Abstract
Walter Brueggemann,
The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word
, Fortress: Minneapolis, 2012; 176 pp.: 9780800698973, £16.99 (hbk)
In 1978 Walter Brueggemann published a book on the prophets entitled The Prophetic Imagination (Fortress Press, 2nd edn, 2002). More than an update, the new work puts fresh emphasis on the way in which prophecy in the Old Testament may shape preaching in the present-day church that aspires to be prophetic. The context Brueggemann has in view is the Protestant churches of America seen as both embedded in and committed to address the politics and society of the United States. The question the book asks is, in effect, ‘What can the Old Testament prophets teach the preacher?’, and it is answered through a very wide-ranging set of parallels between the world of the Old Testament and that of modern America and its churches.
The key concept of the book is ‘imagination’. The prophets, Brueggemann rightly emphasizes, were not social activists addressing ‘issues’. Prophetic ministry is a contest between opposing ways of imagining and describing the world. ‘Prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH— … whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son and Spirit—were a real character and an effective agent in the world’ (p. 2). The subjunctive, Brueggemann explains, is used ‘because such a claim is not self-evident’. This prophetic imagination is in each case set over against the ‘dominant imagination’, marked by a belief in autonomy, ‘self-invention … and self-sufficiency’: in the American case ‘therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism’ (p. 4) in Israel’s royal ideology centred on David and Jerusalem.
The prophetic imagination is embedded in the traditional narrative of divine deliverance and covenant as set out in the Pentateuch. Its implications are traced through loss and restoration. Loss must be both imagined as judgement and experienced as grief leading ultimately to acceptance: thus the preacher’s task is not complete in announcing judgement; the community’s grief must also be articulated in solidarity. And, beyond loss and grief, it is still the prophet’s business to enact hope as the imagination of the impossible, of resurrection and restoration.
Brueggemann is himself prophetic in imagining America’s recent loss as judgement, and his rhetoric, as ever, provokes and inspires. It could be objected that he is not saying anything new. But I am more concerned by his cavalier treatment of modern scholarship, which, as he well knows, would not see most of the prophets as formed by the Pentateuchal narrative or ideas of covenant, which were of later growth. He defends his treatment as canonical and post-critical. This might serve, if he did not speak in historical terms of the prophets making ‘many allusions to the Torah commandments’ (p. 35), and imagine them reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Further, historical distinctions are tossed aside in referring to the prophets as representing ‘Israel’, and always confronting ‘Jerusalem’ – Hosea? Amos?
In brief, preachers who aspire to preach prophetically will find inspiration in this book. But they would be ill-advised to make its details bear much weight.