The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  The poetry here uses the language of grief as it is characteristically expressed in the poetry of lamentation. There is a sense of forsakenness with none to comfort, with a yearning for mercy, but only a yearning. Israel must be grieved and not too soon can there be a word beyond grief.

  Jeremiah spoke to the people with glazed eyes that looked and did not see. They were so encased in their own world of fantasy that they were stupid and undiscerning. And so the numbness was not broken and they continued in their fantasy world: “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer 6:14; 8:11). They fancied their covenantal stupidity to be royal wisdom (8:8) and they went their royal, self-deceiving ways. The prophets imagined that the yoke was a temporary one but not finally serious or decisive (chaps. 27–28). The kings imagined that to void a word and burn a scroll would make the sovereignty of Yahweh “inoperative” (36:23-24). The kings would do everything but grieve, for that is the ultimate criticism and the decisive announcement of dismantling.

  We need not press the language of Jeremiah to expect it to be too concrete and specific. The prophet is engaged in a battle for language, in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge. The prophet is not addressing behavioral problems. He is not even pressing for repentance. He has only the hope that the ache of God could penetrate the numbness of history. He engages not in scare or threat but only in a yearning that grows with and out of pain.

  So what is this prophet up to? Why all this grief? Surely he is not like the “tearjerker” minister who believes that a good cry makes a fine funeral. Nor shall we be professional funeral attenders to whom tears come automatically with one verse of “Rock of Ages.” But we do know from our own pain and hurt and loneliness that tears break barriers like no harshness or anger. Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remains. And when one addresses numbness clearly, anger, abrasiveness, and indignation as forms of address will drive the hurt deeper, add to the numbness, and force people to behaviors not rooted in experience.

  This denying and deceiving kind of numbness is broken only by the embrace of negativity,[16] by the public articulation that we are fearful and ashamed of the future we have chosen. The pain and regret denied only immobilizes. In the time of Jeremiah the pain and regret denied prevented any new movement either from God or toward God in Judah. The covenant was frozen and there was no possibility of newness until the numbness was broken. Jeremiah understood that the criticism must be faced and embraced, for then comes liberation from incurable disease, from broken covenant, and from failed energy. This tradition of biblical faith knows that anguish is the door to historical existence, that embrace of ending permits beginnings. Naturally kings think the door of anguish must not be opened, for it dismantles fraudulent kings. Kings know intuitively that the deception, the phony claims of prosperity, oppression, and state religion will collapse when the air of covenant hits them. The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings.

  Jeremiah stands midway in the history of Israel’s grief. Before him, Amos condemned those in their self-deception who were unable and unwilling to grieve (Amos 6:6). After Jeremiah comes Jesus of Nazareth, who understands grief as the ultimate criticism that had to be addressed against Jerusalem (Matt 23:27; Luke 19:41). Jeremiah stands midway and speaks the grief of God that Israel finally must share. Without it there is no newness.

  Jesus had understands Jeremiah. Ecclesiastes said only that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh; but Jesus sees that only those who mourn will be comforted (Matt 5:4). Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life. Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted and those who do not face the endings will not receive the beginnings. The alternative community knows it need not engage in deception. It can stand in solidarity with the dying, for those are the ones who hope. Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on.

  I used to think it curious that, when having to quote scripture on demand, someone would inevitably say, “Jesus wept.” It is usually done as a gimmick to avoid having to quote a longer passage. But now I understand the depth of that verse. Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a radical criticism, a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones. Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for in radical criticism.

  * * *

  Rubem A. Alves has said this most eloquently in Tomorrow’s Child: Imagination, Creativity, and the Rebirth of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). The practice of imagination is a subversive activity not because it yields concrete acts of defiance (which it may), but because it keeps the present provisional and refuses to absolutize it. The practice of a historical imagination maintains the possibility of a future that is not continuous from the present. It is the intent of every totalitarian regime to force the future to be only an unquestioned continuation of the present. ↵

  As indicated in chapter 2, reference to Ecclesiastes here means no questioning of the conventional Hellenistic dating but only the observance that the cynicism of that period found a correlate in the cynicism of the Solomonic environment. Socially, the two periods are to be contrasted for Israel; but in terms of the human spirit, the two seem to come to the same sorry situation. ↵

  R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), chap. 1. His programmatic statement is: “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive” (12). The contrast between experience and behavior illuminates the recent statement of Martin Marty, A Nation of Behavers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). It is the argument of this chapter that Israel’s prophets must deal with this alienation between experience and behavior, that royal Israel was now only capable of behavior. ↵

  Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson have explored the failure of symbols for death and the destructiveness of death when it lacks adequate symbolization; Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974). Thus they speak of “psychic numbing” and a “symbolic gap” (137). They conclude that “the whole age in which we live is one of vast numbing and desensitization” caused by the technologies of death. Compare Lifton, Death in Life:Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 474, “Technology Leads to Disconnected Death”; idem, History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and Old, Survivors and the Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory (New York: Random House, 1970), 175, in which Lifton speaks of death without symbols as “severance of the sense of connection.” The prophet’s stance over against the king nurtures adequate symbolization and therefore insists upon connectedness. ↵

  Effective symbols are those that have grown out of the history of the community. Thus we are speaking not of universal myths but of symbolization appropriate to a peculiar history. In Israel we may then refer to the memories of incongruity that serve Israel through the prophecy of Jeremiah. See the provocative statement of Peter R. Ackroyd, “Continuity and Discontinuity: Rehabilitation and Authentication,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 215–34. There is a danger in symbols that provide continuity, for they may lessen the reality of the discontinuity; but Ackroyd has stated for Israel that which Lifton sees in terms of our own culture. ↵

  The anguish and passion that make such speech authoritative cannot be in terms of comprehensive myths but must be out of the experience of the community. Thus the study of the language of metaphor and parable is to let Israel experience its own experience, as Laing has seen. On the concreteness of language, see S
allie McFague TeSelle, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975); John Dominic Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge, 1988; reprint ed.); William R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994). It is the task of the prophet to energize the metaphors resulting from historical experience. ↵

  On a quite different critical judgment of this text, see George E. Mendenhall, “The Shady Side of Wisdom: The Date and Purpose of Genesis 3,” in A Light Unto My Path: Old Testament Studies in Honor of Jacob M. Myers, ed. H. N. Bream et al. (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1974), 319–34. The dating to the exile as Mendenhall proposes, vis à vis conventional Solomonic dating, may suggest important parallels between the two periods. ↵

  Thus apathy and official optimism have ideological purposes. Against that, grief and lamentation, as urged and practiced by the prophets, begin the dismantling of royal reality. Expressed suffering is the beginning of counterpower. See G. Müller-Fahrenholz, “Overcoming Apathy,” EcRev 27 (1975) 48–56. He follows the study of A. Mitscherlich in noting the inability of Germans to grieve over the Nazi period. Such an observation coincides with the findings of Lifton. The argument of Müller-Fahrenholz agrees with the point made here, that without grief there will not be the overcoming of apathy and the embrace of new tasks. On pathos as a prerequisite for protest, see James L. Crenshaw, “The Human Dilemma and Literature of Dissent,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, 235–37; Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 395–415. ↵

  Compare William L. Holladay, “The Background of Jeremiah’s Self-Understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22,” JBL 83 (1964): 153–64. Less directly, see Sheldon Blank, “The Prophet as Paradigm,” in Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt, in Memoriam, ed. J. L. Crenshaw and J. T. Willis (New York: Ktav, 1974), 111–30. On grief as definitional for the tradition of Jeremiah, see Peter Weter, “Leiden und Leidenerfahung im Buch Jeremia,” ZTK 74 (1977): 123–50. ↵

  On the Lord’s passion borne by Jeremiah, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), chap. 6. ↵

  Compare Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), sec. 14. Much of his argument concerns the freedom of God and the royal penchant to deny time for some “eternal now.” Against that, biblical faith lives in God’s times, times of recollection and expectation. ↵

  On Jeremiah’s remarkable use of this metaphor, see the statement of James Muilenburg, “The Terminology of Adversity in Jeremiah,” in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament: Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May, ed. H. T. Frank and W. L. Reed (New York: Abingdon, 1970), 42–63. ↵

  See the delicate interpretation of Phyllis Trible, “The Gift of the Poem: A Rhetorical Study of Jeremiah 31:15-22,” Andover Newton Quarterly 17 (1977), 271–80; idem, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, OBT (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). See also Walter Brueggemann, “Texts That Linger, Words That Explode,” in Texts That Linger, Words That Explode (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 1–19, esp. 4–7. ↵

  Terence E. Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective, OBT (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 132–36. ↵

  Most poignant is the presentation of the Lord by Elie Wiesel, Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again (New York: Random House, 1973). ↵

  Douglas John Hall has related the negativity theme both to the theology of the cross and to our social situation; Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), especially chap. 2. ↵

  4

  Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement

  The ministry of Jeremiah as we have considered it as a model was concerned with radical criticism. And the most radical criticism of the prophet is in grief over death. The alternative community embodied in Jeremiah saw how surely fatal everything that the kings called life was. There are, to be sure, other important aspects of Jer­emiah’s ministry. For example, Thomas Raitt has recently argued persuasively that Jeremiah is the boldest and most inventive of all the prophets of hope.[1] In such a view, different critical questions do arise; but Raitt, after the manner of John Bright,[2] ascribes to Jer­emiah substantial parts of the hope poetry. I call attention to this in order not to misrepresent the richness of the Jeremiah tradition.

  In any case, my governing hypothesis is that the alternative prophetic community is concerned both with criticizing and energizing. On the one hand, it is to show that the dominant consciousness (which I have termed “royal”) will indeed end and that it has no final claim upon us. On the other hand, it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality. Having considered the first of these tasks in the tradition of Jeremiah, I now turn to the second function of prophecy, to energize. I propose this hypothesis: The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God.

  Numb people do not discern or fear death. Conversely, despairing people do not anticipate or receive newness.

  Excluding Hope

  As a beginning point it may be affirmed that the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon. Israel had no doubt that since the Solomonic achievement the royal prosperity was increasingly closed to large numbers of the Israelites. That indeed is a key point in the polemics of Amos. And so, in that time as in our own, the royal arrangement surely and properly evokes despair among those who are shut out.

  It is equally important to perceive that those who have entry to power and prosperity are also victims of hopelessness, or in a more contemporary idiom, have a sense of powerlessness. The royal consciousness means to overcome history and therefore by design the future loses its vitality and authority. The present ordering, and by derivation the present regime, claims to be the full and final ordering. That claim means there can be no future that either calls the present into question or promises a way out of it. Thus the fulsome claim of the present arrangement is premised on hopelessness. This insidious form of realized eschatology requires persons to live without hope. The present is unending in its projection, uncompromising in its claim of loyalty, and unaccommodating in having its own way. In the words of a recent beer commercial, you can be totalitarian when “you believe in what you’re doing” and you conclude that one way is the “right way.” I believe the Solomonic regime created such a situation of despair. Inevitably it had to hold on desperately and despairingly to the present, for if the present slipped away, there would be nothing. The future had already been annulled. I do not find it farfetched to imagine the lack of promise in Ecclesiastes to be pertinent to the royal consciousness:

  What has been is what will be,

  and what has been done is what will be done;

  and there is nothing new under the sun.

  Is there a thing of which it is said,

  “See, this is new”?

  It has been already,

  in the ages before us. (Eccl 1:9-10)

  There is nothing new, partly because nothing seemed to be happening but also because the regime had ordered and decreed it that way. The need to annul the future must lead to a situation in which hope is also denied. In concrete terms, technological, agricultural, and other social advances are impeded in aristocratic monarchies because the taxes, tithes, tribute, tolls, rents, and confiscations drain all the peasants’ resources and rationale for creativity; only the technology of warfare advances at a more rapid pace because that contributes to the expansion and control of the king and his entou
rage.[3] Furthermore, the authority of the king rests on dynastic tradition; so introducing new visions opens the possibility of challenges to the tradition and therefore the king’s authority.

  No New Beginnings

  More specifically, the termination of the present in the fall of 587 B.C.E., just as Jeremiah had anticipated, created a situation in which the royal consciousness found itself without resource. The very kings who could not cope with the thought that an end might come could also not imagine a new beginning. Those who had worked so hard to deny the future and banish hope could not all of a sudden permit hope to happen. It is unthinkable for the king to imagine or experience a really new beginning that is underived or unextrapolated from what went before. Kings were accustomed to new arrangements and new configurations of the same pieces, but the yearning to manage and control means that new intrusions are not regarded as desirable. Neither are they regarded as possible or discerned when they happen. And thus the same royal consciousness that could not imagine endings and so settled for numb denial is the one that could not imagine beginnings and so settled for hopeless despair and a grim endurance of the way things now are. Beginnings are no more thinkable or acceptable to kings than endings are, for both announce an inscrutable sovereignty that kings cannot entertain.

  The despair is perhaps reflected in Psalm 137. So I contend that the despair of the early exile is not a new thing in the Babylonian exile; rather, it is the payoff for the hopeless, futureless existence of Israel for a long period. To be sure, the imprecations of Ps 137:7-9 may indicate some quite modest hopefulness; but obviously the poet envisions no bold hope for restoration. At best it is a grim holding, a resolve to remember forever, and a venting of hostility. No word of a beginning that would transform history is articulated here. In the poetry of Lamentations, as Norman Gottwald has observed, hints of hope do poke through;[4] but we should not miss the extreme reservation of the conclusion of the last poem: