The Practice of Prophetic Imagination

Preaching an Emancipating Word

Walter Brueggemann

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780800698973
• eBook ISBN: 9781451419764
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The necessary context of prophetic preaching, Walter Brueggemann argues, is "a contestation between narratives" the dominant narrative of our time, which promoting self-sufficiency at the national level (through militarism) and the personal (through consumerism), and the countervailing narrative of a world claimed by a God who is gracious, uncompromising—and real. In previous work Brueggemann has pointed us again and again to the indispensability of imagination. Here he writes for those who bear responsibility for regular proclamation in communities of faith, describing the discipline of a prophetic imagination that is unflinchingly realistic and unwaveringly candid.

CHAPTER 1

The Narrative Embedment of Prophetic Preaching

IT IS MY HOPE, in what follows, to make a credible connection between the material of “prophetic utterance” in the Old Testament itself and the actual practice of “prophetic preaching” that is mandated in the actual work of pastors who are located in worshipping congregations. It is not difficult to see what the prophets of the Old Testament are doing, and we have ample interpretive analyses of that work.¹ But the transposition from that ancient clarity to contemporary social, ecclesial reality is not easy or obvious.² “Prophetic preaching,” undertaken by working pastors, is profoundly difficult and leaves the preacher in an ambiguous and exposed position. The task is difficult because such a preacher must at the same time “speak truth” while maintaining a budget, a membership, and a program in a context that is often not prepared for such truthfulness. Indeed, given the seductions and accommodations of many congregations, not to mention larger judicatories in the church, such venues are often not readily venues for truth-telling.

Given that problematic reality that is ubiquitous and systemic, we may also note that “prophetic preaching” is not in its definition obvious. On the one hand and popularly, “prophetic preaching” may mean to take up the great issues of the day, so that the preacher is cast, with some immediacy, in the role of prophet. On the other hand, it is possible to construe “prophetic preaching” as a probe of ancient prophetic texts with inescapable side glances at contemporary issues. This latter perspective focuses on texts rather than immediate contemporary context; in many congregations this is a more viable approach that may lead, on occasion, to direct or implied connections. My own judgment is that for most preachers in most congregational settings, a focus on the biblical prophetic text—with traces that connect to contemporaneity—is a more realistic way to proceed. For that reason I have elsewhere suggested that the preacher may be a “scribe” who handles old texts and permits them to be seen with contemporary force and authority.³ In such an approach, the preacher-scribe is not cast as a prophet but as a handler of the prophetic tradition who brings to availability a treasure of what is old (tradition) and what is new (contemporaneity) (Matt. 13:51–53). It will be this latter perspective that I pursue in this discussion.

I

When I ponder what the ancient prophets in Israel are doing as we have them in the text, I arrive at this judgment that will serve as my guiding thesis: prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH—the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son, and Spirit—were a real character and an effective agent in the world. I use the subjunctive “were” because such a claim is not self-evident and remains to be established again and again in every such utterance. The key term in my thesis is “imagine,” that is, to utter, entertain, describe, and construe a world other than the one that is manifest in front to us, for that present world is readily and commonly taken without such agency or character for YHWH. Thus the offer of prophetic imagination is one that contradicts the taken-for-granted world around us.⁴

At the outset, it is clear that this way of putting the matter refuses two common assumptions. On the one hand, it rejects the more conservative assumption that the prophets were predictors, those who tell the future, with particular reference to predictions of the coming Christ. On the other hand, this thesis refuses the common liberal assumption that the prophets were social activists who worked to establish social justice. It strikes me that the ancient prophets only rarely took up any concrete social issue. More important to them than concrete social issues is the fact that they characteristically spoke in poetic idiom with rich metaphors, so that their language is recurringly teasing, elusive, and evocative, with lesser accent on instruction or didacticism.⁵

My thesis about “imagining” with reference to YHWH exposes two common seductions about our characteristic theological speech. It is not easy or obvious about how to “imagine YHWH” because the God of Israel fits none of our conventional theological categories. On the one hand, we tend to imagine the world with reference to other gods, that is, by a practice of idolatry. Thus we imagine the world according to a remote God who is not involved in the world and who could not intervene in the world; thus “rational Christians” may regard “an interventionist God” as a silly notion. Or we take God as a pet who is preoccupied with our well-being, or variously as the god of nation, party, race, gender, or ideology. Thus the temptation is to an irrelevant transcendence or a cozy immanence. None of these conventional ways serves well the hard, dangerous work of “imagining YHWH.”

On the other hand, perhaps more likely, we imagine the world with reference to no god at all, that is, as atheism.⁶ We reduce reality to manageable proportion, imagine our autonomy with accountability to no one, a matter of “might makes right” or simply that it is all “a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing.” While such atheism is a persistent possibility in modern rationality, it is most often the case that some idol lurks at the edge of such atheism, so that idolatry is surely the more immediate and compelling temptation.⁷ The prophetic task of “imagining YHWH” flies in the face of our conventional idolatries and/or our conventional atheisms. The task requires courage and unfettered imagination as well as categories that are unsettling and subversive of the way we conventionally prefer to construe reality.

Given my thesis that imagining YHWH as a real character and as an effective agent in the world leads then to a second, derivative thesis: prophetic proclamation is the staging and performance of a contest between two narrative accounts of the world and an effort to show that the YHWH account of reality is more adequate and finally more reliable than the dominant narrative account that is cast among us as though it were true and beyond critique.⁸ This performed contestation between narratives is modeled in narrative simplicity and directness in Elijah’s contest at Mt. Carmel in which he defiantly requires a decision between narratives and so between gods: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him” (1 Kgs. 18:21). This dramatic utterance is in fact a summary of a long, vigorous contestation between two narratives and two consequent construals of reality.⁹

The present form of that contestation, I propose, is the felt and often denied tension between the gospel narrative that specializes in social transformation, justice, and compassion and the dominant narrative of our culture that I have elsewhere termed “military consumerism.”¹⁰ The contestation that is constituted by prophetic preaching is in our own time, as always, profoundly difficult because the dominant narrative, the one contradicted by the narrative of YHWH, is seldom recognized as a social construction and is almost never lined out in its full clarity and claim. The contestation, moreover, is difficult because the YHWH narrative is rarely recognized as a genuine alternative to the dominant narrative and is more often reckoned as a footnote or a pin prick to the dominant narrative but not a real alternative. In our time and circumstance, the narrative of US military consumerism and the YHWH narrative of social transformation, justice, and compassion are deeply intertwined and there is great resistance to sorting them out.¹¹

Thus I suggest that prophetic preaching can take place only where the preacher is deeply embedded in the YHWH narrative. When the listening community is also embedded there or at least has a residual attachment to that narrative, a chance for engagement is offered. In most ecclesial practice, the sign of congregational embedment or residual attachment to that YHWH narrative is baptism that gives dramatic access to that alternative narrative. Membership in that alternative narrative is consequently realized and enhanced through socialization in education and pastoral nurture. Thus prophetic preaching takes place in a context where a very different subversive conversation about reality is available. In many church contexts, of course, the possibility for such a conversation is eroded or compromised. Such erosion or compromise makes the task more difficult but for that reason also more urgent.

II

The backdrop of prophetic preaching is the dispute between narratives. Many congregations and many preachers would much prefer to keep that dispute hidden or silenced. But the dispute is characteristically present in any case, as the adherents to the dominant narrative are acutely vigilant about any hint that that narrative may be placed in question.

The dominant narrative—one I have characterized as “therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism”—is committed to the notion of self-invention in the pursuit of self-sufficiency. Between a beginning in self-invention and a culmination in self-sufficiency, that narrative enjoins to competitive productivity, motivated by pervasive anxiety about having enough, or being enough, or being in control. Thus it is an acting out, in quotidian ways, of the modern sense of an autonomous self that eventuates in a rat race that readily culminates in violence if and when that self is impinged upon in inconvenient ways. That dominant narrative is seldom lined out, rarely seen in its coherence, and hardly ever critiqued in its elemental claims. That, I propose, is the matrix for prophetic preaching. In ancient Israel it was a matrix governed by the unconditional claim of the Davidic dynasty and the perpetual guarantee of divine presence in the Jerusalem temple, both claims exploited by King Solomon in his propensity to accumulation. In the contemporary United States, it is a matrix that in parallel fashion is rooted in a conviction concerning US exceptionalism that gives warrant to the usurpatious pursuit of commodities in the name of freedom, at the expense of the neighbor.¹²

Prophetic preaching is rooted in the alternative narrative of the God of Israel. Like the dominant narrative, that alternative narrative can also be lined out in various modes:

1. In the Old Testament, that alternative narrative is given succinct expression in what Gerhard von Rad termed Israel’s “credo,” which features the promise to the ancestors, the Exodus deliverance, and the entry into the land of promise, all accomplished by the powerful fidelity of YHWH.¹³ At core, Israel confessed: “The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Deut. 26:8–9). One need not follow von Rad’s now doubted critical judgments to see this recital as a reliable summary of core faith in Israel.

2. In the New Testament, the counterpoint to von Rad’s “credo” is given, as C. H. Dodd averred, in the Pauline summary witness of 1 Corinthians 15:3–5:¹⁴ “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Narrative Embedment of Prophetic Preaching
• Chapter 2: Prophetic Preaching as Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination
• Chapter 3: Loss Imagined as Divine Judgment
• Chapter 4: A Lingering Place of Relinquishment
• Chapter 5: The Burst of Newness amid Waiting
• Chapter 6: The Continuing Mandate
• Note