The hypothesis I will explore here is 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. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated. It may be, of course, that this enduring crisis manifests itself in any given time around concrete issues, but it concerns the enduring crisis that runs from concrete issue to concrete issue. That point is particularly important to ad hoc liberals who run from issue to issue without discerning the enduring domestication of vision in all of them.
The alternative consciousness to be nurtured, on the one hand, serves to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness. To that extent, it attempts to do what the liberal tendency has done, engage in a rejection and delegitimatizing of the present ordering of things. On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move. To that extent it attempts to do what the conservative tendency has done, to lie in fervent anticipation of newness that God has promised and will surely give.
In thinking this way, the key word is alternative, and every prophetic minister and prophetic community must engage in a struggle with that notion. Thus, alternative to what? In what ways alternative? How radically alternative? Finally, is there a thinkable alternative that will avoid domestication? And, quite concretely, how does one present and act out alternatives in a community of faith which on the whole does not understand that there are any alternatives, or is not prepared to embrace such if they come along? Thus it is a practice of ministry for which there is little readiness, indeed, not even among its would-be practitioners. So, my programmatic urging is that every act of a minister who would be prophetic is part of a way of evoking, forming, and reforming an alternative community. And this applies to every facet and every practice of ministry. It is a measure of our enculturation that the various acts of ministry (for example counseling, administration, even liturgy) have taken on lives and functions of their own rather than being seen as elements of the one prophetic ministry of formation and reformation of alternative community.
A while back I caused a minor ruckus by pointing out that the "counter culture" of the1960s and earliest 70s was not counter to this dominant culture in any real or effective way, that it shared in the same basic consciousness of American, Brit, etc. consumerism, egoism, etc. I noted that at the same time there was a genuine visionary counter-culture right there before everyone in The Reverend Martin Luther King's "Beloved Community" but which was rejected by the white establishment out of hand and was rejected by the up and coming radicals both white and black, whose programs weren't visionary, they were not really an alternative but just a fever dream of alternative power structures, often Marxist and, as history made plain as the Marxist categories of the mass murdering gangster regimes of the 20th century and the mountains of bodies and the slave masses they terrorized into submission, they were in many cases a proposal worse than what they allegedly struggled against. Also, Altamont.
And, of course,such people made themselves the tools of the capitalist power structure because the large majority of Americans,seeing those bodies, seeing those terrorized populations knew that the alternatives nurtured by some of the most idiotic academics who still preach from podcasts and Youtubes* are nothing they want to have imposed on them. The worst thing that ever happened to socialism was to be coopted by the gangsters, Marxist as well as National Socialist. They were useful for the racists in attacking Martin Luther King jr. and, in fact, all of the critics of the dominant order.
That Youtube by John Oliver I posted yesterday has a clip of King giving the reason that what he was really asking for would be far harder to get than what the movement he was a leader in had accomplished, it was going to cost the government, the society and the wealthy money to address the economic justice that was inseparable from the broader justice that was the goal. It is one of the great crimes of the19th century through today that that justice sought ever got coopted by an anti-democratic ideology that, demonstrably, is as bad and generally worse at producing justice in even economic terms and certainly never took seriously the other aspects of the overall justice that is the reason for the Mosaic Law, the most radical of all economics, especially when interpreted in the ultra radicalism of Jesus. Those include a more radical economic redistribution than Marx dreamed of or, certainly the capitalists and the National Socialists, but are more radically just in every way.
II wonder if one of the reasons that Marx gave a capitalist period as a prerequisite for his progress of the dialectic on to its pre-determined, material, scientifically predicted end in his ridiculous pie in the never to be achieved future because, since captitalism definitely existed and was definitely the quickly developing hegemonist power of the world, his faith in materialist causation led him to an absurd faith that it was a product of material evolution when it was,as in fact all economic and political forces are, a matter of choices made by those with power granted to them by habits of thought. I have also noted in my critique of that other mistaking of artificial economic-political stratification Darwinism quoted the radical British author William Cobbett who pointed out that if the Malthusians got the "law of nature" they wished to apply to the poor who would starve to death and die in misery that that law would overturn all of the artificial laws that kept the elite Darwin and his earliest disciples belonged to or aspired to as they took what they needed. It is a similar superstitious reification of artificial, human made constructs that absurdly idealistic presentations of capitalism, anarchism, unfortunately most of socialism, and, really, just about any "ism" you can name. I think the truly radical prophetic imagination, to be at all genuine will resist falling into all ideological frames and will not crystallize into a static, dead object. It has to be a living, changing but persisting thing. It will have to be founded in the radical vision of life as manifested in the Jewish prophetic tradition as in the Old Testament but as continues up till today, and in the ultra radical form of that which should have always been the central point of the child of that earlier tradition, Christianity. I will not speak for Islam or any other tradition that might partake of the same or similar prophesy, but I can't accept any religion as authentic unless it is entirely involved with life close to that and on the same terms.
* Indeed, from what I gather the living anachronism, Richard Wolff regularly preaches Marxism from one and no doubt more of those liberal churches which, no doubt, even in 1978 fell under Brueggemann's consideration, as well as the network of Trump's sponsor, RT as well as American versions of that such as from The Hill.
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