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| Jeremiah - Donatello |
The following discussion is an attempt to understand what the prophets were up to, if we can be freed from our usual stereotypes of foretellers or social protestors. Here it is argued that they were concerned with most elemental changes in human society and that they understood a great deal about how change is effected. The prophets understood the possibility of change as linked to 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 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 our humaness diminished. (Preface to the 1st ed., 1978)
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The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act. This enculturation is in some way true across the spectrum of church life, both liberal and conservative. It may not be a new situation, but it is one that seems especially urgent and pressing at the present time. That enculturation is true not only of the institution of the church but also of us as persons. Our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric. (p. 1)
In the quote below, substitute for "the king" and "royal consciousness" the government and its nearly seamless mesh with Wall Street. Or substitute the institution of the Church.
When we move from the primal paradigms to the concreteness of the prophets, we may pause to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. I suspect that our own self-concept as would-be prophets is most often too serious, realistic, and even grim. But as David Noel Freedman has observed, the characteristic way of a prophet in Israel is that of poetry and lyric. The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that makes it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one. (p. 40)Who are our prophets today? Where is our Micah?
‘O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!
For I brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and redeemed you from the house of slavery;
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised,
what Balaam son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.’
‘With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:3-8)Our Jeremiah?
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice;
who makes his neighbours work for nothing,
and does not give them their wages;
who says, ‘I will build myself a spacious house
with large upper rooms’,
and who cuts out windows for it,
panelling it with cedar,
and painting it with vermilion.
Are you a king
because you compete in cedar?
Did not your father eat and drink
and do justice and righteousness?
Then it was well with him.
He judged the cause of the poor and needy;
then it was well.
Is not this to know me?
says the Lord.
But your eyes and heart
are only on your dishonest gain,
for shedding innocent blood,
and for practising oppression and violence.
(Jeremiah 22:13-17)My question in the title of the post is serious. Who are the prophets who speak "the language of newness" today? Within religious institutions, or outside? Or have we no prophets? Do we see in the present the reality of the words from Proverbs, "Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint..."? I've been thinking on these things as I read Brueggemann, and I'd like to hear from others.
Image from the Web Gallery of Art.
The person I read who I feel is a prophet is your retired Bishop John Shelby Spong. His vision of Christianity inspires me and I love the idea of God as the "Ground of our Being."
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jay. Bishop Spong is both honored and dishonored in his own time. While I don't agree with all of his theology, I have never found Bp Spong to be as shocking and heretical as the claims against him. I enjoyed his commentary in the DVD program Living the Questions very much. Brueggemann was also one of the participants, as was John Dominic Crossan.
ReplyDeleteBefore Bp Gene, it was Bp Shelby who was the scandal of the Episcopal Church.
Spong rocks. This is a man who is not afraid to tear down the veil and say the emperor has no clothes: he tells it like it is. I wouldn't say I necessarily agree with all his theology, either, but I like his attitude.
ReplyDeleteProphets are always in short supply in every age. One problem today is that the fundamentalists are so screaming loud in the marketplace, they drown out more reasonable, rational voices; on the other hand, what comes out of more sensible mainstream churches is more often than not conference-cobbled gobbledygook or something so intellectually rarified that means everything and nothing to the ordinary person.
And I could go on to make a longer list, but I guess I'm just trying to say that prophets are where you find them, and not often in the expected places.
I mean, can anything good come out of a hick town full of rednecks like Nazareth?
Renz, the artists, definitely the artists, are often prophets of our time. As Brueggemann says: Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination....
ReplyDeleteThe first person who came to mind was Michael Moore. He critiques some of the biggest sacred cows in our society.
ReplyDeleteEleanor, Michael is fat, shrill, uncooth, in your face, and wears a baseball cap, a perfect prophet for the day. He's taken on the big and powerful, that's for sure. At least, he wasn't ordered to marry a harlot for the Lord.
ReplyDeleteProphets? Why look to Moore or Spong?
ReplyDeleteLook at all of us! We are constantly calling in the marketplace, "Listen! Listen!" and get bile and threats in response . . . certainly no material reward.
I respect Moore and Spong - and Rage Against the Machine and Pink, for that matter - but they get royalties and have celebrity. Would they carry on if that were not the case?
I like the way MarkBrunson thinks. In my own corner of the world, I would nominate Fr. Lee Graham, the priest I used to serve with at noon day on Fridays. He stood up to prejudice in Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement, and has preached a Gospel of inclusion of LGBT people before others in the Episcopal Church here *dared* to do so. Even at 91 and retired, he's still poking and prodding the Church and making people think. He's great!
ReplyDeleteMark, we get no material reward. Virtue is its own reward (says I, piously). Yes, we plug away and, I hope, do a little good.
ReplyDeleteSCG, we lived in Alabama at the time of Bull Connor's attack on the civil rights marchers with dogs and fire hoses, and I wanted to be somewhere else. Yes, it took courage to stand up to prejudice in Alabama in those days.
Bayard Rustin, whose 100th birthday was last Friday. Look at the documentary, Brother Outsider, and be amazed at what one man could accomplish. Tutor of nonviolence to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, organizer of the March on Washington, etc., etc. And people may never have heard of him, because you can't talk about gay people in public -- the children might be listening.
ReplyDeleteMurdoch, I remember Bayard Rustin, a true hero of the civil rights movement, whose his accomplishments are mainly unsung. I did not know he was gay until long after the height of the activism.
ReplyDeleteInteresting thing about prophets: they were recognized by the community for speaking truth. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to mind, although he's now been canonized, and his statements sanitized to the point that all he really had was "a dream."
ReplyDeleteDorothy Day. Oscar Romero. Thomas Merton. All Catholics, interestingly.
Can't think of too many Protestants I consider prophetic, which is odd. Not mad for Spong, largely God as "ground of being" comes from Paul Tillich, and I find it to be crap theology (sorry, but there we are). IMHO, of course, so pay no attention to me. Find a great deal that's prophetic in liberation theology, so that draws in Gutierrez and Sobrino. Cannot get away from the Catholics, can I?
Brueggemann comes close, but he's too much of an academician (almost. I do greatly admire Brueggemann, though.)
Prophets, prophets, prophets....hmmmmmm......gotta be somebody else.....
Rmj, I agree that all those you name are prophets, and liberation theology was a prophetic movement which, although stifled, continues today with a remnant. Although I was not explicit, I was thinking of people who are alive today.
ReplyDeleteWhen I asked the question of myself, 'Who are the prophets of today?' Brueggemann came to mind. Although he's not literally crying in the streets, I view him as a prophet. Next, I thought of the Occupy groups, especially Occupy Wall Street in NYC. Although it's early days to include them just yet, still I am loathe to dismiss them, because I see the possibility of a prophetic movement there. With the Occupiers, I would include Episcopal Bishop George Packard as a potential prophet. If he ever reads this, I'm sure he will be greatly embarrassed. The clergy associated with the Occupy groups are not, as I understand, the leaders of the groups, but are present to minister to the Occupiers.
By no means is my list complete with those two citations, but those were the initial thoughts that came to mind when I asked the question.
Sigh! You always do ask the very tough questions. IMHO the prophets of today are usually individual. Individual voices which come together and make a larger impact for change for justice for the poor, the needy, the marginalized--"the victims of fear, unjustice, hunger, oppression," and bigtory. I see the collective voice of TEC becoming a prophetic voice in this endeavor; not just here but in the global arena.
ReplyDeleteBonnie, when Trinity Wall Street had the Occupiers removed from Zucotti Park and then from Duarte Square, some violently, they took a blow and, by extension, the entire church took a blow for not speaking out.
ReplyDeleteIt's true our church has begun to do the right thing by our LGTB brothers and sisters, so the record is mixed, as is my own, because I am personally enculturated into 'the ethos of consumerism'.