The Authentic Prophets

As I mentioned in my wrap-up a few days ago in the finale of my series of posts entitled “Prophets vs. Posers”, I am shifting from exploring what prophets are not and move towards providing some thoughts (mine or others much smarter than me) about what makes for really authentic prophet – even in the modern context.  I’ve found that there is perhaps no better guide for that journey of exploring the prophetic world than Old Testament Walter Brueggemann.   I’m just about finished with his book,
Texts That Linger, Words That Explode:  Listening to Prophetic Voices . This is the third book of his that I’ve read after David’s Truth (link goes to my review) and The Prophetic Imagination.  You can get to the two-post review I did a couple years ago on the The Prophetic Imagination at these links: Pt. One and Part Two.by Walter Brueggemann.

I’m gong to highlight a couple thoughts here from a truly insightful chapter/essay in this book entitled “The Prophetic Word of God and History.”  He suggests three ways of speaking about the God who keeps “the human process open to possibilities.”

*  God is holy.  He has no rivals and cannot be “harnessed, domestiated, manipulated, or bought off.”
*  God is a “lover of justice” (Ps. 99:4), is mightily at work in the processes of history, is “mightily allied with the powerless, critical of greedy powerful.”
*  God is “a dangerous, subversive God, unsettling every status quo that offends holiness and that mocks justice.”  (pg. 39)

He describes the prophetic act as,

“The prophetic word in history is human utterance about this God unintimidated by modernity, unimpressed by excessive religion, nonnegotiable about rhetoric, nondefensive about its epistemology, daring to insist that this God who works wonders in the historical process is still at large, liberating and healing.” (pg. 39)

He offers five themes characteristic of the prophets that flow from the portrayal of God in the Jewish Scriptures (pg. 39-40,

1. “Out of God’s unaccommodating holiness, the prophetic word is against idols, and consequently against self-serving, self-deceiving ideology.”
2. “This holy God refuses then to absolutize the present, any present.  This holy God drives always toward a new unsettling, unsettled future, which is not yet visible, when God’s purpose will be worked and God’s regime fully established.  That threatening, promising future that lives on the lips of prophets warns against taking the present with excessive seriousness, even if it is a present that we happen to value inordinately.”
3. “Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically speaks about human suffering.”
   “Prophetic speech focused in hurt speaks against any tidy administration of social relations that crushes human reality in the interest of order, progress, profit, or “the common good.”
4. “Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically takes a critical posture over against established power.”
   “Prophetic speech not only insists that the raw use of power is wrong and must pay heed to human reality, it also makes the more difficult claim that, in the end, raw power cannot succeed and is not the final datum of human history.  Prophetic speech is realistic in knowing that massive power matters enormously; it is equally insistent that massive power does not matter ultimately, concerning the outcome or significance of the human process.”
5. “Prophetic speech, finally, is not an act of criticism.  It is rather an act of relentless hope that refuses despair, that refuses to believe that the world is closed off in patterns of exploitation and oppression.”

I found that Brueggemann’s themes really provide a positive counterpart to some of the same themes I have noted.  I find number five incredible insightful.  Prophets are so often thrown under the bus for being a wet blanket or being critical or not being team players when the real issue is one of hope and a refusal to despair.  These themes point to the fact that prophets have a big-picture awareness of what is in opposition to God and God’s ways as well as a practical and in-the-moment concern for the real human condition in a specific context in history.

This is a phenomenal book with rich insight, but it’s pretty dense.  If you’re intrigued by a lot of these thoughts, I suggest you start with The Prophetic Imagination which is one of his earlier works and I think it’s a little bit easier to follow and track with, though it still would classify as some heavy lifting in terms of brain power.

After seeing Brueggemann’s descriptions of the authentic prophet in history, what thoughts or reflections do you have in this area?