The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann is a
delightfully challenging book that looks to see how the prophets in the Bible can speak to our current context in the United States of
America. His hypothesis is simply this:
"the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a
consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of
the dominant culture around us" (3).
Brueggemann proposes throughout that the United States is analogous in
many ways to empire, that the culture of consumerism we live in is all
pervasive, and that the church has become tired, weak, and worn because of
identification with and saturation in this dominant culture.
In many ways, it is the prophets' ministry to break through
to people and help to free them from the numbness that the empire requires to
operate, to break through to people's hearts in order to stir them to create a
new community that Jesus proposes. Beginning
with Moses and tracing through various prophets such as Jeremiah and Isaiah,
Brueggemann arrives at Jesus as the final prophet explored.
There are several crucial ideas that stick with me from
reading this book, especially the following points. First, the language of grief helps
prophets cut through "the royal numbness and denial" and allows
people to identify what needs to collapse so the new Kingdom may enter in
(46). Along these lines, Brueggamnn
states that "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" (56).
Second, prophets energize people to trust God and allow the
new to supplant the old regime.
Brueggemann proposes that "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" (59-60). This
impacts us directly today. How many of
us can see a way to escape consumerism, to live for each other and with each
other when we work crazy hours, how many can see the way to not condemning by
the law but living a life of service for each other that might cost us our
lives? In order to inspire, the prophet
must then "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" (65).
Finally, Jesus presents an alternative community and
identifies with marginal people and the anguish that is denied in so many
societies (81). Beautifully, the resurrection is the "ultimate act of
prophetic energizing in which a new history is initiated" (113).
One Line Summary: Buy this book, read it slowly, pray
over it!
Book Reviewed: Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic
Imagination. Second Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.
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