The Prophetic Imagination
Page 18
Such prophetic insistence asserts that YHWH has a specific will and purpose (known in the Torah) that lies outside the totalism of the day and that will not be mocked or countermanded by the practice of that totalism. When social or cultic practices violate or contradict that purpose, God works judgment, so say the prophets, through various agents and mediations—sometimes “natural” crises, sometimes through other nations. That divine purpose does, of course, concern socioeconomic justice for the vulnerable (widows, orphans, immigrants), but it also sometimes concerns the disciplines of holiness that fail to match the singularity of God’s people to the singularity of God (see Lev 19:2; Ezek 22:26). When the “prophetic” among us concerns social justice without the claim of divine agency, it is possible, as with many religious progressives, to contain social justice within the purview of the totalism—that is, without elemental transformation. It is the recurring claim of Israel’s prophets, however, that the claim will not and is not contained within the totalism of any regime, not even that of the holy city of Jerusalem.
Such prophetic insistence affirms the freedom of God to act outside of, beyond, and in contradiction to the totalism. It can, for that reason, anticipate the divine work of newness that is voiced as divine promise. Thus, the prophets can confidently assert, “The days are surely coming,” or “in that day.” The anticipated day of God’s newness is an authentic newness. It is not derived from or extrapolated from present life circumstance. Thus in both acts of prophetic judgment and prophetic promise, the prophets speak a world of divine resolve that owes nothing to the present totalism. The totalism does not believe it can or will be terminated; it does not, moreover, believe any new alternative is possible. It is the character of God, known here in poetic articulation as sovereign who will not be mocked by the pretensions of the totalism and as promise-keeper who will not be contained in or foiled by the dead-ends of the totalism that is the subject of the prophets.
The reason prophetic utterance evokes the lethal hostility of the totalism, I judge, is not simply because of an advocacy for social justice, though the prophets did indeed advocate systemic justice. The reason for hostility, rather, is because the enunciation of the God of the covenant (who is the creator God) renders the claims of the totalism penultimate, while every totalizing regime (as in “Make America Great Again”) presents itself as ultimate. Prophetic deconstruction dismisses the ultimacy of allegiance and submission expected by the totalism. The enunciation of this God undermines all such pretensions.
In both judgment and hope, prophetic articulation—in elusive poetic form—voices the interruption of the known controlled world of the totalism and the emergence of an alternative world that is dramatically other than the world managed by the totalism. The prophets voice a world other than the visible, palpable world that is in front of their hearers. For that reason, prophetic utterance must perforce be “imaginative,” an act of imagination by word and image that evokes and hosts a world other than the one readily available. Thus the prophets, with their passionate rootage in tradition, their passionate grasp of social reality, and their passionate force of language, imagine the present world under threat and judgment, even while the regime continues to imagine itself as absolute and abiding. The prophets can even imagine the termination of the Holy City over which the regime presides. Thus the prophets, conversely, imagine a new world coming outside the totalism that the totalism thinks is impossible. They imagine a new sociopolitical, this-world emergence beyond the capacity of the regime. The totalism imagines itself absolute to perpetuity, while the prophetic imagination—in contradiction—imagines an old world ending and a new world emerging. It is a contest of imaginations that admits no easy resolution but that puts the hearer in crisis between a failed imagination and a new inexplicable imagination.[3] In the formation of Scripture’s canon, that contest between imaginations is resolved on behalf of prophetic imagination while dismissing the imagination of the totalism. Prophetic imagination is judged in the canon to be adequately truthful, even when on occasion historical events say otherwise.
It has become clear to me, albeit belatedly, that the paradigm I have offered in this book has functioned as leitmotif for much of my subsequent work. Thus, I have further explicitly exposited such thought in Hopeful Imagination, in Reality, Grief, and Hope, and most recently in The Practice of Prophetic Imagination, as well as less explicitly in many of my publications.[4] While my journal articles have been scattered and varied, I think that two of my most durable journal articles further serve the same paradigm. First, in “The Costly Loss of Lament,” I have considered what could happen—as does happen in the bourgeoisie church and in bourgeoisie political culture—when the ancient practices of lament, protest, and complaint are silenced and avoided in the interest of happy, uncritical well-being.[5] In civic culture, the loss of lament invites denial and so enhances the dominant social system as though it were beyond failure or critique. In the church, with such a loss, the gospel becomes one of unmitigated happiness where “never is heard a discouraging word.” Many pastors, moreover, are paid to sustain exactly such a practice. But of course, in prophetic realism (as with real-life realism), such an illusion is unsustainable because there is much about which to lament, protest, and complain. The “costly loss” is to sign on for the illusion of well-being, or in theology it is an exercise in a “Theology of Glory” to the disregard of a summoning “Theology of the Cross.”[6]
Second, in my article, “The Liturgy of Abundance and the Myth of Scarcity,” it becomes clear that “scarcity” is an element in a strategy for injustice.[7] A regime that operates with a claim of scarcity can legitimate hoarding, accumulation, and eventually monopoly to the disregard of the needs of others, even when such strategies evoke and legitimate the violence of the strong against the weak. (Thus, we have “class war” that is characteristically conducted from above; as Warren Buffett has observed in our economy: “There is a class war and we are winning.”) Israel’s doxologies of abundance (as in Psalms 104 and 145) affirm the generative generosity of the creator God. Thus, the sloganeering of scarcity contradicts the claims of the generativity of the creator. And of course, the endless frantic acquisitiveness evoked by market ideology (our specific form of totalism) serves to counter the claims of faith in a way that has real-life practical consequences.[8]
I need hardly attest that the profound tension between totalism and prophetic imagination is ferociously active among us as Donald Trump has eagerly become the point person for such a totalism. His mantra “Make America Great Again” is a heavy-handed ideology with a validation of racist accents and an uncritical embrace of the exceptionalism of “the American Dream.” President Trump, however, did not create this ideology, which is very old in the lore of Euro-American exceptionalism, operative already in the early Puritanism of Cotton Mather. The outcome of that unapologetic ideology is the monetizing of all social relationships, thecommoditization of all social possibilities, and the endless production of dispensable persons who have no legitimate membership in the totalism. One may quibble about detail, but the main thrust of market ideology among us is beyond dispute.
For that reason, it follows that ours is a time for prophetic imagination, the capacity to host a world other than the one sponsored and legitimated by market ideology. In the contemporary practice of prophetic imagination, it will be important
to move the church from its comfortable habit of charity to issues of justice;
to move the church to a systemic awareness of ways to “follow the money”;
to show the ways in which the old traditions of the God of the covenant makes righteousness, justice, and faithfulness central to common life in a way that resituatesmoney, power, and wisdom (see Jer 9:23–24; Matt 23:23); and
to see how a theology of the cross contradicts our more comfortable, convenient theologies of glory.
It is a time for the courage and freedom to engage in contestation with the totalism among us that is killing in
its force and authority.
I am grateful to Fortress Press and its editors for continuing to make this book available, and for marking it on this anniversary occasion. I am grateful to a host of readers (including pastors, nuns, teachers, and students) who have found the book to be a resource for serious interdisciplinary engagement. Now as always, prophetic imagination depends upon great intentionality, and it requires a host of reliable companions on the way from a failed world under judgment to a new world of good-news possibility. That “way” is one of relinquishing what has failed (which we are likely to treasure) and receiving what God will give. It is a move from scarcity toabundance that is likely routed through lament to doxology.
Walter Brueggemann
Advent, 2017
* * *
Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011). On pages 67–68 and 381 Lifton outlines the recurring “deadly sins” of totalism. ↵
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). ↵
William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) has traced out the contest of imaginations in Chile under the Pinochet regime. “Social imagination is not a mere representation of something more real; it is not some ideological ‘superstructure’ which reflects the material ‘base.’ . . . The imagination of a society is the condition of possibility for the organization and signification of bodies in a society. The imagination is the drama in which bodies are invested. . . . If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church” (57, 229). Cavanaugh quotes from a novel of Lawrence Thornton: “We have to believe in the power of imagination because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs” (279). Cavanaugh concludes: “To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God’s imagination” (279). It is clear that in ancient Israel the imagination of the royal-priestly-scribal establishment in Jerusalem was very powerful; the prophets sought to out-imagine that enterprise. So among us, the imagination of market ideology (relentlessly offered in the liturgies of mindless televisions and most poignantly through the NFL as a festival of money, sex, and violence) is a powerful form of imagination; the prophetic task, now as then, is to out-imagine that enterprise. ↵
Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986); Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014); The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipatory Word (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↵
“The Costly Loss of Lament,” JSOT 11/36 (1986): 57–71. ↵
Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976) has provided a reliable compelling exposition of the Theology of the Cross. ↵
“The Liturgy of Abundance, the Myth of Scarcity,” The Christian Century 116/10 (March 24–31, 1999): 342–47. ↵
On market ideology, see most poignantly Gerald Berthoud, “Market,” in The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs, 2nd ed. (New York: Zed, 2010), 74–94. Berthoud makes clear that “the market” has morphed from a matrix for trade to a regulatory principle that intends to impose its categories on all of our common life. ↵
Abbreviations
AAR American Academy of Religion
AB Anchor Bible
ABD Anchor Bible Dictionary
ATR Anglican Theological Review
BA Biblical Archaeologist
B.C.E. Before the Common Era
BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin
CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly
ChrCent Christian Century
EcRev The Ecumenical Review
FOTL The Forms of the Old Testament Literature
GBS Guides to Biblical Scholarship
HBT Horizons in Biblical Theology
IDBS Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume
Interp Interpretation
ITC International Theological Commentary
JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion
JBL Journal of Biblical Literature
JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament
JSOTSup JSOT Supplement Series
KAT Kommentar zum Alten Testament
OBT Overtures to Biblical Theology
OTL Old Testament Library
PTMS Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series
SAA State Archives of Assyria
SAAS State Archives of Assyria Studies
SBL Society of Biblical Literature
SBT Studies in Biblical Theology
SBTS Sources for Biblical and Theological Study
SWBA The Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series
ThTo Theology Today
TUMSR Trinity University Monograph Series in Religion
VT Vetus Testamentum
VTS VT Supplements
WW Word and World
ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft
ZTK Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
Notes
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.
Preface to the Second Edition
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.
Chapter 1
To be sure, the prophet lives in tension with the tradition. While the prophet is indeed shaped by the tradition, breaking free from the tradition to assert the new freedom of God is also characteristic of the prophet. Compare Walther Zimmerli, “Prophetic Proclamation and Reinterpretation,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. Douglas A. Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 69–100. More broadly, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Prophecy and Canon: A Contribution to the Study of Jewish Origins, Studies of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity 3 (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1977), has explored the authority found in the ongoing tension between prophet and tradition.
Formally this argument is informed by the sociology of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966); Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967); Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). But our concern is with the substance of prophetic ministry and not simply with formal understandings. In terms of substance, the issue has been well put by Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).