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5. Prophetic speech, finally, is not an act of criticism. It is rather an act of relentless hope that refuses to despair and that refuses to believe that the world is closed off in patterns of exploitation and oppression.13 It stands against a closed present tense that is either excessively complacent about social relations or excessively despairing about an unbearable present tense. This speech knows that such closed-off life inevitably produces brutality, the child of despair, either out of strident control or out of hopelessness. It dares to assert in any and every circumstance the conviction known since Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Aaron, namely, that there is a God who can and will make all things new, even in the face of our most closed-down, self-satisfied present tense. This is what the text means when it asserts that God works an impossibility in order that “all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (1 Sam. 17:46).
From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann
