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Chapter 2. Prophetic Preaching as Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination
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21 Chapter 2 Prophetic Preaching as Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination When I published my book The Prophetic Imagination in 1978, I laid out a series of theses that voiced my fundamental understanding of Israel’s prophets .1 That series of theses continues to ring true, I believe. In this foray, I will reflect on those theses and hope to advance the argument a bit. I proposed: • That the prophets in ancient Israel addressed the royal consciousness concerning the Jerusalem establishment and offered a covenantal alternative to that consciousness. • That the Old Testament prophets had as their work a sustained critique of royal consciousness and the energizing of an alternative community. I believe that these theses continue to be valid and are immediately pertinent to our own reflection on contemporary prophetic preaching. I But here I want to reflect on the title of that book, “Prophetic Imagination.” In fact the title was rather happenstance at the end of the process of publication. 22 The Practice of Prophetic Imagination It was, nevertheless, a fortuitous formulation, for it juxtaposed the notion of “prophetic” with its freight of earnest ethical urgency with the term “imagination ” that was, at the time, not much in vogue among interpreters. The juxtaposition of the two terms, of course, redefined each of them. To qualify “prophetic” by “imagination” is to dig deeper than moral earnestness into the notion of playful, venturesome probing into the unknown that requires poetic utterance and that evokes daring images and metaphors, all in the service of an elusiveness out beyond royal totalism. To evade royal totalism requires an emancipated imagination that refuses the domesticated categories of settled control. On the other hand, to qualify the term “imagination” by the adjective “prophetic” delivers imagination from sheer fantasy into a world of covenantal engagement that features YHWH as the compelling partner of both the human prophetic utterer and those who heard the prophetic utterance in serious ways. Thus the word pair identifies an elusive, daring, subversive verbal probe in ancient Israel that intended to subvert the settled political, economic order of royal Jerusalem. That subversion was based upon the character of YHWH who is the key agent in the sub-version of reality that Israel tells in its normative narrative. It turned out, after the accidental juxtaposition of the terms, some years after publication, that I discovered that Flannery O‘Connor, in one of her letters, used the same juxtaposition of terms. That of course fits just right, for O’Connor was always preoccupied with subverting settled reality and did so with a religious nuance. Thus there can be no doubt that the ancient prophets of Israel would have found a ready ally in O’Connor. She, like them, utilized daring utterance to displace old truisms that were trusted far too much. It is on the basis of that juxtaposition of “prophetic” and “imagination” that I consider prophetic preaching. It is easy enough to imagine that Amos, commonly regarded as the first of the great prophets in Israel, appeared de novo with his shrill, playful, elusive poetic utterance. For as he himself said, The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy? (Amos 3:8) His utterance, moreover, was enough to see him banished from the royal capital of Samaria: “And Amaziah said to Amos, ‘O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple [52.55.55.239] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:18 GMT) Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination 23 of the kingdom’” (Amos 7:12-13). De novo as he may have appeared (and in fact we do not know), that is not the way Israel remembers the matter, contrary to much critical judgment. For the canonical shape of “the law and the prophets” provides antecedents to Amos and his fellow subversives . The way the canon works, the antecedent narrative had already prepared , presented, and witnessed to the irascible, wonder-working God of the Torah. This God is waiting for the chance to reemerge in Israel after the stifling reductionism of the royal consciousness accented by Solomon.2 This waiting God is the one who called the world into being, who worked an impossibility for Sarah and her ilk, who overwhelmed pharaoh on behalf of emancipation, who sent meat, water, and bread from who knows where; this God spoke ten...