The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  From this characterization, three specific comments follow:

  1. It is not surprising that the noteworthy “prophetic figures” of the twentieth century have emerged in oppressive situations not completely closed down by usurpatious technology, in circumstances wherein subcommunities could claim for themselves enough space in which to practice resistance and alternative.

  2. The immense technological power of the United States makes the formation and maintenance of subcommunities of resistance and alternative in the United States exceedingly difficult. Moreover, for all of our treasured talk of “individual freedom,” the force of homogeneity is immense—partly seductive, partly coercive, partly the irresistible effect of affluence, in any case not hospitable to “difference.”

  3. While a Christian congregation in the prosperous United States is not at all parallel to subcommunities of resistance and alternative in more manifestly brutal societies, the church as a subcommunity in the United States is a thinkable mode of ministry. This is not a championing of sectarian withdrawal—a charge often made against Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon—nor a cranky community of endless protest, dissent, and confrontive “social action.” Rather, it is a suggestion about a community of peculiar discourse with practices of memory, hope, and pain that keep healthy human life available in the face of all the “virtual reality” now on offer in dominant culture. Reflection on biblical faith will indicate that the discourse of the biblical text provides ways of speech that make such a community possible. The formation and sustenance of such a subcommunity require a shared willingness to engage in gestures of resistance and acts of deep hope. These gestures and acts in turn require pastoral leadership that proceeds with an intentional ecclesial focus, namely, a subcommunity with an evangelical will for public engagement.

  In our contemporary world we are able to notice pro­phets-­in-the-face-of-oppression. It is not so easy in our electronic environment of consumerism to imagine pro­phetic discourse and prophetic action, but such consumerism is nonetheless likely the foremost circumstance of prophetic faith in the United States. As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent. A deficit in that conviction, to which to we are all prone, will produce despairing conformity, an atmosphere making the prophetic profoundly unlikely.

  V

  I was led into a wholly new understanding of theological imagination by the deeply unsettling and deeply reassuring book of William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ.[18] The book is an amazing critical reflection upon the role and conduct of the Roman Catholic Church in Chile during the years of terror under Pinochet. Cavanaugh’s analysis of the intentionality of Pinochet’s torture and terror is that it was designed to make human community impossible, to eliminate any chance of human dissent or human alternative, and so to assure the absolutism of the state.

  In his analysis, Cavanaugh concludes that during the first, early years of that brutality, the church and its leadership were asleep at the switch and passively conceded everything to the regime. After a certain point, however, the bishops of the church began to realize that the community-forming miracle of the Eucharist was a vehicle for the rule of God and a practical instrument for generating communities of resistance against the state. Thus, on deep theological grounds as well as practical considerations, the Eucharist proved to be an effective, even if risky, antidote to torture.

  In the final passages of his exposition, Cavanaugh reflects on the force of liturgic imagination by an appeal to the novel of Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina.[19] In the novel, the key character, Carlos Rueda, is visited with “a peculiar miraculous gift,” the capacity to create futures by acts of anticipatory imagination. Cavanaugh summarizes:

  What is especially astonishing is that Carlos’s gift is more than just the gift of seeing; his stories about people can actually alter reality. Men appear in the middle of the night to give back babies snatched with their mothers. Holes open in solid concrete walls, and tortured prisoners walk through to freedom. Carlos’s imagination actually finds people who have disappeared. . . . Confronted with evidence of the miraculous, Carlos’s friends nevertheless remain skeptical, convinced that Carlos cannot confront tanks with stories, helicopters with mere imagination. They can only see the conflict in terms of fantasy versus reality. Carlos, on the other hand, rightly grasps that the contest is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination, that of the generals and that of their opponents. The nightmare world of torture and disappearance of bodies is inseparable from the generals’ imagination of what Argentina and Argentines are. Carlos realizes that “he was being dreamed by [General] Gusman and the others, that he had been living inside their imagination.”[20]

  Cavanaugh then quotes from the novel itself:

  They remember a time before the regime, but they do not take their imaginations beyond memory because hoping is too painful. So long as we accept what the men in the car imagine, we’re finished. . . . We have to believe in the power of imagination because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.[21]

  Cavanaugh then concludes in a reflection on the novel:

  To refer to torture as the “imagination of the state” as I have done is obviously not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscrib-ing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state. Likewise, in Imagining Argentina, Carlos’s imagination is manifested in real effects; escaping the imagination of the state means that bodies go free. The imagination is defined as nothing less than “the magnificent cause of being.” Thornton’s novel provides us with a glimpse of what it means to make the odd claim that the Eucharist is the key to Christian resistance to torture. To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ’s corpus verum, they resist the state’s ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture.[22]

  Hardly anything remains to be said about imagination as theological force.

  Except to note that clearly the need for Eucharistic imagination in the United States is very different from the need for it in the abusive contexts that prevailed in Argentina and Chile. Indeed, the difference is so great that one might judge there is no transfer of the power of imagination from one context to the other. Whereas the South American societies suffer torture and physical abuse, the cultural situation in the United States, satiated by consumer goods and propelled by electronic technology, is one of narcoticized insensibility to human reality. It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny a lively, communal imagination that resists a mindless humanity of despairing conformity.

  If Eucharist is potentially an act of resistance and alternative to torture, perhaps Eucharistic imagination can also be a potential resistance and alternative to commodity satiation. It is evident that in our American society, as in those brutal contexts, there are two types of imagination, that of “the generals and their opponents,” or that of consumer ideology and its resisters. The fact is that we in American society too easily live “inside this imagination” when prophetic imagination is capable of enabling us to live inside “God’s imagination.” Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

  What the prophetic tradition knows is that it could be different, and the difference can be enacted. At the end of this edition of the book I have listed examples of enacted prophetic imagination. Those listed there are persons, communities, and institutions that have refused to live inside an alien, numbing imagination and have embraced the very �
��imagination of God.” The capacity of such alternative imagination is neither strong nor wise. But clearly,

  God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters; not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are (1 Cor 1:25-28).

  VI

  It remains for me to express thanks in connection with this second edition of the book. The impetus for the second edition has come from K. C. Hanson of Fortress Press. Beyond the impetus, Hanson has done the major part of the work in preparing the new edition. He has done extensive work on updating the body of the text, supplying new notes, and preparing the bibliographies at the end of the new version. Without him I would not have gotten this second rendering completed, and so I am deeply grateful to him.

  In addition, I am as usual grateful to Tempie Alexander, who has done her usual careful and discerning work. I suppose it is fair as well to acknowledge the decades of readers who have read, used, and responded to this book, as well as kept it in circulation. I have the sense, along with the readers, of being engaged with life-or-death questions of mission that must now occupy us.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Pentecost season, 2000

  * * *

  Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 b.c. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1979). ↵

  Robert R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980). ↵

  Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, OBT (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). Trible’s more recent book, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah, GBS (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), presents the method in more programmatic fashion. ↵

  Paul Ricoeur has famously distinguished among “the world behind the text,” “the world within the text,” and “the world in front of the text.” ↵

  Among the more important recent discussions of the issue is Garrett Green, Theology, Hermeneutics, and Imagination: The Crisis of Interpretation at the End of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The key issue in imagination is the extent to which it is reflective of a given and the extent to which it is generative of a new given. Green is cautious on the matter but in his most recent book seems to move a bit in a more constructivist direction. ↵

  Frederick Asals, Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). ↵

  Ibid., 198–233. ↵

  Ibid., 213. ↵

  Ibid., 215. ↵

  Ibid., 221, with a defining quote from Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 10. ↵

  Ibid., 221. ↵

  Ibid., 226, quoting Heschel, 179. ↵

  Ibid., 226. ↵

  Ibid., 227. ↵

  Ibid., 228, with a quote from Heschel, 7. ↵

  Ibid., 233. ↵

  Wilson, Prophecy and Society, 69–83 and passim. ↵

  William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). ↵

  Lawrence Thornton, Imagining Argentina (New York: Doubleday, 1987). ↵

  Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 278, with a quote from Thornton, 131. ↵

  Lawrence, Imagining Argentina, 65, quoted by Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 279. ↵

  Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 279. ↵

  Preface to the First Edition

  The time may be ripe in the church for serious consideration of prophecy as a crucial element in ministry. To be sure, the student indignation of the sixties is all but gone, but there is at the same time a sobering and a return to the most basic issues of biblical faith.

  The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to, if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of foretellers or social protesters. Here it is argued that they were concerned with most elemental changes in human society and that they understood a great deal about how change is effected. The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to emotional extremities of life. They understood the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning. Most of all, they understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness “fresh from the word.” It is argued here that a prophetic understanding of reality is based in the notion that all social reality does spring fresh from the word. It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops we find our humanness diminished.

  These lectures were first presented to United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ ministers in the state of Washington, where I was generously hosted by Larry Pitman and James Halfaker, and at North Park Seminary, Chicago, where Dean Glenn Anderson was a source of encourage­ment and support. As in so many parts of my growth and learning, my colleague M. Douglas Meeks has stimulated these reflections.

  This book is offered in thanksgiving for a growing number of my sisters who at long last are finding acceptance in ordained ministry. For me, of course, that distinguished group of colleagues is headed by my wife, Mary, who pastors in prophetic ways. It includes a growing number of women who have been my student colleagues at Eden Seminary.

  I am growingly aware that this book is different because of the emerging feminine consciousness as it impacts our best theological thinking. That impacting is concerned not with abrasive crusading but with a different nuancing of all our perceptions. I do not think that women ministers and theologians are the first to have discerned the realities of grief and amazement in our lives, but they have helped us see them as important dimensions of prophetic reality. In many ways these sisters have permitted me to see what I otherwise might have missed. For that I am grateful—and amazed.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Eden Theological Seminary

  Lent 1978

  1

  The Alternative Community of Moses

  A study of the prophets of Israel must try to take into account both the evidence of the Old Testament and the contemporary situation of the church. What we understand about the Old Testament must be somehow connected with the realities of the church today. So I shall begin with a statement of how I see our present situation and the task facing us in ministry. I will not elaborate but only provide a clue to the perspective from which I am presenting the subject.

  The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act. This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life, both liberal and conservative. It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time. That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons. Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric.

  The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition. Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now. Either way, a community rooted in energizing memories and summoned by radical hopes is a curiosity and a threat in such a culture. When we suffer from amnesia, every form of serious authority for faith is in question, and we live unauthorized lives of faith and practice unauthorized ministries.

  The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has
no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity. And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid the faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightenment.

  It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.[1] In what follows, I want to urge that there are precise models in Scripture for discerning prophetic ministry in this way.

  A study of the prophets of Israel must also try to take into account both the best discernment of contemporary scholarship and what the tradition itself seems to tell us. The tradition and contemporary scholarship are likely to be in some kind of tension, and we must try to be attentive to that. The weariness and serenity of the churches just now make it a good time to study the prophets and get rid of tired misconceptions. The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers, is that the prophet is a fortune-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually with specific reference to Jesus. While one would not want to deny totally those facets of the practice of prophecy, there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable. While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges upon the present. Conversely, liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present. Thus prophecy is alternatively reduced to righteous indignation and, in circles where I move, prophecy is mostly understood as social action. Indeed, such a liberal understanding of prophecy is an attractive and face-saving device for any excessive abrasiveness in the service of almost any cause. Perhaps our best effort would be to let the futuring of such conservatives and the present criticism of the liberals correct each other. But even that is less than might be claimed. I believe that neither convention adequately understands what is really at issue in the Israelite understanding of prophecy.