"news just for this moment and just for this community"

Continuing on with The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann:

Second, in 11:7 there is a wondrous statement of a new reality that surely must energize: "But against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast,  not a dog shall growl; that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel."  In our scholarly ways we may miss the power here.  It is too terrible to be contained in "a doctrine of election."  It occurs not in a doctrine but in a narrative and an unproven memory that we must let stand in all its audaciousness.  It is not reflective theology but news just for this moment and just for this community.  The God who will decide is not the comfortable god of the empire, so fat and well fed as to be neutral and inattentive.  Rather, it is the God who is alert to the realities, who does not flinch from taking sides, who sits in the divine council on the edge of his seat and is attentive to his special interests.  It is the way of the unifying gods of the empire not to take sides and by being tolerant to cast eternal votes for the way things are.  

We may pause here to note the kind of theological reflection in which this primal prophetic narrative engages.  There is not much here for the systematic theologian.  No prophet ever sees things under the aspect of eternity.  It is always partisan theology, always for the moment, always for the concrete community, satisfied to see only a piece of it all and speak out of that at the risk of contradicting the rest of it.  Empires prefer systematic theologians who see it all, who understand both sides, and who regard polemics as unworthy of God and divisive of the pubic good.  But what an energizing statement!  It is like Andrew Young, who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking.  The affirmation whispered in the barracks is that he is "up front" about his commitments and Pharaoh is not going to like it. 

Since at a distance, this bald statement is high theology.  It is the gospel;  God is for us.  In an empire no god is for anyone.  They are old gods who don't care anymore and have tried everything once and have a committee studying all the other issues.  For Moses and Israel energizing comes not out of sociological strategy  or hunches about social dynamic but out of the freedom of God.  And so the urging I make to those who would be prophets is that we not neglect to do our work about who God is and that we know our discernment of God is at the breaking points of human community. 

I had to remind myself of what Andrew Young was doing during this period.  He was a former Congressman and a long time civil rights lawyer and activist who was a mayor of Atlanta after the book was published in 1978.   At the time this was written, was Jimmy Carter's media establishment designated "controversial" Ambassador to the UN who took a number of, indeed, controversial stands and made some controversial statements, some spot on right, some very wrong, in retrospect though the ones I was reminded of wouldn't have seemed so at the time.  I doubt Walter Brueggemann would have predicted how apt his choice to mention him in this context was, due to the stands he took that seemed right to him at the time.  For example, he supported the disastrously misjudged Robert Mugabe in a disputed election which was a disaster for Zimbabwe as Mugabe morphed into a terrible despot.  The issue in supporting him was the still hot one of "anticolonialism" which is somewhat understandable, no one knew he would turn so bad, though that should no longer bet so surprising in a general turned politician in the world context. With some exceptions, generals, colonels, etc. along with CEOs usually lack any inclination to value democracy and respect for the common People. 

What is apt in this context is that for all its mistakes, many of which he could not have foreseen, Andrew Young's Ambassadorship is an example of the kind of prophetic imagination that is, after all, all too human in its scope of vision, its particular references and its inability to guess the future.  He embodied what Brueggemann said about that, [A prophet is someone] "who takes sides with losers and powerless marginal people, who has not yet grown cynical with the "double speak" of imperial talk, who dares to speak before the data are in and dares to affront more subtle thinking."  If Breuggemann's idea to use Young as an example was prophetic, I'd love to be able to ask him.  

It is one of the things that William Blake so frustratingly mimicked from the Bible Prophets, that his articulation in poetry was at times so obscure and confusing that even some Blake scholars say the "prophetic" poems are incomprehensible.  And sometimes when you think you can apprehend some of what he is getting at, sometimes it seems rather wrong.  I used to think his view of "enlightenment" erudition in the form of Voltaire and Rousseau, that Blake's use of "The atoms of Democritus and Newton's particles of light," was kind of naive.   Now I think it shows what a genius he was in assigning a higher place to this exact revelation. 

One of the things that hasn't been brought up about those who practiced prophetic imagination is the courage it takes, the willingness to, in the kind of contingency Breuggemann so brilliantly describes here, the willingness to speak and decide before all the data are in and to risk being mocked, dismissed, or even killed for being wrong is a big part of it.  It doesn't seem to be much of a career path for careful people, people who make their way in the empires of the world.  

One thing I am convinced of, the vocation of a Christian now and for a long time will be to condemn the kind of "christianity" that is not only totally at ease within the empires of the world, but who have substituted its gods for not only the God of Abraham, Isaac and Moses, but the one of Jesus as well.   And they've kidnapped Jesus and are holding him hostage.   I don't think it's time to forego any religious fights among those who take religion seriously.  Andrew Young's example is exactly the right one to look at, for all its problems.  I wish I had the time to look up to see what Jimmy Carter, also embattled and with the responsibility to prevent the disaster he, alas, could not, even as the media, corporate and "leftist" were attacking him over everything he did.  That's something we will see if Biden becomes president, though, in his case, I don't think he's going to be worried about his own reelection.  

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I'm tempted to go into the annoyingly cute Hollywood, Broadway view of God and the angels, etc. as bureaucrats and their CEO, though, considering how God had been marked as an accountant keeping records of sins (not so much mentioning merits, in that accounting) and coming up with the tally of whether we go to heaven or hell, maybe that's a deeper issue the misconceptions about God.  We would seem determined to make him more like Pharaoh than the Bible should lead us to expect.  In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, Jesus had a pretty radical point to make about God's freedom to be generous quite at odds with the common human conceptions of the human virtue of fairness.  It was certainly at odds with accounting and the bottom line.  Maybe that's what we need to understand,  even the virtue of fairness is a human makeshift that God exceeds, in general, perhaps, quite possibly, quite likely "at the breaking points of human community," where things have already gone dangerously out of that context.  The contingency of prophetic imagination and its risks are in answer to that.  It even risks getting it wrong because we'll never have all the data in.  The realm prophetic imagination is relevant to doesn't have the luxury to pretend that will ever be true in human affairs.