5. The Prophetic Imagination-Walter Brueggemann

I. The Alternative Community of Moses
~The problem: -The enculturation of consumerism in our church today: "The internal cause of such enculturation is our loss of identity through the abandonment of the faith tradition. Our consumer culture is organized aganist history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now..." p.1
~Hypothesis of the book: "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." ...to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness/engage in a rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things. "On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move."  "...to live in fervent anticipation of the newness that God has promised and will surely give." p.3
-"The ministry of Moses...represents a radical break with the social reality of Pharoah's Egypt." p.5
"Prophecy is born precisely in that moment when the emergence of social political reality is so radical and inexplicable that it has nothing less than a theological cause."
-Breaking with (the religion of static) triumphalism and (politics of) oppression (and exploitation):
Moses discloses that Yahweh, the sovereign one who acts in his lordly freedom, is extrapolated from no social reality and is captive to no social perception but acts from his own person toward his own purposes." "At the same time, Moses dismantles the politics of oppression and exploitation by countering it with a politics of justice and compassion." p.6 "the emergence of a new social community in history, a community that has historical body, that had to devise laws, patterns of governance and order, norms of right and wrong, and sanctions of accountability. ...to match the vision of God's freedom." Moses' work "came precisely at the engagement of the religion of God's freedom with the politics of human justice." p.7
"Our sociology is predictably derived from, legitimated by, and reflective of our theology. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the 'haves,' oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion." "we have split those two items much too easily but not without reason. The liberal tendency has been to care about the politics of justice and compassion but to be largely uninterested in the freedom of God. ...As a result, social radicalism has been like a cut flower without nourishment, without any sanctions deeper than human courage and good intentions. ...the tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression...The point that prophetic imagination must ponder is that there is no freedom of God without the politics of justice and compassion, and there is no politics of justice and compassion without a religion of the freedom of God." p.8
"The genuine alternative, entrusted to us who bear that calling, is rooted not in social theory or in righteous indignation or in altruism but in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is." p.9
-"Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power..." p.12
"Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously..." the criticism of cry p.13
-Prophetic energizing. In this narrative, 1) energy comes from the embrace of the inscrutable darkness, 2) the LORD makes a distinction between the Egyptians and Israel Exod 11:7 3) "the great Song of the Sea (Exod 15:1-18) & Song of Miriam (Exod 15:21) are the most eloquent, liberating, and liberated songs in Israel. The last energizing reality is a doxology  in which the singers focus on this free one and in the act of the song appropriate the freedom of God as their own freedom." p.16
"Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either wither or become ideology." p.17 The energy of Moses' doxology includes: "The speaking of a new name that redefines all social perception. ......."
"It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology is the ultimate challenge to the language of managed reality, and it alone is the universe of discourse in which energy is possible." "Only where there is doxology can there be justice, for such songs transifgure fear into energy." ep.18
-the Mosaic tradition affirms three things: 1) The alternative life is lived in this very particular historical and historicizing community. 2) This community criticizes and energizes by its special memories that embrace discontinuity and genuine breaks from imperial reality. 3) This community, gathered around the memories, knows it is defined by and is at the disposal of a God who as yet is unco-opted and uncontained by the empire." p.19

II. Royal Consciousness: Countering the Counterculture
"his concern was with the consciousness that undergirded and made such a regime possible."
-Solomon's economics of affluence, oppressive social policy, static religion (accessibility of God, security "He had replaced covenanting with consuming, and all promises had been reduced to tradable commodities. Every such trade-off made real energy less likely." p.33) as the dominant culture against which the prophets are regularly a counterpoint
-"Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality." p.35
-It takes little imagination to see ourselves in this same royal tradition.
*Ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well off that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.
*Ourselves in a politics of oppression in which the cries of the marginal are not heard or are dismissed as the noises of kooks and traitors.
*Ourselves in a religion of immanence and accessibility, in which God is so present to us that his abrasiveness, his absence, his banishment are not noticed, and the problem is reduced to psychology. (p.36)

III. Prophetic Criticizing and the Embrace of Pathos
-"The imagination (vision) must come before the implementation." Poetic imagination is the last way left in which to challenge and conflict the dominant reality. ...not the formal aspects of poetry but the substantive issues of alternative prospects that the managed prose around us cannot invent and does not want to permit. "Such an activity requires that in the center of our persons and communities we have not fully embraced the consuming apathy espoused by the royal consciousness. It requires that we have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises."  p.40
-the royal consciousness-apathy, numbness, the absence of pathos (Eccl 1:7-9), "In the language of R. D. Laing, people must simply practice the proper behavior because they are no longer able to experience their own experience." p.41
-numbness about death; we are incapable of facing our own death. denials about endings. "we have no adequate way to relate to death's reality and potential, so we deny it with numbness." A symbol gap in which "we do not have symbols that are deep or strong enough to match the terror of the reality. What takes place when symbols are inadequate and things may not be brought to public expression is that the experience will not be experienced." p.43 "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." p.45 3 tasks: 1) To offer symbols that are adequate to confront the horror and massiveness of the experience that evokes numbness and requires denial. .. to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty e.g. the Exodus symbol. 2) To bring to public expression those very fears and terrors that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we do not know they are there. use the language of metaphor, so that the expression can be touched at many points by different people. 3) To speak metaphorically but concretely about the real deathliness that hovers over us and gnaws within us, and to speak neither in rage nor with cheap grace, but with the candor born of anguish and passion. the deathliness among us introduced in that royal garden of Genesis 2-3, wanting all knowledge and life delivered to our royal management. p.45-46
-Jeremiah as the clearest model for prophetic imagination and ministry. Jeremiah's poetry-ministry of articulated grief.

IV. Prophetic Energizing and the Emergence of Amazement
-"...it is the task of the alternative prophetic community to present an alternative consciousness that can energize the community to fresh forms of faithfulness and vitality." p.59
-"The royal consciousness leads people to despair about the power to move toward new life. It is the task of prophetic imagination and ministry to bring people to engage the promise of newness that is at work in our history with God." pp.59-60
-the royal consciousness militates against hope. For those who are denied entry into prosperity a kind of hopelessness emerges because little or no prospect for change is on the horizon.
-to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping that seems to have no end or resolution. by: 1) The offering of symbols that are adequate to contradict a situation of hopelessness in which newness is unthinkable. p.63 "the symbols of hope cannot be general and universal but must be those that have been known concretely in this particular history. ... The speech of God is first about an alternative future. ...the real world is the one that has its beginning and dynamic in the promising speech of God" p.64
2) to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. lyrical. "speech about hope must be primally theological, it must be in the language of covenant between a personal God and a community. Promise belongs to the world of trusting speech and faithful listening. ... It will finally be about God and us, about his faithfulness that vetoes our faithlessness." p.65 we are ordained of God to be people of hope. Puropse "to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God. ...Only a move from a managed world to a world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope." p.66
3) speak metaphorically about hope but concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation. p.67
-The language of amazement: "The hope announced is not a nice feeling or a new inner spiritual state. Rather, it is grounded in a radical discernment of Israel's worldly situation. ...the comfort (Isa 40:1-2). New reality, metaphor of enthronement (Isa 40:9-10, 52:7), "Israel is in a new situation where singing is possible again. ...Change resulted from being addressed, called by a name, cared for, recognized, and assured. ...If the lack of singing is an index of exile, then we are in it, for we are a people who scarcely can sing. The prophet makes the hopefulness of singing happen again." & the poet knows well that the inversion to real power happens only by suffering (Isa 49:14-15)
-New song time (Isa 42:10); The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. ...The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. p.74
-Birth to the Barren (Isa 54:1)
-Isa 40:28-29 vs 30-31: "a critique of every effort to reorganize on our own, and it is a warning about settling in any exile as home." p.78




Dec 13, 2016-Jan 6, 2017.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. (Second Edition)

R: How can I relent control and management & sing a new song of the freedom and hope the Mighty God promised and the salvation in Him? To be free of the economics of affluence, politics of oppression and religion of immanence (praying to God only when I need his help?)