The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  Davis Hankins

  Appalachian State University

  Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018

  Thanks to Brent A. Strawn for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this foreword.

  * * *

  For example, on the role of imagination in interpretation, see Walter Brueggemann, Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); on imagination in the texts, see Walter Brueggemann, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). ↵

  Kathleen M. O’Connor, Jeremiah: Pain and Promise (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011). ↵

  See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). ↵

  See, for example, Lawrence Mishel, Elise Gould, and Josh Bivens, “Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts,” Economic Policy Institute, January 6, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/ybnuk95l. ↵

  See Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (New York: Crown Business, 2016). ↵

  Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 224. ↵

  A Note about the 40th Anniversary Edition

  Fortress Press is pleased to publish this new edition of The Prophetic Imagination to honor its fortieth year in print and to celebrate the legacy of Walter Brueggemann’s many publishing projects with Fortress Press, twenty-eight volumes and counting! We are grateful for this long and enduring relationship, and we are honored to have been one of many conduits for Walter’s voice.

  Based on the revised edition published in 2001, this volume includes a new foreword by Davis Hankins and Walter Brueggemann’s own “In Retrospect (PI at Forty).” We have updated the cover as a reminder that this groundbreaking volume is ever new and timely, calling forth fresh prophetic imagination in each generation.

  Preface to the Second (Revised) Edition

  The publication of The Prophetic Imagination in 1978 was my first publication in which I more-or-less found my own voice as a teacher in the church. Much has changed for me since then, but the basic thesis that I articulated there holds for me and continues to frame my ongoing work. There are indeed definitive continuities between what I said then and what I would say now.

  I

  At the same time, a great deal has changed since then. I mark three such changes. First, the changes in method and approach in the critical study of the Bible since then are immense. In 1978 or in the years just preceding when I wrote, scripture study was completely defined by historical criticism, even though the first hints of new approaches were on the horizon. For the study of the prophetic texts, this commitment to historical criticism meant understanding the prophetic personalities in their presumed historical contexts and then extrapolating from that text-in-context to general thematics. Derivatively, the practical use of prophetic texts in “prophetic ministry” meant rather regularly direct, confrontational encounter with established power in the way Amos seemed to confront Amaziah (Amos 7:10-17). Such an approach that, in retrospect, seems somewhat simplistic did indeed fund and authorize bold and courageous ministries.

  At that time, however, scripture study generally awaited the articulation of methods that moved beyond or underneath historical criticism of a conventional kind. Specifically, social-scientific criticism, stunningly introduced into Old Testament studies by Norman Gottwald in 1979—the year after my book—opened the way to see texts as ideological statements evoked by and evoking specific forms of social action and policy, social authorization, and social criticism.[1] Robert Wilson helped us to see that the prophets are not lonely voices against the establishment but are in fact representative voices that give social expression to what may be important and engaged social constituencies.[2] The effect of such study is to situate prophetic texts more densely in the interplay of social forces that are in conflict over the correct characterization of social reality. Thus the texts are brought more closely into contact with the social processes in which they are imbedded and to which the texts themselves may have contributed.

  In like manner, critical study of the Old Testament in 1978 still awaited the emergence of rhetorical criticism and its appreciation of the generative, constitutive power of imagination. In 1978, the same year as my book, Phyllis Trible published God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, a definitive starting point in Old Testament study for the ways in which public speech (and thus text) generate alternative worlds.[3] Partly out of rhetorical criticism and partly out of the crucial work of Paul Ricoeur on imagination, it became generally evident that texts—in particular biblical texts—are acts of imagination that offer and purpose “alternative worlds” that exist because of and in the act of utterance.[4] Since that early publication of Trible, there has been an explosion of literature on theological imagination with the recognition, against dominant classical views, that imagination is indeed a legitimate way of knowing.[5] One consequence of this new awareness is that biblical texts, in particular prophetic texts, could be seen as poetic scenarios of alternative social reality that might lead to direct confrontation with “presumed, taken-for-granted worlds” (the old liberal assumption). The canonical text, as norm for an intergenerational community, might also serve to nurture and fund obedience that is not necessarily confrontational but that simply acts out of a differently perceived, differently received, differently practiced world (imagination/obedience). Thus a focus on rhetoric as generative imagination has permitted prophetic texts to be heard and reuttered as offers of reality counter to dominant reality that characteristically enjoys institutional, hegemonic authority but is characteristically uncritical of itself.

  The second change since 1978 that I note is my own changed perspective. My dedication of that book to “sisters in ministry” plus my citation of José Porfirio Miranda on page 89 indicate that at that time I was only beginning (as most of us were only beginning) to integrate into my interpretive practice the perspectives that are associated with various forms of liberation theology. My continued attention to issues of a liberation hermeneutic has since that time intensified for me. The recurring critiques of liberation hermeneutics are of course well known; in general, however, those critiques strike me as misinformed and offered by critics who have the luxury of social distance from the sharp wounds of social reality. When one considers the issues of liberation and exploitation on the ground, then the intimate contact between biblical texts of a prophetic sort and matters of social justice, social interest, and social criticism seem to me to be incontrovertible. Moreover, the enmeshment of the United States church in the raging force of globalization and the easy accommodation of church faith and practice to consumer commoditism make the urgency of “prophetic consciousness” palpable among us, any critique of method to the contrary. In any case, I believe that the lines of argument I have laid out are, if anything, more important than at the time of my writing, precisely because the hegemonic power of the “royal consciousness” is all but totalizing among us. Thus my own conviction about the matter is intensified as I ponder my own faith in the context where I find myself called.

  The third change that I identify is that the church community in its “mainline” expressions is increasingly decentered and disenfranchised since the time of my writing. There is much speculation and gnashing of teeth about the causes of such marginalization, and lots of culprits have been identified. But the likely “explanation” is the long-term and deep force of secularization. Whatever may be the cause of such marginalization of the church as an institution, the effect can hardly be doubted. The consequence of this social reality that concerns us is that the old confrontational model of “prophet versus established power,” which was a replication of the Old Testament notion of “prophet versus king,” is increasingly difficult to bring off and without great social effect. A confrontational model assumes that the
“prophetic voice” has enough clout, either social or moral, to gain a hearing. Currently, the old “prophetic stance” of such churches lacks much of that authority, so that the old confrontational approach is largely ineffectual posturing. Given that social reality, which I think cannot be doubted, I suspect that whatever is “prophetic” must be more cunning and more nuanced and perhaps more ironic.

  For that reason it is important to see that the prophetic texts that feature the great confrontations are not to be directly replicated and reenacted. Rather, they are to be seen as materials that might fund the would-be prophetic voice, to give wisdom and courage, but which then invite immense imagination to know how to move from such texts to actual circumstance. This move, required by contemporary context, is to take the prophetic texts as text and not as “personality,” the tendency of the older confrontational model. Thus my accent on imagination has turned out to be exactly correct, for what is now required is that a relatively powerless prophetic voice must find imaginative ways that are rooted in the text but that freely and daringly move from the text toward concrete circumstance. Seen in that contextual way, “prophetic imagination” requires more than the old liberal confrontation if the point is not posturing but effecting change in social perspective and social policy.

  II

  Since I have suggested something of an equation of “royal consciousness” and “false consciousness,” I should acknowledge one ongoing critique of my position by my friend J. J. M. Roberts and his students. The persistent judgment of that perspective is that I have been much too severe on the monarchy in the Old Testament and have treated the thematic of the royal too harshly and dismissively. Perhaps so. But I think it important to identify two grounds for the quite different nuance we each bring to the question. First, I have tried to do serious social criticism of the ideology that exists in the royal texts. That is, I have brought to the text my own hermeneutic of suspicion. I believe that is in order when one considers the outcome of the Solomonic reign that is terminated in the interplay of idolatry (1 Kgs 11:1-13) and a critique of economic policy with reference to labor (1 Kgs 12:1-19). The combination of idolatry and economic policy are telling in a suspicion about the monarchy expressed in the text. Second, it is evident that the monarchy was terminated and any reading of the Old Testament makes clear the sustained judgment that the termination is because of Torah disobedience. One can hardly, in my judgment, fail to see Torah disobedience apart from the realities of social practice. Thus I believe that any robust theological defense of the monarchy in the Old Testament as it was practiced on the ground must disregard any social analysis and must proceed in a kind of innocence. Third, I believe that the impetus for the defense of the monarchy is in order to be in a position to appreciate the coming of Christ as the fulfillment of the royal line. That is, I believe that the defense has a theological motivation, one that I think is remote from the kind of analysis I am doing. I do not intend to impute to my critics anything less than a legitimate scholarly judgment, and in the end it may be that we simply disagree on what the texts say. I imagine that none of our judgments is objective or disinterested, mine or theirs. I hope it is fair to try to state what I think the disagreement is about and regard my own judgment on the matter as a quite provisional one.

  III

  The interface of “prophetic” and “imagination” has turned out to be a most important one. I must admit, however, that the phrasing for the book was entirely happenstance, a title decision made late in the publication process. It is, nonetheless, a fortuitous one because prophetic faith in a flat, confrontational mode, without imagination, is a non-starter. Concerning the phrase of the title, I am delighted to notice that in 1982, just after my book was published, F. Asals offered his study of the work of Flannery O’Connor in his book Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity.[6] Even better than that, his sixth chapter is titled “The Prophetic Imagination.”[7] It is of course too much to associate my writing, then or now, with the savage artistry of Flannery O’Connor. I am sure, nonetheless, that the joining of “prophetic” to “imagination” leads inescapably in an artistic direction in which truth is told in a way and at an angle that assures it will not be readily coopted or domesticated by hegemonic interpretive power. Of O’Connor’s work, Asals judges:

  The imagination, O’Connor discovered, might accomplish much more; it might become the channel of visionary awareness. . . . For O’Connor, as for Aquinas, it is the imagination, with its roots deep in the human unconscious, that is the link between the depths of the self and the unseen reaches of the universe, that can reveal to finite man his apocalyptic destiny . . . the imagination for her is as dangerous a force as any named by Freud, for what it opens to, in those shattering climaxes when it achieves release, are the unwanted visions that ravage the lives of her protagonists.[8]

  . . . as the institutional guardian of the prophetic Word, the church has hardly been hospitable to the individual voice crying, “Thus sayeth the Lord.”[9]

  . . . Far from denying the body and the senses, the asceticism in the later fiction works consistently to affirm them, to release them from the false consciousness of her protagonists in order to experience reality. But reality, to the prophetic mind, is always double: “This world, no more shadow of ideas in an upper sphere, is real, but not absolute; the world’s reality is contingent upon compatibility with God.”[10] For O’Connor’s sacramentalism, it is the natural world that becomes the vehicle for the supernatural, and her characters’ literal return to their senses becomes the means of opening their imaginations to receive it.[11]

  Suffering is central to the prophetic consciousness. “The prophet is prepared for pain. One of the effects of his presence is to intensify the people’s capacity for suffering, to rend the veil that lies between life and pain.”[12] . . . This ascetic imperative in O’Connor is a part of that prophetic consciousness. . . .[13]

  As a writer of fiction, Flannery O’Connor simply had no interest in—no imagination for—“a socially desirable Christianity.”[14]

  Concrete, passionate, and imaginative, prophetic in its form, prophetic speech is nonetheless “a sharp sword,” conveying a vision “designed to shock rather than edify.”[15]

  Moderation is a delusion, and only extremists are in touch with reality.[16]

  As O’Connor’s writing is dense, so the allusions in Asals’s analysis are dense, and I will not unpack them here. It is sufficient to notice, first, that O’Connor appeals a great deal to Abraham Heschel, also definingly important for my work. Second, it is important to notice that her notion of the prophetic is truth that is inexplicable and out beyond the normalcy of her characters. Thus, I submit, prophetic must be imaginative because it is urgently out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable.

  The analysis of Asals makes clear that O’Connor stresses a concern for “false consciousness” that I have termed “royal consciousness,” the defining power of suffering for the reception of truth, that established institutions and social conventions are deeply inhospitable to such imagination. It is inescapable that prophetic utterance and action turn out to be absurd, but it is an absurdity that may be the very truth of obedient imagination.

  IV

  Because this book intends to serve the practice of the church, I take the liberty of commenting on “the natural habitat” of prophetic voices. Evidently God can “raise up prophets” and authorize prophetic voices and deeds in the fullness of God’s own freedom, anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance. If, however, we are to think from the human side of the matter, it will not surprise that some social environments are more hospitable than others to prophets and more likely to be the locus of their emergence. I take it, following Wilson’s notion of “peripheral prophets,” that prophets are “naturally” in subcommunities that stand in tension with the dominant community in any political economy.[17]

  The subcommunity that may generate prophecy will participate in the public life of the dominant community; it does
so, however, from a certain perspective and with a certain intention. Such a subcommunity is likely to be one in which

  there is a long and available memory that sinks the present generation deep into an identifiable past that is available in song and story;

  there is an available, expressed sense of pain that is owned and recited as a real social fact, that is visibly acknowledged in a public way, and that is understood as unbearable for the long term;

  there is an active practice of hope, a community that knows about promises yet to be kept, promises that stand in judgment on the present;

  there is an effective mode of discourse that is cherished across the generations, that is taken as distinctive, and that is richly coded in ways that only insiders can know.

  In short, such a subcommunity is one in which the first-line, elemental realities of human, bodily, historical existence are appreciated, honored, and treasured. It is obvious that such a subcommunity knows itself to be positioned for the long-term in tension with the dominant community that responds to the subcommunity at best as an inconvenience, at worst as an unbearable interruption.