The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word

by Walter Brueggemann

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The contest in the book of Exodus (and thereafter), moreover, is not on level ground. In that narrative and everywhere, the dominant narrative (in this case the narrative of Pharaoh) has the upper hand, enjoying public legitimacy, liturgical reinforcement, and technological superiority.

Thus Israel’s narrative is characteristically told “from below,” at a disadvantage, mostly by the socially disadvantaged, so that it appears to be “weak and foolish” in the eyes of the world.

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The prophetic preacher, as a child of this narrative, lives in some dis-ease. Because such a child of the narrative is not naïve about the challenges and the risks of the narrative.

In the world of the early church, the preachers had to make the case that the narrative of crucifixion-resurrection was a more adequate account of reality, while the official religious leaders, allied with the dominant narrative of the empire, mocked him derisively:

And now the case is yet to be made again for the narrative of emancipation and covenant wrought by an Agent who looks suspect according to the way of the world. The context in which that advocacy is to be made is one in which the dominant narrative is failing before our eyes. The inability of our strong military to have its way in the world, the inability of our strong economy to maintain its strength, perhaps the Gulf oil spill as an icon of a failed narrative of technological self-sufficiency, all together produce an endless round of anxiety that the world guaranteed by that dominant narrative is vanishing while we watch. Consequently, we live in an ocean of anxiety that is now scarcely bearable.

There is hidden deep within most of us, I suspect, a profound tension between these narratives, knowing better than to trust the dominant narrative but having a huge stake in its being true, wanting the gospel narrative to be true but reluctant to speak another language about the world other than the one in which we are palpably invested.

It is the hard work of prophetic preaching, I propose, to make that tension explicit, available, and visible in order to permit informed, knowing choices.

Prophetic preaching does not put people in crisis. Rather it names and makes palpable the crisis already pulsing among us.

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CHAPTER 2 Prophetic Preaching as Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination

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 energiz...

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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.

The Torah is waiting for the prophets, and the God of the Torah is waiting for the utterance of the prophets who have the old script in front of them.

And when the prophets speak, they do so imaginatively; they voice “prophetic imagination,” and YHWH is played into the midst of royal history as an awkward misfit who does not accommodate the ancient regime.

YHWH reemerges in metaphor and in image, in poe...

my thesis stated ...

Prophetic preaching is an effort to imagine the world as though YHWH, the creator of heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians name as Father, Son, and Spirit, is a real character and a defining agent in the world.

We may see, for example, that Martin Luther King, surely a prophet among us, speaks fresh utterance. But his fresh subversive utterance is shot through with ancient imagination.

Thus, “I have a dream” surely appeals to and is grounded in the ancient promises of the old prophets that in turn are grounded in the ancient covenantal blessings and the lyric of creation in which all will finally be “very good,” as the creator has intended from the outset.

King’s final utterance, “I have been to the mountaintop,” could not have been said so powerfully if Martin had not stood with Moses at the awesomeness of Sinai and “gazed” on God (Exod. 24:11, Feiler) or if Martin had not stood with Moses in Deuteronomy 34 looking into the land of promise, or if Martin had not been alo...

King is a clear and dramatic embodiment of the way in which the tradition is layered and layered again with the thick voicing of YHWH who keeps uttering, even in the fac...

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By “imagination” I mean the capacity to generate and enunciate images of reality that are not rooted in the world in front of us.

It is of immense importance, and not often enough fully appreciated, that the prophets characteristically spoke in poetic cadences. This is not to suggest that all poetry is prophetic. It is to suggest, rather, that the characteristic prophetic utterance intends to evoke, to shock, to tease, to play, to probe, not with certitude but with possibility for what has been, until now, unthinkable and unsayable.

Thus variously the dominant imagination of the national security state trades on • “A city set on a hill,” • “Land of the free and home of the brave,” • “Don’t tread on me,” • “Leader of the free world,” • “White man’s burden,” • “Manifest destiny.” All of these mantras, and many more that could be added, amount to a claim of exceptionalism that readily melds “God” into “country.”

The claim of dominant imagination, in both ancient Israel and in contemporary US “democratic capitalism,” is a totalizing claim that does not permit any reality or any claim outside of its regime and certainly does not welcome any rival claim.

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prophetic preaching, ancient or contemporary, is in a contest of competing imaginations—a contest between old Torah imagination that features YHWH as character and agent and the dominant imagination that predictably assimilates God into its powerful socio-political claims.

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The prophets in ancient Israel refused the dominant narrative. Their standing ground for that refusal is simply, “Thus saith the LORD.” They claimed to have been given an alternative word that called them to a different utterance. They claimed to be in touch with a more reliable truth.

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Prophetic participation in the contests of imaginations is not simply to negate dominant imagination and to expose it as flawed. Beyond that, these poetic utterers dared to propose an alternative shape for reality that is offered in a “scale of relationship” in which YHWH is the other party as a real participant and agent.

The insistence upon relationships makes clear that the real issue in society is not wealth or scarcity or control. It is rather fidelity toward God and toward neighbor.

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Contemporary prophetic imagination, as it joins issue with dominant imagination, is continually funded by remembered imagination:

1. Prophetic imagination is rooted in the doxolog...

2. Contemporary prophetic imagination is rooted in the ancestral narratives of new birth (new rebirth) that is given just as the human subject reaches its end in barrenness.

3. Contemporary prophetic imagination is rooted in the memory of the exodus deliverance that features emancipation from the pharaonic system of coercion.

4. Contemporary prophetic imagination is rooted in the liturgical reiteration of Sinai in which the covenant is remembered and reenacted in each new generation:

5. The tradition of Deuteronomy, the fullest theology of covenant in the Old Testament, has taken the requirements of Sinai and has codified them into a rigorous quid pro quo of blessing and curse.

6. Contemporary prophetic imagination is informed by the terminal narrative of Deuteronomy 34. That imagination knows about waiting. It knows about having forfeited, like Moses, entry into God’s new promise of land.

Prophetic imagination is committed to two propositions: (a) The remembered imagination of Torah is powerfully contemporary in new time and place; (b) Contemporary imagination funded by remembered imagination offers a critique of dominant imagination and offers an alternative construal of reality that is life giving.

Thus in every elusive utterance given by this elusive God of the tradition, the gift of life is mediated outside the totalizing claims of dominant imagination.

In that situation of denial that pretends it will all work out and of despair that suspects it will not work out, the old tradition of YHWH as the God who enforces covenant and the God who gives newness lurks in prophetic utterance waiting to be mobilized.

It is the work of twenty-first century prophetic preachers, is it not, to name the denial and to identify the infidelities that make our common life toxic.

It is the work of twenty-first century prophetic preachers, is it not, to name the despair and witness to the divine resolve for newness that may break the vicious cycles of sel...

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