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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

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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

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3. Out of God’s justice, prophetic speech characteristically speaks about human suffering. It takes human suffering as a definitional datum of the human, historical process. Thus, already in the exodus narrative, when Israel cries out, God sees, God hears, God knows, God remembers, and God intervenes (Exod. 2:23-25; 3:7-14).12 It is the utterance of hurt that moves God to newness. The powers of modernity want not to notice human suffering; they want to define suffering as a legitimate and necessary cost of well-being or as an inexplicable given of human history. Prophetic speech demystifies pain and sees clearly that much pain is principally caused by the manipulation of economic and political access whereby the strong regularly destroy the weak. Such suffering is not a legitimate, bearable cost; and it is not inexplicable. Instead, social pain is a product of social relationships that can be transformed. Prophetic speech focused in hurt speaks against any tidy administration of social relations that crushes human reality in the interest of order, progress, profit, or “the common good.”

From:
Like Fire in the Bones
Walter Brueggemann

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2. This holy God refuses to absolutize the present, any present. This holy God drives always toward a new unsettling, unsettled future, which is not yet visible, when God’s purpose will be accomplished and God’s regime fully established. This threatening, promising future, which lives on the lips of prophets, warns against taking the present with excessive seriousness, even if it is a present that we happen to value inordinately.

 

From:

Like Fire in the Bones

Walter Brueggemann

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Speech about God, speech that is daringly human and embarrassingly particular, regularly sounds themes that demand attention and require a revisioning of the human process. I should like to identify five such themes that are characteristic of the prophets, though many others might be cited.

 

1. Out of God’s unaccommodating holiness, the prophetic word is against idols, and consequently against self-serving, self-deceiving ideology. Idolatry and its twin, ideology, always want to absolutize some arrangement of power and knowledge so that we may bow down to the work of our hands. Against such an absolutizing pretension, the holiness of God critiques, exposes, and assaults every phony absolute since all such absolutes of nation, race, party, or sex will end in death.

 

From:

Like Fire in the Bones

Walter Brueggemann

Fire in the Bones 01

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The courage and burden of the Old Testament prophets, the prophets of scandalous impossibility, was to find speech that is adequate for the character of God. There would be no prophets (as here understood) without this God who is the subject of their speech, and there would be no prophetic word were God not a God of whom it can be said, “Thus says the LORD”; to put it succinctly, human utterance sounds holy speech.

 

Accordingly, for all our interest in sociology and politics, the theme we strike is theological in nature and has to do with the character of God and the courage to bring this God to speech What the prophets assert is that human processes and policies are, apart from this God, wrongly construed. I suggest three ways of speaking about this God who keeps human history open to possibility. The character of this God who does wonders (pela’) is described one oracle at a time, one crisis at a time, one possibility at a time:

 

1. This God, unlike other gods, is holy, brooking no rivals, utterly unapproachable. There is at the center of the historical process a force and a will that cannot be harnessed, domesticated, manipulated, or bought off.

 

2. This God, unlike other gods, is a “lover of justice” (Ps. 99:4), intolerant of injustice, mightily at work in the public processes of history, allied with the powerless, critical of the greedy powerful, intervening with a “preferential option for the marginal.”

 

3. This God, unlike other gods, because holy and because just, is a dangerous, subversive God, unsettling every status quo that offends holiness and that mocks justice. This God, unlike any other, is one who subverts, ending what is cherished and beginning what we little expect, in order that the world may receive and enact its proper life as God’s creation.

 

The prophetic word in history is human utterance about this God, unintimidated by modernity, unimpressed by excessive religion, nonnegotiable about rhetoric, nondefensive about its epistemology, daring to insist that this God who works wonders in the historical process is still at large, liberating and healing.

 

From:

Like Fire in the Bones

Walter Brueggemann