The Prophetic Imagination

In the opening pages of The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann charges that “the contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act” (1). He urges the church to recover its faith tradition, and with it the ability to speak and act with “prophetic imagination.” His hypothesis is simple: “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” (3). Such ministry serves both to criticize the dominant narrative and to energize towards God's future.

Brueggemann, a leading Old Testament scholar, turns to the story of Israel and God's call for her to form a new social reality. He begins with the Exodus account, Israel's experience of the redeeming power of God that shaped national identity and dominates the entire Old Testament horizon. This narrative “is designed to show the radical criticism and radical delegitimizing of the Egyptian empire” (9)—a regime whose order and stability is based on oppression of the stranger. Into this situation God speaks through Moses with passionate authority: “Let my people go!” “Moses was ... concerned not with social betterment through the repentance of the regime but rather with totally dismantling it in order to permit a new reality to appear” (21). Israel is powerfully summoned to experience the freedom of God in a community built on justice and equality.

However, a deep problem emerges in Israel's history. The monarchy against which God warned comes to full and ominous flower in the reign of Solomon. In contrast to the radical Mosaic vision, “the entire program of Solomon now appears to have been a self-serving achievement with its sole purpose the self-securing of the king and dynasty” (23). What develops is a new “royal consciousness” that seeks to preserve the status quo at all costs, including oppression and forced labour. The unrestrained dance of freedom is replaced by dulled satiation (26). God, once worshipped as transcendent and free, now is domesticated in a temple in the royal city (28). “The dominant history of that period, like the dominant history of our own time, consists in briefcases and limousines and press conferences and quotas and new weaponry systems. And that is not a place where much dancing happens and where no groaning is permitted” (36).

In sharp contrast, the prophetic imagination visualizes a future where God and people are truly free. But this begins with grieving at the brokenness and injustice in the present. Brueggemann turns to Jeremiah as the paradigmatic “weeping prophet”. Jeremiah was called to groan and grieve almost alone for Israel's idolatry and injustice. “This denying and deceiving kind of numbness is broken only by the embrace of negativity, by the public articulation that we are fearful and ashamed of the future we have chosen” (56). Only then can prophecy move on to its second function: to energize. It is (Second) Isaiah who is the prophet of hope par excellence. He offers new symbols and new songs of God's freedom and power to make a new beginning, for “our hope is never generated among us but always given to us” (79).

Brueggemann traces this dual theme of prophetic criticism and energizing in Jesus' ministry. Jesus criticizes not only in words, as is often noted, but in his very deeds. After all, “empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion ... thus compassion that might be seen simply as generous goodwill is in fact criticism of the system, forces, and ideologies that produce the hurt” (89,89). But Jesus's ministry is also one that produces amazement, for the entire prophetic tradition finds its highest fulfillment in him (102).

The key weakness of the book is that the target for prophetic ministry is always assumed to be idolatrous surrounding culture, when in fact it is almost always the people of God, being called back to their broken covenant with Yahweh. The prophetic ministry the church needs most is the one that calls us to faithfulness to our own identity as God's holy people. In his concluding “Note on the Practice of Ministry”, Brueggemann observes that “the task of prophetic ministry is evoke an alternative community that knows it is about different things in different ways” (117). In this way the prophetic imagination helps the church be truly missional, by reminding her that a true missionary encounter with the world will require criticism through tears as well as the joyful announcement of God's new reign in Jesus.