I previously posted this review on one of my blogs. I thought this was one that the OST populace may enjoy.

I commend to you the short book The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann. Perhaps I can explain it as pop-Christian-lit for people that don’t enjoy getting treated like 12 year olds.

Since Brueggemann is a Professor specialising in Old Testament and since the book is based on a series of lectures it is quite readable and addresses issues of interest in some depth without overloading on detail. This proved to be a weakness as well: sometimes I found the language a little difficult to read. However, if I slowed and read it out loud it was quite powerful.

He states:

“the hypothesis I will explore here is this: 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. Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.” (Brueggemann, 13)

Brueggemann sees something of Jesus’ subversive nature. As I have often said, the gospel is the most subversive message in the world. It’s a message of overthrow, of revolt. Will you take the red pill or the blue? Beginning with Moses, then moving through Jeremiah and Second Isaiah, the author gives us a fresh view of Jesus’ prophetic tradition. By pitting the free, creative worldview of the prophetic against the royal consciousness of numb consumerism we are led to a current application that stands in the Judeo-Christian prophetic tradition.

He sees two major themes throughout the prophetic ministry: criticism of established structures and energising people through hope (which he distinguishes from optimism). I connected this with William’s theory of groups which create circles of inclusion and exclusion in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Allow me to follow (briefly) the theme of criticism by quoting again:

“The royal consciousness [expressed in Pharaoh and Solomon] leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to engage their experiences of suffering to death.” (Brueggemann, 46)

“The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.” (Brueggemann, 49)

This tradition leads (inevitably?) to culmination in the cross:

“It is the crucifixion of Jesus that is the decisive criticism of the royal consciousness. the crucifixion of Jesus is not to be understood simply in good liberal fashion as the sacrifice of a noble man, nor should we too quickly assign a cultic, priestly theory of atonement to the event. Rather, we might see in the crucifixion of Jesus the ultimate act of prophetic criticism in which Jesus announces the end of a world of death (the same announcement as that of Jeremiah) and takes that death into his own person. Therefore we say that the ultimate criticism is that God himself embraces the death that his people must die. The criticism consists not in standing over against, but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition.” (Brueggemann, 91)

Much more can be said, but I will leave it there so as not to bore my readers, but inspire them to find a copy. I have several other books by the same author on my reading list; I’ll post reviews if I have time.