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4. Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically takes a criticalposture over against established power. Established power, in predictable ways, always manages to legitimate itself until it drives every other factor out of the social equation and history comes to equal not only the play of power but finally the embrace of this particular arrangement of power.
Prophetic speech refuses such a seductive domestication of the historical process. Prophetic speech not only insists that the raw use of power is wrong and must pay heed to human reality but also makes the more difficult claim that, in the end, raw power cannot succeed and is not the final datum of human history. Prophetic speech is realistic in knowing that massive power matters enormously; it is equally insistent that massive power does not matter ultimately as regards the outcome or significance of the human process. This view of power is not an obscurantist supernaturalism that bails out with reference to God. Rather it is the studied conclusion that there simply is not enough power in the long run to sustain itself in the face of human restlessness among those who refuse to be eradicated as an inconvenience. Moreover this human restlessness that refuses eradication is rooted in God’s own resolve for the world.
From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann
