Before I continue with that, though, I want to comment on the use of imagination by atheists to discredit ideas they don't like. As I pointed out the other day, atheist, materialists of the scientistic kind aren't particularly good at following the logical consequences of their ideological assertions to their ends, at least not when it's things they like and, indeed, the very things they use to make their claims and assert that theirs are the only rational conclusions and all other ideas are deserving of only disdain and discrediting, along with the large majority of humanity which don't share their ideology.
The idea that because something is imagined that that fact defines it as an illusion or a delusion or a superstition or an unconsidered bit of "folk psychology" is asserted by people who ignore that all of their ideological holdings, materialism, atheism, scientism, etc. are no less products of imagination than the beliefs of religion. In fact, every idea we have of anything external to ourselves is inevitably a product of imagination, the production of images and their manipulation and extension into scenarios that comprise understanding and, in fact, what we articulate to other people to convince them of ideas we want them to adopt. That is certainly how science works, as, for example, in what happens when a scientist reads a paper by a colleague and from the descriptions of events and observations, the measurements of them, the mathematical representation of them, the very conclusions that are asserted by the paper are all acts of imagination. Often, any model or diagram included is a product of imagination not a representation of even one event but, often, a fictitious "typical" event of the type asserted in the conclusion. The idea that you can specify or typify a number of events into one set description of what such an event should be is an act of imagination, itself. And that's especially true of objects which cannot be seen. It tickles me that the "atom" which some atheists take as their sacred symbol is entirely a produce of imagination and is in no way "what an atom would look like." "The atom" as imagined by materialists going back to the Greeks and ancient Indians was and is entirely a matter of imagination, not all of those "things" so imagined being either real or as science has come to characterize atoms now. Atheists who claim to be all about objective observation, measurement and analysis to come up with an "objective" view of reality are imagining what they claim no less than any religious believer does.
I will go back to the practice of giving links to scriptural passages and other things as needed, the Revised Standard Version because it's so widely used. I have not provided citations for the authors mentioned by Brueggemann, though in his chapter notes in the book he provides most of those. So, check the book out. The book was meant for, as he put it "professional religionists" but even without those his substance is useful for us amateurs. They're easy to look up online.
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As a beginning point in these considerations, I propose that our understanding of prophecy comes out of the covenantal tradition of Moses. I do not minimize the important scholarly contributions concerning non-Israelite antecedents to prophecy in Israel. These include (a) studies in the Canaanite phenomenon of ecstasy, surely echoed in 1 Samuel 10 and 19; and, more recently, (b) the evidence from Mari concerning institutional offices of prophecy both in the cult and in the court. Both these kinds of evidence illuminate practices and conventions to which Israel undoubtedly appealed in its much borrowing. But the tradition itself is not ambiguous when it comes to the dominating figure of Moses who provides our primary understandings. That is to say, the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else. That urging is fundamental for this discussion, for I am urging in parallel fashion that if the church is to be faithful it must be formed and ordered from the inside of its experience and not by borrowing from sources external to its own life. This judgment, I am aware, is against the current tendency of scholarship. Thus, for example. Ronald Clements in his more recent Prophecy and Tradition has drawn back somewhat from his earlier position in Covenant and Prophecy. There is currently the reassertion of a kind of neo-Wellhausian perspective, and that may be an important corrective to the synthesis of Gerhard von Rad. Nonetheless, I would urge that we are on sound ground if we take as our beginning point Moses as the paradigmatic prophet who sought to evoke in Israel an alternative consciousness.
This is an important consideration these days when the Bible is regularly attacked on a weirdly programmatic application of the genetic fallacy to it, the extent to which the ideas of the Old Testament, the Mosaic books was a break with earlier thinking and the radical content of that, so radical that if the United States were to adopt the economic Law of Moses it would be the most radical egalitarian reform that has been known in the modern world, in every way more radical than any Marxist or socialist program I've ever come across. Certainly more radical than any Marxist regime which has ever been known and without the violence of any modern revolution from the American and French ones up till today. That is something which no one can find antecedents for in what's known of earlier Mediterranean and middle-eastern contexts. The closest to it I can think of are the tales told about King Ashoka after his conversion to Buddhism.
The ministry of Moses, as George Mendenhall and Norman Gottwald have most recently urged, represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharaoh's Egypt. The newness and radical inattentiveness of Moses and Israel in that period can hardly be overstated. Most of us are probably so used to these narratives that we have become insensitive to the radical and revolutionary social reality that emerged because of Moses. It is clear that the emergence of Israel by the hand of Moses cannot be extrapolated from any earlier reality. Obviously nothing like the Kenite hypothesis or the monotheism of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt will help us at all. While there are some hints that the God of Israel is known to be the God of the fathers (cf. Exodus 15:2), that evidence is at best obscure. In any case, the overriding experience of Exodus is decisive and not some memory now only hinted at in the tradition. However those antecedents are finally understood, the appearance of a new social reality is unprecedented. Israel in the thirteenth is indeed ex nihilo. And that new social reality drives us to the category of revelation. Israel can only be understood in terms of the new all of God and his assertion of an alternative social reality. Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause. Theological cause without social political reality is only of interest to professional religionists, and social political reality without theological cause need not concern us here. But it is being driven by the one to the other that requires us to speak of and wonder about the call to the prophetic.
(1) The radical break of Moses and Israel from imperial reality is a two-dimensional break from both the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation. Moses dismantled the religion of static triumphalism by exposing the gods and showing that in fact they had no power and were not gods. Thus, the mythical legitimacy of Pharaoh's social world is destroyed, for it is shown that such a regime appeals to sanctions that in fact do not exist. The mythic claims of the empire are ended by the disclosure of the alternative religion of the freedom of God. In place of the gods of Egypt, creatures of the imperial consciousness, Moses discloses YHWH, the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality, and is captive to no social perception but acts form hi own person towards his own purposes.
At the same time, Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion. The reality emerging out of the Exodus is not just a new religion or a new social community in history, a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability. The participants in the Exodus found themselves, undoubtedly surprisingly to them, involved in the intentional formation of a new social community to match the vision of God's freedom. That new social reality, which is utterly discontinuous with Egypt, lasted in its alternative way for 250 years.
For those who might forget, the United States hasn't lasted that long and it's ever more doubtful that our Constitution is going to make it to the 250 year point. And if it does, we might not. There is nothing easy or finally settled in human life or society.
About ten years ago I was introduced to the Yigdal of Maimonides by reading a translation of the text while listening to Stefan Wolpe's fine cantata* on it. The text of the cantata is a 13 point declaration of the Jewish faith by Maimonides, the seventh verse was one I didn't really appreciate at the time, it declared that there was never another prophet like Moses who saw clearly. Having been fed the secular, atheist view of Moses by my education and reading, I didn't care for that idea. But having read, especially from Protestant authors and post-Vatican II Catholics, I've definitely warmed up to Moses and The Law, for all its being a human interpretation and understanding of things, a few, such as in the Holiness Rules of Leviticus as commonly interpreted, excepted. Only when considered in light of the understanding of those trying to leave the oppression of the pagan world for one of justice and equality, always in danger from the old, ingrained habits (as we always are the habits of slavery and in, for example, serfdom in Russia) they didn't want the worst of that, such as temple prostitution of children, to take root in Israel. I could go more into detail about that point more and probably will before this is over. It will have to get pretty explicit. It won't be in accord with the real-right-way to be lefty, these days. The Law dealt with real human reality as lived, not some abstract model of simple objects.
*
Christfried Biebrach, bass
Wolfgang Zerer, organ
NDR Choir
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