The Prophetic Imagination

by Walter Brueggemann

  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.

  Chapter 4

  Thomas M. Raitt, A Theology of Exile: Judgment/Deliverance in Jeremiah and Ezekiel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977).

  John Bright, Jeremiah, AB 21 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965). For different perspectives, see Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile/Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), and Robert P. Carroll, Jeremiah: A Commentary, OTL (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986).

  See John Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982), 7–8; K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) 64–70.

  Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, SBT 1/14 (2d ed. Chicago: Allenson, 1962).

  Bernhard W. Anderson has explored two quite distinct dimensions of the tradition to which appeal is made; but in each case it is to a specific Israelite tradition. See “Exodus Typology in Second Isaiah,” in Israel’s Prophetic Heritage: Essays in Honor of James Muilenburg, ed. B. W. Anderson and W. Harrelson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 177–95; “Exodus and Covenant in Second Isaiah and Prophetic Tradition,” in Magnalia Dei: The Mighty Acts of God. Essays on the Bible and Archaeology in Memory of G. Ernest Wright, ed. F. M. Cross et al. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 339–60.

  Prophetic ministry must see more clearly than we have in recent time the integral connection between speech and hope! It is only speech that makes hope possible, and when the royal consciousness of technology stops serious speech, it precludes hope. This was seen clearly by Paul in his claim in Rom 10:14-21.

  On the subversive power of hope as a way of dismantling, see John M. Swomley Jr., Liberation Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

  The richness of the language of Second Isaiah suggests that the poet not only lived in but knew and utilized the literature of his own time; compare especially Klaus Baltzer, Deutero-Isaiah, trans. M. Kohl, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). The links between Job and Second Isaiah on creation theology have been noted by Robert Pfeiffer, “Dual Origin of Hebrew Monotheism,” JBL 46 (1927): 193–206. The possibility that Second Isaiah is a response to the chagrin of Lamentations is worth pursuing. See below, that the poetry of Second Isaiah begins with “Comfort, comfort” (Isa 40:1) is probably a response to the “none to comfort” of Lamentations (1:2, 17).

  The reference is only a partially facetious one to June Bingham’s biography of Reinhold Niebuhr, Courage to Change: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Scribner, 1961). That same phrase is not only applicable to the Lord of Israel but is an important prophetic assertion against the immutability of God fostered by the royal consciousness that yearns for eternal stability.

  Raitt, A Theology of Exile, 188–89.

  Such waiting is of course not passivity. See the recent hints by Dorothee Soelle, Revolutionary Patience, trans. Rita Kimber and Robert Kimber (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1977), and the older statement by Christoph Blumhardt under the phrase “Warten und Eilen!” Concerning the dialectic of action and waiting in the Blumhardts, see Karl Barth’s comments in the afterword to Christoph Blumhardt’s Action in Waiting (Farmington, Pa.: Plough, 1998).

  Chapter 5

  That same contrast and alternative between powerful king and new claimant is presented in the present shape of Jeremiah 34–35. In their present form, the two narratives are surely juxtaposed intentionally. In Jeremiah 34, the calculating holders of the land (not unlike Herod) play a deathly game with land and freedom, and in the end they are sentenced to death, for their calculating game cannot succeed. By contrast, in chap. 35 the Rechabites—those who claim nothing and who have nothing, except a determination to obedience—end with a blessing. The Nazarene identity of Jesus and the lifestyle of the Rechabites suggest a more than casual parallel.

  See the perceptive statement about Lucan summaries by Paul S. Minear, To Heal and to Reveal: The Prophetic Vocation According to Luke (New York: Seabury, 1976), 63–77. The Magnificat is seen as one of several texts that present, Luke as a theology of the necessity of the impossible. Other texts shaped in parallel fashion, according to Minear, are: 4:18-19; 6:20-22; 7:22; and 14:21.

  See Minear, To Heal, 63–65 on the theme of inversion represented in this most characteristic text of Luke. The hope carried in the passage is an appeal to the spirit, “to heaven,” i.e., to that which the present order cannot administer.

  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 236–43: “The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth” (238). “It is his insistence on the ‘power to forgive’ even more than his performance of m
iracles, that shocks the people” (239 n. 76).

  On the Sabbath as a sign of the freedom of the messianic age, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution of Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. M. Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 261–78. Moltmann quotes Fromm to good advantage: “Death is suspended and life rules on the Sabbath day” (270). Compare Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament, trans. M. Kohl (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 135–42, on the radical social implications of the day. See also Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951).

  Paul W. Hollenbach, “Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities: A Socio-Historical Study,” JAAR 49 (1981): 567–88; John J. Pilch, Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000); Norman K. Gottwald, “The Plot Structure of Marvel or Problem Resolution Stories in the Elijah-Elisha Narratives and Some Musings on Sitz im Leben,” in idem, The Hebrew Bible in Its Social World and in Ours (Atlanta: Scholars, 1993), 119–30.

  Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983; 10th anniversary ed., 1994); Kathleen Corley, Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993); Ekkehard W. Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, The Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 378–88.

  Douglas E. Oakman, “Jesus and Agrarian Palestine: The Factor of Debt,” in SBL Seminar Papers 1985 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1985), 57–73; K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 119–20, 152–53.

  K. C. Hanson, “Sin, Purification, and Group Process,” in Problems in Biblical Theology: Essays in Honor of Rolf Knierim, ed. H. T. C. Sun et al. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 167–91; this article deals with Leviticus 4–5; Jeremiah 7–8 and 26; Acts 2.

  There can be little doubt that, in his temple sermon of Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah had to combat a high theology of Jerusalem in part encouraged by Isaiah. The critique of the claims of Jerusalem inevitably meant conflict with the royal consciousness. On the royal dimension of the Jerusalem tradition, see John H. Hayes, “The Traditions of Zion’s Inviolability,” JBL 82 (1963): 419–26; J. J. M. Roberts, “The Davidic Origin of the Zion Tradition,” JBL 92 (1973): 329–44; idem, “Zion in the Theology of the Davidic-Solomonic Empire,” in Studies in the Period of David and Solomon and Other Essays, ed. T. Ishida (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1982), 93–108; Jon D. Levenson, “Zion Traditions,” in ABD 6:1098–102.

  On the law and social convention as related to biblical faith, see the critique by José Porfirio Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. J. Eagleson (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974), especially chap. 4.

  José Porfirio Miranda argues in a similar direction concerning compassion, though with reference to a different Greek term; Being and the Messiah: The Message of St. John, trans. J. Eagleson (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1977), 148–53.

  Both the value and the deficiency on structural criticism are evident in the various discussions of the parable of the good Samaritan in Semeia 2 (1974).

  That claim is of course at the center of prophetic faith and of liberation theology. A somewhat different rendering of the same reality is expressed by Paul Elmem in commenting on the poet Robert Lowell: “. . . the secret known to poets and to nightingales; that pain can be managed when it finds a perfect expression” (“Death of an Elf­king,” ChrCent 94 [1977], 10–57). That is the secret completely denied to the managers who shape the empire.

  It now is clear that the “woe oracle” used by the prophets and then by Jesus is to be understood not as a harsh renunciation but as a summons to grieve a death. Compare W. Eugene March, “Prophecy,” in Old Testament Form Criticism, ed. J. H. Hayes, TUMSR 2 (San Antonio: Trinity Univ. Press, 1974), 164–65, and references there to the works of Richard J. Clifford, Erhard Gerstenberger, Günther Wanke, and James G. Williams. The recharacterization of the form in that way is indicative of a quite new discernment of what the prophets are about. Such a form indicates grief as the proper context for such speech and indicates the heavy misunderstanding of the prophets in many circles where “woe” is understood as threat and rage. For an interpretation of “woe” in terms of honor and shame, see K. C. Hanson, “How Honorable! How Shameful! A Cultural Analysis of Matthew’s Makarisms and Reproaches,” Semeia 68 (1996): 81–111.

  The cross thus is the announcement that God has abandoned all theology of triumph and glory. See the arguments of Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976).

  Paul Lehmann, The Transformation of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) 48–70.

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

  The argument of Lifton from chap. 3 is pertinent here. The collapse has to do finally not with visible, imperial items but with the collapse of the symbol system. Alienation from a symbol system that leaves us disconnected is the harshness of this criticism.

  See R. H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (New York: Scribner, 1965), 207.

  On embrace of negation see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chap. 2 and passim. See also Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: The Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 395–415.

  Chapter 6

  On the distinction between hope and process or optimism, see Douglas John Hall, Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), chaps. 1 and 3; also Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. J. W. Leitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), chap. 2.

  The census stands in Israel for the ability of the royal apparatus to regiment people against freedom and justice; thus it evokes curse (2 Samuel 24). Perhaps with intuitive correctness, the Chronicler has credited the policy to Satan (1 Chronicles 21). There is indeed something satanic about such an exercise of control. Frank Moore Cross links the census to the entire development of royal ideology (Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays on the History of the Religion of Israel [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973], 227–40). It is not difficult to see why it was later discerned as satanic. Thus the discernment of Satan as having socio­economic dimensions. Walter Brueggemann, “2 Samuel 21–24: An Appendix of Deconstruction?” CBQ 50 (1988): 383–97; idem, First and Second Samuel, Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox, 1990), 350–57; K. C. Hanson, “When the King Crosses the Line: Royal Deviance and Restitution in Levantine Ideologies,” BTB 26 (1996): 11–25.

  On the restoration of language as the first act of hope, see Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. E. R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).

  John J. Pilch, “Selecting an Appropriate Model: Leprosy—A Test Case,” in Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 39–54; Jerome H. Neyrey, “Clean/Unclean, Pure/Polluted, and Holy/Profane: The Idea and the System of Purity,” in The Social Sciences and New Testament Interpretation, ed. R. L. Rohrbaugh (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996), 80–104.

  In commenting on the Beatitudes, José Porfirio Miranda observes the socioeconomic dimension to the blessing: “I wonder where there is more faith and hope: in believing ‘in the God who raises the dead’ (Rom 4:17) or in believing like Luke in the God who ‘filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty’ (Luke 1:53)?” (Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. J. Eagleson [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1974], 217).

  On the claims of the Beatitudes, see Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution of
Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. M. Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 80–81. He concludes that the “people of the Beatitudes” must be converted to the future. On the Beatitudes in general, see: Michael Crosby, The Spirituality of the Beatitudes: Matthew’s Challenge for First World Christians (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1981); Hans Dieter Betz, “The Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-12): Observations on Their Literary Form and Theological Significance,” in idem, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, trans. L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) ,17–36; idem, The Sermon on the Mount, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994); K. C. Hanson, “How Honorable! How Shameful! A Cultural Interpretation of Matthew’s Makarisms and Reproaches,” Semeia 68 (1996): 81–111.

  Chapter 7

  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.

  Postscript

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

  Ibid., 49–86.

  Ibid., 92.

  Ibid., 120.