there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable - The Prophetic Imagination

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface.  That is,  the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language,  who is so at home in the memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church  in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.   In what follows, I will want to urge that there are precise models in Scripture for discerning prophetic ministry in this way. 

A study of the prophets of Israel must also try to take into account both the best discernment of contemporary scholarship and what the tradition itself seems to tell us.  The tradition and contemporary scholarship and what the tradition itself seems to tell us.  The tradition and contemporary scholarship are likely to be in some kind of tension, and we must try to be attentive to that.  The weariness and serenity of the church is just now make it a good time to study the prophets and get rid of tired misconceptions.   The dominant conservative misconception, evident in manifold bumper stickers,  is that the prophet is a future-teller, a predictor of things to come (mostly ominous), usually  with specific reference to Jesus.  While one would not want to deny totally those facets of the practice of prophecy,  there tends to be a kind of reductionism that is mechanical and therefore untenable.  While the prophets are in a way future-tellers, they are concerned with the future as it impinges on on the present.  Conversely,  liberals who abdicated and turned all futuring over to conservatives have settled for a focus on the present.  Thus prophesy is alternatively reduced to righteous indignation, and in circles where I move, prophecy is mostly understood as social action.  Indeed, such  liberal understanding of prophecy is an attractive and face-saving device for any excessive abrasiveness to the service of almost any cause.  Perhaps our best effort would be to let the futuring of such conservatives and the present criticism of the liberals correct each other.  But even that is less than might be claimed.  I believe that neither such convention adequately understands what really is at issue in the Israelite understanding of prophecy. 

The view of the prophetic tradition that Walter Brueggemann articulates is an interplay of the past (tradition) predictions or advocacy of a future and how those are made manifest in human experience of the present.  Focusing on any of those, exclusively or ignoring any of them is a distortion of the tradition and of the prophetic practice in regard to the future and the present.  Different ways  intentionally distorting the tradition can be done to produce desired results, most of those done for dishonest purposes often out of habit and social convention, often without even the one doing it admitting their intentions to themselves.  

One thing that is asserted by this view of the prophetic tradition that started with the prophets of Israel is that the distortions, intentional and habitual, those of calculated self-interest and those done in the interest of self-regard diminish, devalue and destroy the practice.  And they discredit it, especially among those who want it to be discredited because they reject one or more of its bases, its practices and its purpose.  I think a good deal of the (perhaps exaggeratedly reported) decline of the so-called mainstream  churches is due to them becoming embarrassed at the fact that monotheistic religion is, in fact, supernatural and that its life is inevitably founded in faith, not what is claimed by modernism and postivism as certainty.  Though science is, as well, founded in faith which is pretended to not be faith.   A trait that modernism and scientism and positivism holds in common with various scriptural fundamentalisms.

That is something it is dangerous to deny, that none of human culture, including science,  is an objective view of reality that is not, from start to its continuation in the present a totally human interpretation of human experience and human thought addressing that experience and the legacy of past thoughts.  The legacy of human thought, though it is an a artificial thing, acts as if it were a direct experience of the outside world in so far as we use it to come to our own conclusions in the present.  It can be entirely taken for granted and its shading of our thoughts unconsidered or considered to be as natural as water flowing and grass growing when it is not. 

It is one of the things which is different in the Jewish prophetic tradition that it does criticize that cultural legacy or baggage, if you will, it is not static, it holds all of the tradition,all of the present experience and all of the conjecture about the future in the tension which Brueggemann says we must be attentive to.  It both takes human experience of the world and human thought about it seriously while holding it and the conclusions and, most of all, the self-interested habits developed through those up to deep critical thinking.   It also looks critically at what we revere as our loftiest aspirations telling us to hold on and really consider that either we might not want that as much as we think we do or that there is another whose will will govern and who may have quite different thoughts than our thoughts.  Ours will inevitably be reductive, we cannot encompass any more reality than we can contain in our limited minds, individually and collecively,  our view of it, especially under the framing of modernism and scientism will be mechanical - from the habits of thought we have come to expect through the modeling of science and engineering - and as a means of understanding the world we are presented with now and in the future, it will be untenable as long as we don't take into account the limits imposed by the inescapable vissicitudeds of our own existence as human beings.  It's best to remember that, especially when dealing with life or death matters.   

Even the great and good Dr. Fauci recently had to take back a few of his predictions and prescriptions of late winter that seemed right in his expert opinion based on the models he had available.  He knows enough to do that with humility, that everything he says is contingent and open to error.  The man who is stupidly given by the law the power to hold Dr. Fauci's career in his hands is, alas, a more typical example of human folly and arrogance.  Don't get me started on the law that gives Trump that power and allows him to keep it out of Constitutional tradition.