The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  Ministry

  This note is concerned with the practice of ministry. Without this note the entire discussion lacks the concreteness appropriate to discussions of the prophetic. Without precluding peculiar ministries in special places, it is presumed that the practice of ministry is done by those who stand in conventional places of parish life and other forms of ministry derived from that model. We cling to the conviction that prophetic ministry can and must be practiced there, although many things militate against it. The ministry is, first of all, consumed by the daily round of busyness that cannot be ignored; perhaps that daily pressure may be reduced, but it cannot be ignored. In addition, the ministry most often exists in congregations that are bourgeois, if not downright obdurate, and in which there is no special openness to or support of prophetic ministry.

  Other things can be said as well, and I have tried to say some of them in this book. I have tried to say that prophetic ministry does not consist of spectacular acts of social crusading or of abrasive measures of indignation. Rather, prophetic ministry consists of offering an alternative perception of reality and in letting people see their own history in the light of God’s freedom and his will for justice. The issues of God’s freedom and his will for justice are not always and need not be expressed primarily in the big issues of the day. They can be discerned wherever people try to live together and show concern for their shared future and identity. So these dimensions of prophetic ministry arise from our study:

  1. The task of prophetic ministry is to evoke an alternative community that knows it is about different things in different ways. And that alternative community has a variety of relationships with the dominant community.

  2. The practice of prophetic ministry is not some special thing done two days a week. Rather, it is done in, with, and under all the acts of ministry—as much in counseling as in preaching, as much in liturgy as in education. It concerns a stance and posture or a hermeneutic about the world of death and the word of life that can be brought to light in every context.

  3. Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught. Clearly, the numbness sometimes evokes from us rage and anger, but the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament. Death, and that is our state, does not require indignation as much as it requires anguish and the sharing in the pain. The public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in and let the death go.

  4. Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate despair so that new futures can be believed in and embraced by us. There is a yearning for energy in a world grown weary: “The age has lost its youth, and the times begin to grow old” (2 Esd 14:10). And we do know that the only act that energizes is a word, a gesture, an act that believes in our future and affirms it to us disinterestedly.

  In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost. Grief and praise are ways of prophetic criticism and energy, which can be more intentional even in our age.

  Radical Faith as Gift

  As I reflect on ministry, and especially my ministry, I know in the hidden places that the real restraints are not in my understanding or in the receptivity of other people. Rather, the restraints come from my own unsureness about this perception. I discover that I am as bourgeois and obdurate as any to whom I might minister. I, like most of the others, am unsure that the royal road is not the best and the royal community the one which governs the real “goodies.” I, like most of the others, am unsure that the alternative community inclusive of the poor, hungry, and grieving is really the wave of God’s future. We are indeed “like people, like priest” (Hos 4:9). That very likely is the situation among many of us in ministry, and there is no unanguished way out of it. It does make clear to us that our ministry will always be practiced through our own conflicted selves. No prophet has ever borne an unconflicted message, even until Jesus (compare Mark 14:36). Thus the Beatitudes end in realism (Luke 6:22-23). Also, it reminds us again that such radical faith is not an achievement; for if it were, we would will it and be done. Rather, it is a gift, and we are left to wait receptively, to watch and to pray.

  Perhaps our own situation credits what we have suggested here. We ourselves shall likely move in and out, precisely because of our poor capacity to grieve the death in our own lives and to be amazed at the new futures. We are not more skilled in that than all the other children of the royal community, and therefore we must engage in the same painful practices of becoming who we are called to be. I have come to think that there is no more succinct summary of prophetic ministry than the statement of Jesus: “Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:21), or, more familiarly, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt 5:4).

  Jesus’ concern was, finally, for the joy of the kingdom. That is what he promised, and to that he invited people. But he was clear that rejoicing in that future required a grieving about the present order.[1] Jesus takes a quite dialectical two-age view of things. He will not be like one-world liberals who view the present world as the only one, nor will he be like the unworldly who yearn for the future with an unconcern about the present. There is work to be done in the present. There is grief work to be done in the present that the future may come. There is mourning to be done for those who do not know of the deathliness of their situation. There is mourning to be done with those who know pain and suffering and lack the power or freedom to bring it to speech. The saying is a harsh one, for it sets this grief work as the precondition of joy. It announces that those who have not cared enough to grieve will not know joy.

  The mourning is a precondition in another way too. It is not a formal, external requirement but rather the only door and route to joy. Seen in that context, Jesus’ saying about weeping and laughing is not just a neat aphorism but a summary of the entire theology of the cross. Only that kind of anguished disengagement permits fruitful yearning, and only the public embrace of deathliness permits newness to come. We are at the edge of knowing this in our personal lives, for we understand a bit of the processes of grieving.[2] But we have yet to learn and apply it to the reality of society. And finally, we have yet to learn it about God, who grieves in ways hidden from us and who waits to rejoice until his promises are fully kept.

  * * *

  At the level of individual personality, this is the argument of George Benson, Then Joy Breaks Through (New York: Seabury, 1972). He begins his last chapter in this way: “The transformation of all time and the Christian prototype of joy is the resurrection of Christ” (123). His entire book is about the meaning of the cross on the way to life. ↵

  In a way that is enormously helpful and a bit deductive, I have been helped greatly by the research of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). See my discussion of her paradigm in relation to the faith of Israel in “The Formfulness of Grief,” Interp 31 (1977): 263–75. See also idem, “Psalms of Disorientation,” in The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984), 50–121. ↵

  A Postscript on Practice

  In the end, of course, “prophetic imagination” is not simply “a good idea.” It is a concrete practice that is undertaken by real believers who share the conviction of grief and hope that escapes the restraints of dominant culture. It is my hope that my exposition of prophetic imagination is intimately connected to concrete practice and that it may, on occasion, evoke, generate, and authorize such concrete practice.

  Thus at the end of my exposition I take the liberty of identifying some concrete practices of prophetic imagination that are under way in concrete subcommunities of grief and hope that engage in resistance and alternative. Of course I do not suggest at all that this list is generated by my exposition, but only that the examples I cite are typical
and representative of what is possible for the church in its enactment of prophetic imagination. Obviously the list I present is in large part happenstance and subjective and concerns the practices known to me. The reader surely knows other such typical practices and is invited to add to the list. The ones I think of include the following.

  In Atlanta, close to my own experience:

  Plymouth Harbor. This is a day-care facility housed by my local UCC Church, Central Congregational Church. Led by the relentless and persistent Pam Rapp, it cares on a daily basis for persons suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and other forms of senior dysfunction. The care is necessarily person-to-person, labor intensive, and extraordinarily demanding of both staff and a host of volunteers.

  Family Counseling Services Urban Ministries. A network of urban ministries presided over by cunning and knowing Bob Lupton that aims at rehabilitation and restoration of communities that are economically disadvantaged and consequently crime threatened. FCS operates entrepreneurially and taps effectively into the resources of corporate capitalism in the enactment of its dreams.

  Open Door. A food-and-shelter community of worship and care with Presbyterian connections. This agency, led by the shrill Ed Loring and the determined Murphy Davis, in addition to self-styled “band aids,” maintains a shrill and steady voice of dissent so that the poor remain visible in the city.

  Beyond Atlanta, the following have come to my attention:

  Jimmy Carter, in his stunning post-presidential vocation, works on a large international scale at political reconciliation, all the while keeping his hand concretely in on-site hammer-and-nails work with Habitat for Humanity.

  The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a community organizing effort derived from the passion and strategies of Saul Alinsky. My contact has been with Ernesto Cortez, officed in Austin, Texas, a regional office for the Southwest. This remarkable effort at mobilizing communities for the sake of shared well-being includes passionate staff people, spirited volunteers, and institutional, congregational support that takes on large urban issues concerned with social justice in the face of fearful privatization.

  Watts Street Baptist Church (Durham, North Carolina), where T. Melvin Williams Jr. is the pastor, characteristically begins its worship services not with conventional praise but with lament Psalms, with the “public processing of pain.” That congregation, moreover, is part of a Durham church coalition that “regularly holds prayer vigils at the site of each violent death” in Durham. The ritual marks the accession and the loss liturgically and thereby creates a place for protest and grief in response to the violence that destroys life.

  Church Health Center, sponsored by a church coalition of hundreds of congregations in Memphis, has established an extensive, first-rate health care system for the poor in that city where poverty savages too many. Alongside deep and crucial church support and participation, the center mobilizes the active support of hundreds of dentists and doctors plus the resources of a large hospital that has made building space available. The moving force for this immense project is Scott Morris. Morris combines medical expertise and theological sensitivity, a capacity for organizational effectiveness and abundant people skills. Around his passion and vision have gathered a large prophetic populace that is resolved to connect the healing capacity of God to the poor who are deprived of normal health care delivery.

  Finally, in this quite personal and subjective list to which many other items, names, and efforts should be added, I want to report a most fortuitous happening. On the very day that I was writing this paragraph (September 26, 2000), it happened that Andrew McAuley Smith, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, shared with me a copy of his 1999 D.Min. thesis from Princeton Seminary. He was generous to give me a copy that of course caught my attention because it is titled, Prophets in the Pews: Testing Walter Brueggemann’s Thesis in The Prophetic Imagination in the Practice of Ministry.[1] Smith has taken my book and has understood that the test of its exposition is actual, concrete practice of the faithful in the life of the world, which for his particular study focuses upon the social crisis evoked by racism. After an alert summary of my argument, Smith organizes his response in two ways.

  First, he offers a working definition of white racism and considers the perception of racism as offered by three towering prophetic figures:

  Bartolome de Las Casas (1474–1566), a Spaniard who came to the “new world” along with the first colonialists after Christopher Columbus, in the midst of the Spanish genocide against the native population of Haiti and Cuba. He came on an evangelizing mission of the church but became single-handedly a vigorous, noticeable force in defense of the “Indians” against European rapaciousness.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), a better-known German theologian who took his bold stand early against the “Aryan clause” of German National Socialism, and almost single-handedly summoned the Confessing Church in German to see what was at stake in the racism of National Socialism against Jews—for which he risked and eventually sacrificed his life.

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1969), best known among us as a prophet for racial justice whose life was given over to—and taken by—that cause.[2]

  Second, on the basis of that data, Smith articulates his research project, which is to examine the outreach ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlotte as it concerns racial issues. He examines twin hypotheses that are to be tested through his research:

  1. Lay outreach ministries that cross racial and socioeconomic barriers in Charlotte, North Carolina, are serving as prophetic voices in confronting white racism in the Southern church.

  2. Lay outreach ministries that cross racial and socioeconomic barriers in Charlotte, North Carolina, are simply enabling the volunteers to “feel good” about participating in acts of charity, and therefore are not addressing the deeper issues related to white racism in the Southern church.[3]

  Smith’s conclusion confirms his first hypothesis. His further reflection on the prophetic dimension of ministry is this:

  The prophetic witness of the church is not to be identified in some specific functions of ministry and not in others. Prophetic witness is a mind-set. It is a countercultural consciousness of how the community of faith sees all things. Therefore, to ask the question if one specific group of ministries are “prophetic voices” might imply that other ministries within the same church setting are not. The mere presence of a question considering the prophetic nature of a specific group of ministries within a local congregation is in danger of misunderstanding the nature of prophetic witness. This project served to remind me that all functions of the church can and should be prophetic voices that serve to criticize the dominant culture around us while energizing the faithful. Pastoral care can be a prophetic ministry. Preaching can be prophetic ministry. Sunday school classes can be prophetic ministry (even session meetings can be prophetic ministry!).

  Thus, the essential question for the church is whether or not its prophetic voice has been co-opted into the culture of the day. The community of God’s people who are striving to remain faithful to the whole counsel of God’s Word will be prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness of the dominant culture of our day.[4]

  Aside from the particular enquiry that concerns Smith, his study is a rich and suggestive way in which the themes exposited in my book may engage with actual ecclesial practice.

  While the environment of technological consumerism in the United States is not a welcoming habitat for prophetic ministry, these several instances of prophetic ministry that I have cited are grounds for taking heart. Obviously every reader can add to that list of local efforts at resistance and alternatives. The interplay between prophetic texts heard imaginatively and concrete practice is a defining one for the church that will become more crucial and more difficult, and perhaps more joyous, in time to come.

  * * *

  Andrew McAuley Smith, “Prophets in the Pews: Testing Walter Brueggemann’s Thesis i
n The Prophetic Imagination in the Practice of Ministry” (D.Min. thesis, Princeton Seminary, 1999). ↵

  Ibid., 49–86. ↵

  Ibid., 92. ↵

  Ibid., 120. ↵

  In Retrospect (PI at Forty)

  Forty years is a long time for a book! I am gratified—the reader will understand—that many readers continue to judge that the book has contemporary interpretive currency.

  As I look back on the forty years since I first wrote The Prophetic Imagination, the one particular change that I might make in my articulation of a prophetic paradigm is this: I used the phrase “royal consciousness” to refer to the socio-ideological context in which Israel’s ancient prophets performed. I would now alter “royal consciousness” to “totalism,” thus making the reference more readily transferable to other contexts like that of our own in late capitalism. I have learned the term “totalism” from Robert Lifton, who, in his study of variety of ideological regimes, has identified the characteristic, recurring practices of such regimes that serve to “totalize” the claim of regime.[1] Behind Lifton, one might also refer to the “totality” of Emmanuel Levinas.[2] The term “totalism” refers to a socio-ideological arrangement in which hegemonic ideology takes up all the social space and allows for no alternative possibility. Its claim is “total”!

  It is fashionable among many so-called “religious progressives” to refer to any advocacy for social justice as “prophetic.” There is nothing objectionable about such usage. It is worth noting, however, that “prophetic” in ancient Israel does not refer precisely to matters of social justice. The prophetic in ancient Israel rather is a “God-performance” in which YHWH, the Lord of the covenant, is voiced as a real character and lively agent (a claim that is surely an embarrassment to many religious progressives), funded by old narratives, songs, and poems. It is because prophetic utterance is a “God-performance” that the prophetic oracles are regularly marked by “Thus saith the Lord,” or “The word of the Lord came to me.” That is, in these utterances and actions, the prophetic hosts a world in which the agency, will, and purpose of God are effective and to be taken with utmost seriousness. This, moreover, amid a regime that determinedly dismissed such claims and relied instead on a tepid god who functioned simply as patron of the regime.