueggemann admits in the preface to the 2001 edition that the title’s conjunction of “prophetic” and “imagination” was a late decision that “was entirely happenstance.” Subsequently, Brueggemann’s significant publications on the pivotal and various roles that imagination plays—in biblical texts, their interpretation, and in communal practices—make it nearly impossible to view the title as a fortuitous happenstance.[1] That is, the title’s precise formulation now seems absolutely necessary because we have since learned that no prophetic text or task can be grasped without considering the function of imagination. This point now appears clearly within The Prophetic Imagination, yet it could not have been as clear to its initial readers.
The gift of forty years of hindsight and the ongoing work of many scholars, including Brueggemann, have cast into fine relief the depth and richness of the claims in this book. Brueggemann’s work on the imagination, for example, participates in larger developments in literary criticism, philosophy, and other fields. Sometimes designated poststructuralism or postmodernism, these developments refer in part to an increasing appreciation for the role of nonconceptual content—such as performance, way of life, enactment, images, and other imaginary features—in the production of conceptual content and the assessment of its value. Rather than continuing to pursue this point in relation to theory, however, I can offer a different, more concrete example from my personal experience.
In a seminar that I teach on prophetic rhetoric and literature, I typically assign The Prophetic Imagination after students read Kathleen O’Connor’s 2011 monograph on the book of Jeremiah.[2] O’Connor and Brueggemann enjoyed a long and happy time as colleagues at Columbia Theological Seminary, where I had the good fortune of being their student. Their relationship proved to be, over time, one of mutual support, stimulation, and evocation. O’Connor approaches Jeremiah in a way that is explicitly indebted to Brueggemann’s work, but she adds a thorough engagement with trauma and disaster studies. The latter field of inquiry emerged as a robust and distinct area of scholarship only in the last decade of the twentieth century, so it is astonishing that Brueggemann’s reflections on grief and mourning in this book (first published in 1978) align so extensively with recent research. One might reasonably read The Prophetic Imagination first, and then O’Connor, since she engages his book and supplements it with attention to a new field of inquiry. But in my experience, more is learned by reading O’Connor first because her presentation of the theoretical work and practical experiences gained by those who study and treat the effects of trauma and disaster provide a background against which the depth and implications of Brueggemann’s claims can be better appreciated. For example, Brueggemann attends to the numbness, denial, and the powerful deadening hold by which the dominant, royal consciousness perpetuates its status quo. Students are more prepared to understand this social reality after they have considered how these same symptoms manifest in, for example, the psychological responses that typically appear and function as coping mechanisms in victims of domestic abuse. And Brueggemann’s description of the positive social and political potential of narrating painful experiences and expressing grief is even clearer after reading about the essential role that they play in therapeutic treatment.
The second reason why I think that The Prophetic Imagination has required four decades of ongoing articulation is because the problematic features that this book diagnoses in the social situation have not faded into the past, and because the prophetic program of criticizing and energizing that the book advocates retains similar relevance and vitality. First, among the many factors that differentiate what Brueggemann calls the royal situation from the prophetic imagination, the unequal distribution of wealth and economic practices of unjust extraction play a pivotal role in the social inequities and oppression that characterize the former and summon the latter. Beginning in the late 1970s, and certainly by the 2001 revision of The Prophetic Imagination, inequalities in wealth and income, which had been relatively low and stable for three decades after World War II, began to increase dramatically in the rich countries of Europe and especially the United States.[3] Over the course of this meteoric rise in income and wealth inequalities, wages for the majority of the population in the United States have remained stagnant.[4] Systemic forces that have exacerbated disparities in wealth and income sustain this status quo. For Brueggemann, “prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated” (p. 3). From an economic perspective, this means that prophets primarily need to address not this or that overpaid CEO, super-manager, university chancellor, college football coach, or professional athlete, but the dominant social and economic forces that drive steadily increasing divergences in wealth distribution. Similarly, the question is not whether our economic system has enabled growth and benefited lives, but whether we can imagine an alternative kind of economy that might foster broader benefits for far more people in the future.
Such economic realities cannot be separated from politics and public policy. Many policy decisions over the last four decades have played a major role in these increased inequalities, such as those that have contributed to the emerging dominance of finance within our economic system—even in the decade since 2008 when finance played such a pivotal role in nearly collapsing the global economy.[5] Other political tensions have similarly persisted. Brueggemann consistently shows how royal orders desperately try to maintain power and control in various ways, such as phony claims to moral supremacy, just retribution, peace, and well-being, in order to avoid critique and mask realities of self-interest, victim-blaming, and inequality.
The prophet should mourn and criticize actions that enable the persistence of situations that compromise core values and imagine alternative policies that define national interests on the basis of those values. This is, in fact, how Martin Luther King began his “Dream” speech. He urged America to honor the “promissory note” that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence offered African Americans, which they had not yet been able to cash.[6] Prophets characteristically summon their communities to turn from their current failings so as to be true to their most fundamental values.
Race has continued to be a contemporary issue over the decades since The Prophetic Imagination first appeared, as has the struggle for gender equality and rights, as well as questions about immigrants, refugees, foreigners, and more. Brueggemann dedicated this book to “sisters in ministry,” and now Time
magazine has named #MeToo the 2017 “person of the year.” It is also noteworthy that the last time I taught the course mentioned above on prophecy, students were astonished that Stokely Carmichael was not part of Black Lives Matter but instead spoke with such contemporaneity over forty years ago. This is not to deny progress on these issues in the United States, for prophetic leaders like Carmichael have not worked and died in vain. But the underlying root of these social problems remains, along with the steps that can be taken toward an alternative. As William Barber regularly mentions in his Moral Mondays movement and in his renewed Poor People’s Campaign, The Prophetic Imagination helps to identify and articulate the problem, and to imagine and pursue a more emancipatory future, which is why Brueggemann’s book has needed forty years of ongoing implementation.
The Prophetic Imagination never treats biblical texts as mere vehicles for policy positions or cultural critique. Brueggemann emphasizes throughout the importance and the implications of the fact that the prophets were not pundits but poets and preachers. Just as the prophets articulate a poetic idiom that frees imaginations from the flat prose of a dominant discourse that admits nothing unexpected, so too does the prophets’ Lord operate with agency in an arena that is unacknowledged and even unknown to the prevailing consciousness. This God is not defined by doctrines or wedded to social institutions but regularly surprises the human community with new meanings, unforeseen possibilities, and unconscious truths that the prophets voice in God’s name. The Prophetic Imagination is one such instance; ultimately, it is an attempt to create a new future for Christianity as host for divine possibilities in a cultural context that is dominated by unacknowledged anxiety that issues in anti-neighborly resentment, aggression, and worse. Of course, mainstream Christianity has often, unfortunately, contributed to that toxic context, but Brueggemann’s wager is that the prophetic tradition is like a foreign body within that toxicity—inside the church and out—that is capable of eroding it and constructing an alternative. Forty years after its initial publication in 1978, the need is no less urgent, and the promise of this book sounds even more compelling. The work that lies ahead is to imagine and enact that alternative. For that we can be grateful—and amazed!
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