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CHAPTER 1
The Prophetic Interpreter
Whose voice or action might be termed prophetic? What does âthe propheticâ look or sound like in our culture? Forty or fifty years ago, many North American Christians who might have self-identified as political liberals would have had a ready answer to those questions: the prophetic role in this and every time is speaking truth to power. Such a definition of the role is supported by numerous biblical examples, chief among them Mosesâ first recorded words to Pharaoh: âThus says YHWH God of Israel, Release my people!â (Exod. 5:1). Moses is the foremost exemplar of âthe prophetic imaginationâ as it confronts âthe royal consciousness,â to use terms from Walter Brueggemannâs classic study, The Prophetic Imagination (1978). However, in an essay written nearly a quarter-century later, Brueggemann reconsiders that âprimal caseâ of Moses and Pharaoh. Now he judges that in our social, intellectual, and spiritual climate, âThere are deeply problematic things about the model of truth-speaking-to-powerâ (Inscribing the Text, 10; italics original). Indeed, the basic terms are problematic, for âin a postmodern world, both truth and power are complex and evasiveâ (11).
If that is the problem with the model, then it is not confined to the postmodern world; the biblical writers were themselves well aware of the complexities attending truth and power. A number of biblical prophets had complex relations to the royals of their time. Some, such as Jeremiah, one of the disenfranchised priests from the rural village of Anathoth, may have spoken as rank outsiders, but othersâElisha, Isaiah, Huldahâevidently were consulted by kings and those at the center of government. The complexity of truth itself is one of the major themes of the Bible. Pilateâs question to JesusââWhat is truth?â (John 18:38)âmight epitomize that theme, but in his mouth the query could be heard as merely cynical or despairing. However, prophets, sages, psalmists, and evangelists all struggle at length and in faith with the mystery of truth, which is both revealed and hidden, given as a reliable guide and still to be searched out, known through Godâs word or in Jesus Christ and yet to be discerned.
Even if speaking truth to power was never a simpler matter to conceive nor an easier thing to do than it is now, Brueggemann is nonetheless right to observe the complexity of power relations in our society and in the church. Lay or ordained, many of us who serve the church are responsible to and for institutions, their personnel, programs, and budgets, and thus to some degree we are arbiters of power. Certainly all those who get a salary (including pastors and religious educators), all who pay tax on anything and submit forms and reports to governmental, denominational, or educational bodiesâwe all participate in large social systems that further complicate and likely compromise our own relationship to power. Those whose primary responsibility is pastoral may exercise enormous power, and it is a sign of health that this is increasingly acknowledged in the contemporary church; it is no longer assumed that power is a fixed quantity that should remain wholly on the pastorâs side of the relationship. Rather, pastors are charged to empower others, instilling in them âthe readiness to accept and affirm what power there is, or could be, had we courage to embrace a different notion of power, a different perspective of ourselves in the worldâ (Brueggemann, Inscribing the Text, 11).
Moreover, we stand in complex relationship to the truth as it is relevant to our public roles as pastors, teachers, preachers. Probably no one who bothers to read a book such as this presumes to have a monopoly on the truth, but many of us might lack confidence that we can speak knowledgeably, responsibly, and helpfully on some of the immense problems and questions that the church must address: global warming, migrant farmworkers and food production, sexual identity and relations. Virtually none of us is off the grid of the global economy, and that inevitably compromises our perception and proclamation of the truth. Thus Brueggemann concludes his analysis of the problematic model of speaking truth to power: âWe cannot automatically cast ourselves as Moses or Nathan or Elijah or Daniel, no matter how endlessly we are tempted. Besides, if we are casting to type, it may be that we fit the part of the royally and sinfully acquisitive, rather than the truth-tellerâ (Inscribing the Text, 11).
In this study, I begin with a different scriptural model of the prophetic role, one that was suggested to me a few years ago when I was asked to speak at a conference titled âThe Prophetic Interpreter.â That phrase was new to me at the time, but I have come to see it as useful for designating a kind of work that crosses borders (as did the conference itself) between the theological academy, the church, and the wider culture. The notion of the prophetic interpreter may help us think about the significance of a variety of leadership roles and modes of service performed in and for the church, including teaching, preaching, writing, and artistic work, as well as public speaking and multiple forms of community service and political work that is done in the service of the church and the wider community. People whom the Bible designates as prophets or as possessing the gift of prophecy engaged in all these forms of work. In word and deed, they interpreted the faith for their time, and equally, they interpreted the times for the faithful. Moreover, the Bible itself represents some of those engaged in prophetic work as learned and innovative interpreters of Israelâs scriptural (or protoscriptural) traditions. So I propose that we lift up the prophetic interpreter as an important model for service in and to the church. To illustrate that model, I turn to the first (in canonical order) clear exemplar of the prophetic interpreter within the Bible itself, Huldah of Jerusalem.
Interpreting Current History: Huldah and Josiah
Huldah was a professional prophet, known within the royal circle in Jerusalem during the reign of Josiah of Judah (640â609 BCE). As the story is told (2 Kgs. 22:8â20), âthe Torah scrollâ is found during Josiahâs major renovation of the temple precinct, and it is brought to the king. When he hears the contents of the sacred bookâpossibly some version of what now forms the core of Deuteronomy (chaps. 12â26), with the appended curses for violatorsâJosiah becomes alarmed and charges the high priest and his advisers to secure a divine oracle from a prophet. They go immediately to Huldah at her home in the Mishneh, a fashionable district not far from the palace (her husband, Shallum, served the court as keeper of the wardrobe). The prophet would presumably have the strongest personal reasons for retaining Josiahâs favor, yet Huldah sends back to the palace this harsh and markedly impersonal word:
The historical validity of the scroll story is much debated. There are reasons that Josiahâs admirers, such as the Deuteronomistic Historian, might have invented such a story: to give the aura of ancient authority to Josiahâs newly initiated program of religious reform, to avert criticism that the king did not earlier institute reform, since he had been on the throne for a dozen or more years (see 2 Kgs. 22:1 and 2 Chr. 34:3) before he purged Jerusalem and Judah of shrines and images âmade for Baal and Asherah and all the host of heavenâ (2 Kgs. 23:4). However, it is likely that the story tells us less about the exact circumstances of Josiahâs reform than it does about Huldahâs role as a prophet. Several things are important for considering the role of prophetic interpreter:
1. Huldahâs story is the first clear account of someone who encounters Godâs word in written form and recognizes how it speaks to current and emerging circumstances. As the recipient and interpreter of Torah (divine Teaching), she stands in the line of authoritative figures that begins with Moses. Indeed, she is the culminating figure in that line, according to the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy through Kings); she stands knowingly on the cusp of the precipitous slide into the great destruction and the exile to Babylon (2 Kgs. 24â25).
2. Huldah of Jerusalem stands in liminal relation to power: she is connected though not subordinated to the very nerve center of the kingdom. Apparently Huldah did not serve with Shallum within the royal palace; it is probable that the position of Judean court prophet, like that of priest, was not open to a woman. But even if she did not give oracles for a salaryâperhaps because she did notâHuldah was respected and indeed relied upon by the most powerful people in the kingdom; âthe manâ in the palace heeded her words. So from her position at the edge of the circle of power, she was able to interpret Godâs word in such a way as to stimulate major change through official channels; in this sense, Huldah is one of the few âsuccessfulâ prophets of whom the Bible speaks.
3. Huldahâs story comes from the circle of theologians, literary scholars, and editors (the so-called Deuteronomists) who likely also collected and shaped the first edition of the Latter Prophets, and especially the book of Jeremiah (Blenkinsopp, History, 191â93). Setting Huldah alongside Jeremiah, her contemporary, we may see both of them as liminal figures in a second sense: they stand at the threshold between the age of the great prophets and the age of scribal interpretation. While Jeremiah is represented as a prophet who dictated the divine word into scroll form (Jer. 36), Huldah is the prophet who receives the written word as from God (âThus says YHWH God of Israelâ) and recognizes how it applies to her own moment in history. She has the fortitude to interpret it in a way no one would want to hear, and the clarity to make the divine word intelligible and compelling.
4. Josiah exemplifies the person who hears what God is saying through the written word, seeks responsible interpretation, and as a result changes radically and decisively (2 Kgs. 23:1â25). Although Josiah is the most powerful person in the land of Judah, that is not necessarily crucial for what the story has to say to us about hearing Godâs word through Scripture. Rather, he models the (tragically) rare ability to hear Godâs word spoken against oneâs own apparent interests. To hear Godâs word as spoken âagainst ourselvesââthis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer maintained, is what it means to read the Bible seriously, to prefer its thoughts to our own, and thus to âfind ourselves againâ (No Rusty Swords, 185â86). Bonhoeffer was speakingâprophetically, one might sayâat the Berlin Youth Conference in April 1932. At that time, his was a nearly isolated Christian voice speaking publicly and persistently against the rise of National Socialism. Bonhoefferâs permanent legacy as a theologian has been to show that in the modern world, as in Josiahâs and Huldahâs Jerusalem, fostering the discomfiting yet life-giving practice of reading the Bible against ourselves is a major public responsibility of the Christian teacher and theologian. In desperate times, as his was and ours may yet prove to be, many may be called to serve thus as prophetic interpreters.
Elements of the Prophetic Perspective
As a clear-eyed interpreter of both text and history, Huldah of Jerusalem may be one of the most important biblical models for those who preach, teach, and interpret Scripture for others in various settings, and Josiah is a model for how we might study and hear Godâs word for (or âagainstâ!) ourselves. At a given time any Christian might assume either role: Huldahâs, of offering an interpretation, or Josiahâs, of listening to one; the apostle Paul suggests that every member of the church should be engaged on both sides of the interpretative process (see 1 Cor. 14:26â31). Assuming full responsibility on either side of that process requires that we speak and listen from a perspective that is broadly informed by the prophetic traditions of Scripture, in shorthand âthe prophetic perspective.â
Here I set forth five essential elements of that perspective on reality as broadly represented in the prophetic traditions of the Bible. My intention in identifying these five is to be suggestive rather than exhaustive, to point to elements that are central to these traditions and, considered together, may provide fruitful ground for theological reflection and ministry in the twenty-first century. Distinguishing them thus at the outset of this study is artificial, even if it may be somewhat useful, for these five elements are everywhere interrelated and overlapping. In the texts treated in the following essays, all these elements appear, in different combinations and with varying degrees of emphasis, but there is no attempt to identify each as discrete. Nonetheless, listing them here may alert readers to some of the elements that make the prophetic traditions of the Bible distinctive modes of discourse, with the potential to speak to the church in our own time and varied situations:
- The radical concreteness of prophetic expression, which both engages hearers in particular contexts and makes vivid Godâs engagement with the world
- The prophetic demand for moral, economic, and religious integrity in human communities (Israel or the church) and the recognition that human integrity in these several dimensions is fundamentally related to the God-given integrity of creation
- Prophetic participation in the suffering of the vulnerable within the created order and the social order, and prophetic witnessing to the suffering of God
- The prophet as the trusted friend of God, entrusted with a ministry of protest, prayer, healing, and reconciliation
- Prophetic witness to the theological significance of those who do not worship Israelâs God, which is potentially a witness of reconciliation
The remainder of this chapter is an explication of these five elements.
1. The radical concreteness of prophetic expression, which both engages hearers in particular contexts and makes vivid Godâs engagement with the world. The biblical prophets do not traffic in general ideas, universal ideals, or dispassionate ruminations. Their settings are particular with respect to place and time; the political situations th...
