The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored!

  Renew our days as of old!

  Or have you utterly rejected us?

  Are you exceedingly angry with us? (Lam 5:20-21)

  There is the risk of a petition, but with little conviction. The last pair of rhetorical questions seems to expect the worst.

  The inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion is predictable given the characteristic royal capacity to manage all the pieces. It is so even in our personal lives, in which we conclude that the given dimensions we have frequently rearranged are the only dimensions that exist. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. We are able to believe no more in the graciousness of God than we are in the judgment of God.

  We are largely confined to reflections on the given pieces, and our modest expectations are confined by our reason, our language, and our epistemology. We have no public arenas in which serious hopefulness can be brought to articulation. What is most needed is what is most unacceptable—an articulation that redefines the situation and that makes way for new gifts about to be given. Without a public arena for the articulation of gifts that fall outside our conventional rationality, we are fated to despair. We know full well the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces. And short of genuine newness life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much.

  My judgment is that such a state of affairs not only is evident in the exile of Judah but is characteristic of most situations of ministry. When we try to face the holding action that defines the sickness, the aging, the marriages, and the jobs of very many people, we find that we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. Such hope is an enemy of the very royal consciousness with which most of us have secured a working arrangement. The question facing ministry is whether there is anything that can be said, done, or acted in the face of the ideology of hopelessness.

  Penetrating Despair

  The task of prophetic imagination and ministry, especially as we see it in sixth-century Judah, is to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution. A prophet can do little in such a situation of hopelessness, so I suggest a quite basic and modest task. It includes three actions:

  Symbols

  The offering of symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable. The prophet has only the means of word, spoken word and acted word, to contradict the presumed reality of his or her community. The prophet is to provide the wherewithal whereby hope becomes possible again to a community of kings who now despair of their royalty. After a time, kings become illiterate in the language of hope. Hope requires a very careful symbolization. It must not be expressed too fully in the present tense because hope one can touch and handle is not likely to retain its promissory call to a new future. Hope expressed only in the present tense will no doubt be co-opted by the managers of this age.

  What a commission it is to express a future that none think imaginable! Of course this cannot be done by inventing new symbols, for that is wishful thing. Rather, it means to move back into the deepest memories of this community and activate those very symbols that have always been the basis for contradicting the regnant consciousness. Therefore the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history.[5] And when the prophet returns, with the community, to those deep symbols, they will discern that hope is not a late, tacked-on hypothesis to serve a crisis but rather the primal dimension of every memory of this community. The memory of this community begins in God’s promissory address to the darkness of chaos, to barren Sarah, and to oppressed Egyptian slaves. The speech of God is first about an alternative future.

  In offering symbols the prophet has two tasks. One is to mine the memory of this people and educate them to use the tools of hope. The other is to recognize how singularly words, speech, language, and phrase shape consciousness and define reality. The prophet is the one who, by use of these tools of hope, contradicts the presumed world of the kings, showing both that that presumed world does not square with the facts and that we have been taught a lie and have believed it because the people with the hardware and the printing press told us it was that way. And so the offering of symbols is a job not for a timid clerk who simply shares the inventory but for people who know something different and are prepared, out of their own anguish and amazement, to know that the closed world of managed reality is false. The prophetic imagination knows that the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God and that this is true even in a world where kings have tried to banish all speech but their own.

  Hope and Yearning

  The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there.[6] Hope, on the one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present,[7] daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question. Thus the exilic community lacked the tools of hope. The language of hope and the ethos of amazement have been partly forfeited because they are an embarrassment. The language of hope and the ethos of amazement have been partly squelched because they are a threat.

  It is mind-boggling to think of the public expression of hope as a way of subverting the dominant royal embrace of despair. I am not talking about optimism or development or evolutionary advances but rather about promises made by one who stands distant from us and over against us but remarkably for us. Speech about hope cannot be explanatory and scientifically argumentative; rather, it must be lyrical in the sense that it touches the hopeless person at many different points. More than that, however, speech about hope must be primally theological, which is to say that it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. It will not be reduced to the “cool” language of philosophy or the private discourse of psychology. It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness. Those who would be prophetic will need to embrace that absurd practice and that subversive activity.

  The urging to bring hope to public expression is based on a conviction about believing folks. It is premised on the capacity to evoke and bring to expression the hope that is within us (see 1 Pet 3:15). It is there within and among us, for we are ordained of God to be people of hope. It is there by virtue of our being in the image of the promissory God. It is sealed there in the sacrament of baptism. It is dramatized in the Eucharist—“until he come.” It is the structure of every creed that ends by trusting in God’s promises. Hope is the decision to which God invites Israel, a decision against despair, against permanent consignment to chaos (Isa 45:18), oppression, barrenness, and exile.

  Hope is the primary prophetic idiom not because of the general dynamic of history or because of the signs of the times but because the prophet speaks to a people who, willy-nilly, are God’s people. Hope is what this community must do because it is God’s community invited to be in God’s pilgrimage. And as Israel is invited to grieve God’s grief over the ending, so Israel is now invited to hope in God’s promises. That very act of hope is the confession that we are not children of the royal consciousness.

  Of course prophetic hope easily lends itself to distortion. It can be made so grandiose that it does not touch reality; it can be trivialized so that it does not impact reality; it can be “bread and circuses” so that it only supports and abets the general despair. But a prop
het has another purpose in bringing hope to public expression, and that is to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. It is only that return that enables a rejection of the closed world of royal definition. Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope. It is that overriding focus that places Israel in a new situation and that reshapes exile, not as an eternal fate but as the place where hope can most amazingly appear. No objective norm can prevent a prophet of hope from being too grandiose or too trivial or simply a speaker for bread and circuses. It is likely that the only measure of faithfulness is that hope always comes after grief and that the speaker of this public expression must know and be a part of the anguish that permits hope. Hope expressed without knowledge of and participation in grief is likely to be false hope that does not reach despair. Thus, as Thomas Raitt has shown, it is precisely those who know death most painfully who can speak hope most vigorously.

  Newness That Redefines

  The prophet mustspeak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation. The prophet must speak not only about the abandonment of Israel by its God but about the specificity of Babylon. Talk about newness in exile comes not from a happy piety or from a hatred of Babylon but from the enduring jealousy of Yahweh for his people. This jealousy, so alien to our perceptual world, includes rejection of his people, which sends them and even Yahweh himself into exile. It is a jealousy that stays with his people, making their anguish his anguish and his future their future. The hope that must be spoken is hope rooted in the assurance that God does not quit even when the evidence warrants his quitting. The hope is rooted in God’s ability to utilize even the folly of Israel. The memory of this community-about-to-hope revolves around such hope-filled events as that of Cain, the murderer of a brother, being marked protectively; of the chaos of royal disarray resolved in praise; of rejected Joseph observing to his brother that in all things God works for good; of Solomon, very Solomon, born in love to this shabby royal couple—and out of that comes a word that contradicts the exile.

  The Language of Amazement

  The hope-filled language of prophecy, in cutting through the royal despair and hopelessness, is the language of amazement. It is a language that engages the community in new discernments and celebrations just when it had nearly given up and had nothing to celebrate. The language of amazement is against the despair just as the language of grief is against the numbness. I believe that, rightly embraced, no more subversive or prophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets us before the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed he had fled. Indeed, the language of amazement is the ultimate energizer in Israel, and the prophets of God are called to practice that most energizing language.

  Second Isaiah serves as the peculiar paradigm for a prophet of hope to kings in despair. This great poet of the exile understood that speech that rearranges the pieces and that echoes the management mentality of its contemporaries is not worth the bother. Second Isaiah presumably lived through and knew about the pathos of Lamentations and the rage of Job.[8] Nevertheless, he goes beyond pathos and rage to speeches of hope and doxology.

  Second Isaiah has indispensable precursors in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as Thomas Raitt has made clear. But more than these or any other, it is Second Isaiah who announces to exiled Judah a genuine innovation. His announcement depends first of all on the audacity of his person and his poetry. He must have been a remarkable person to say things that violated the entire perceptual field of his community. Second, his speaking depends on the reality that his time was indeed a newness of time in which all the old certitudes were becoming unglued. Babylon was going and Persia was coming, and this poet knew precisely what time it was. Third, and most important, his speaking depends on the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom, freedom not only from the conceptions and expectations of his people but from God’s own past actions as well. God, much like Reinhold Niebuhr, does have courage to change.[9] His freedom is not some pious or spiritual event, for God’s freedom is visible in the public place. In speaking of forgiveness Raitt says: “Jeremiah and Ezekiel commenced communicating a revolutionary shift in God’s will and plan for his people in history . . . a new ‘game’ or dispensation has begun. . . . God is operating under a new plan.”[10] This is Second Isaiah’s first word to the exiles, a word of forgiveness:

  Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

  Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

  and cry to her

  that her warfare is ended,

  that her iniquity is pardoned. (Isa 40:1-2)

  The discomforted are comforted. This is not a word in a vacuum or a general theory about a gracious God. The poet responds precisely and concretely. He responds to Jeremiah’s Rachel who refuses to be comforted (Jer 31:15). He speaks directly to and against the poems of Lamentations that found “none to comfort” (Lam 1:2, 16, 17, 21). To find comfort in exile is not thinkable, but in this remarkable beginning the poet refuses all that. The free God is ending that whole situation and now enacts an amnesty that was unthinkable before the speech. That speech let Israel know what she did not know before he spoke. Hope is created by speech, and before that speech Israel was always hopeless. Indeed, are we not all? Before we are addressed, we know no future and no possible newness. Where there is no speech we must live in despair. And exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God’s speech has been banished. But the prophetic poet asserts hope precisely in exile.

  The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel’s worldly situation. The poet employs a radical political announcement twice. First he instructs the watchman to announce a new reality:

  Get you up to the high mountain,

  O Zion, herald of good tidings;

  lift up your voice with strength,

  O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,

  lift it up, fear not;

  say to the cities of Judah,

  “Behold your God!”

  Behold, the Lord God comes with might. (Isa 40:9-10)

  Note that the prophet may have been afraid to say such an absurd and subversive word, but he is not to fear; he is to make this exile-transforming announcement. The new reality is that the One who seemed to be dismissed as useless and impotent has claimed his throne. And he has done so right in exile; right under the nose of the Babylonians. The poet brings Israel to an enthronement festival, even as Jeremiah had brought Israel to a funeral. Whereas that scenario left Israel in consuming grief, Second Isaiah brought Israel to new buoyancy. Whereas Jeremiah tried to penetrate the numbness, Second Isaiah had to deal with despair. Both had to speak out of Moses’ liberating tradition against the royal mentality that would not let people grieve or hope.

  We should hold to the metaphor of enthronement and not leave it too soon or reduce it too concretely. The poet is not changing external politics but is reclaiming Israel’s imagination. He asserts a newness that is so old Israel had forgotten, but it is there in memory. Moses’ energizing Song of the Sea ended with enthronement: “The Lord will reign for ever and ever” (Exod 15:18). It is as though Second Isaiah means to bring Israel back to the doxology of Moses, but it is not only a memory recalled. It is a seizure of power in this moment that carries with it the delegitimizing of all other claimants and definers of reality. The other claimants to power and definers of reality are, in this act of language, like the ancient Egyptians, dead upon the seashore. This public act of poetic articulation reshapes Israel’s destiny. Exile with the crowned sovereign is very different from kingless exile because it means the grimness is resolvable.

  And what a god has now claimed his rule! He is as terrifyingly masculine as a warrior with sleeves rolled up for battle and as gently maternal as a carrier of a lamb. It is all there—for exiles. It includes the comfort of
enormous power, with stress on fort (strengthen); it includes the comfort of nurture, with stress on com (along with). Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. Have you ever been in a situation where because of anger, depression, preoccupation, or exhaustion you could not sing? And then you could? Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. The prophet makes it possible to sing and the empire knows that people who can boldly sing, have not accepted the royal definition of reality. If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again. The second enthronement formula is even more familiar:

  How beautiful upon the mountains

  are the feet of him who brings good tidings . . .

  who publishes salvation,

  who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isa 52:7)

  The very one who seems to have lost charge is in charge now. The one who seemed to end in grief and bankruptcy in Jeremiah is the one who now will invert history. And the poet knows well that the inversion to real power happens only by suffering (49:14-15). The rejoicing belongs to those who know about the abandonment and the pathos. It is a curious route to kingship, but that is how it comes in Israel’s history.