The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to,if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of fortunetellers or social protesters. Here it is argued that they were concerned with the most elemental changes in human society and that they understood a great deal great deal about how change is effected.
There is no coincidence in the enormous number of times that The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. made reference to the Hebrew Prophets during the struggle of the Civil Rights movement he was such a large figure in. And he was not alone in that. I think it is one of the reasons that the Black Churches played the central role, with other churches playing supporting ones, so many of the most effective figures in the human rights movements have made reference to the Biblical Prophets, they not only exposed the exact same kinds of wrongs we face today, they proposed means of ending those wrongs and they proposed what the results of a successful change in the right direction would look like. And, perhaps most important of all, that that dynamic would always be in operation, there would be no successful change in human life that would not be susceptible to reversion.And that, as well, there was no wrong so bad that God would abandon us totally beyond the possibility of redemption. Secular revolutionary change has been, by and large if not completely less successful and far more immediately prone to reproduce the evils it alleged to overcome.
Deepest of all change is change within a person. That change, if it is deep enough, it will make a more reliably durable change than passing a law that can be ignored, interpreted out of any meaning or overturned. As we are finding and will increasingly find is the case in the United States.
The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to the emotional extremities of life. They understood the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning. Most of all, they understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word." It is argued here that a prophetic understanding of reality is based in the notion that all social reality does spring fresh from the word. It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that where such language stops we find humanness diminished.
These are the reasons I think it's helpful to go through Breuggemann's book The Prophetic Imagination as we are going ever deeper into the same kinds of disaster that the Jewish Prophets addressed, over and over again.
I have absolute confidence that the reason we are in such trouble is related to not only the secular rejection of that tradition but also the effective abandonment of it within the Churches, the Fundamentalists, the Roman Catholics, the other churches which have aligned themselves with what Breuggemann has called the "totalizing power" I believe borrowing it from a secular writer to whom he gave the credit for it (I don't have time to go through the many lectures posted online to find the one I'm remembering), the focus of Breuggemann's critique and theological discourse, the similarities of the Pharaohic system, the corruptions of the Jerusalem establishment and of modernist capitalism and consumerism.
You don't have to go far into the book to see that the author was speaking prophetically himself. He began during Lent 1978 by saying 42 years ago:
The Time may be ripe in the church for serious consideration of prophesy as a crucial element in ministry. To be sure, the student indignation of the sixties is all but gone, but there is at the same time a sobering and a return to the most basic issues of biblical faith.
And there, indeed was, though not in the as seen on TV and heard on rent-time radio, not so much later that year in the Vatican as John Paul II and Cardinal Ratizinger would take control of it, not so much in it. But at that point as the popular culture was decidedly not sobering as it seldom does many Protestants, many Catholics, many Jews were definitely taking that sober return that he talked about.
The mostly and increasingly secular, in most cases I knew of irreligious, iconoclastic "student indignation" had, indeed, petered out. In the United States it took one of its biggest hits when Richard Nixon craftily and cagily, understanding the basic mind set of so many of those indignant students ended the draft and the possibility that they might find, on graduation, their asses on the line in the war in Southeast Asia. Secular substitutes for that kind of prophetic action are seldom based in much that is durable other than, perhaps, those that coalesce around a cult figure which the majority either never hear of or find as absurd as they are. So many of those within that "student indignation" went on to join the totalizing power, Larry Kudlow was a member of the SDS and later of Americans for Democratic Action (surprised to find out that Michael Medved was in that as well). I could draw you a very long list of those indignant students who took that same road into the worst of the American fascist movement as, indeed, so many of an earlier generation of them had been Trotskyites in their youth, before they started having the chance to make a lot of money. There may well be religious apostates into it, the Catholic tradition has certainly stunk with many of them, as can be seen in the Trump regime and the Supreme Court as well as the incumbant members of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
But what Breuggemann sensed within the churches then was real, it was actively prophetic, the Latino and Black Liberation theology movements, related and supporting movements within the Catholic and Protestant churches and within Judaism and other religious groups was real and have been sustained efforts under some of the most seriously discouraging conditions there are.
Far from the smallest point of interest in the preface to the book is its last paragraphs.
This book is offered in thanksgiving for a growing number of my sisters who at long last are finding acceptance in ordained ministry. For me, of course, that distinguished group of colleagues is headed by my wife, Mary, who pastors in prophetic ways. It includes a growing number of women who have been my student colleagues at Eden Seminary.
I am growingly aware that this book is different because of the emerging feminine consciousness as it impacts our best theological thinking. That impacting is concerned not with abrasive crusading but with a different nuancing of all our perceptions. I do not think that women ministers and theologians are the first to have discovered the realities of grief and amazement in our lives, but they have helped us see them as important dimensions in prophetic reality. In many ways these sisters have permitted me to see what I otherwise might have missed. For that I am grateful - and amazed.
I will mention that that new stream of prophetic witness has been disruptive even of the prophetic voice within that same period. The great Black Liberation theologian James Cone's great influence has not been immune from the criticism or, I'd think more productive disagreement with that of the great Womanist theologian Dolores Williams. Prophetic witness will always have that feature, it is clearly part of "the strange incongruence between public conviction and personal yearning" or between the differences in the human experiences and the informed, passionately moral conclusions based on that experience. But more important than those differences are the common purpose and understanding of them. I am in my early reading of Womanist theology and I haven't read nearly enough Black Liberation and other Liberation Theology. I wasted most of those 42 years when I should have been reading them, as I would bet you Breuggemann and many other white males were reading them. I have to say that of the areas of intellectual life I've seen, theologians are among the best and most widely read of the lot of them. It is one of the most intellectually engaged of all the disciplines and one of the most serious about life outside of its specialty.
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