Profits & Prophecy 4: A Personal Story

I have more to say about the nature of prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures and what it means today, but I want to take a moment and describe why the prophets are so meaningful to me personally, and why I am passionate about their message being heard in our time.

I am one of those who, as they say, “grew up in the church”. The conservative evangelical church, specifically. Southern Baptist, even more specifically. In fact, my father was a minister. I went to Sunday school and church (twice on Sundays) and Wednesday night supper every week. I accepted Jesus as my savior, and was baptized accordingly. I was a Royal Ambassador. I went to youth group. I have been to dozens of retreats, camps, lock-ins, and Bible studies. I have heard thousands of sermons.

And I never once heard a thing about caring for the poor.

Ok, that last bit is hyperbole. I’m sure I heard something about the poor; as an aside, or as charity, or as a way to draw in people to evangelize. Or as, at best, a consequence of the gospel: Christians become good people and good people should give money to those less fortunate. I’m sure somebody said something about it at some time. Maybe.

Knowing what I now know about the history of Christianity in America, and the modernist/fundamentalist split, and so on, it is not surprising to me that the segment of the church I was a part of was suspicious of anything suggestive of the “social gospel”. We had long ago divvied up into teams (much like politics today) and whatever the other side was for, we were against. What is still surprising to me, what continues to anger me, is that this disregard for social justice comes from people who claim to have a high regard for the Bible. Here is a nice collection of verses in the Bible about poverty. It’s not even close to all of them.

What this has to do with the prophets is that, when I was in college, I took a class in the Judaic Studies department called “The Hebrew Prophets”. This is where I learned about God’s “preferential option for the poor“, from an ex-fundamentalist Christian who converted to Judaism and taught at a secular, state-run university. This is where I discovered a whole area of the Bible about which I knew nothing, except maybe a little from Isaiah (“by his stripes we are healed”). I learned about the passion of Jeremiah and the faithfulness of Hosea and the courage of Amos. I learned about the particularity and holiness of God’s chosen people from Obadiah and the universality of God’s love for all creation from Jonah, which is right next door in the table of contents, and that this placement was probably on purpose. Mostly I learned about a God who was on fire with love and justice, with a special concern for the most vulnerable and marginalized, or in the language of Scripture, “the alien, the fatherless, and the widow”.

I do not assume a 1:1 correspondence between the prophets’ situation and our own, or that their words can be applied uncritically and unthoughtfully to our particular problems (if for no other reason than that we are not Israel). I am not suggesting the prophets would all be Democrats, or socialists, or anything like that. I am not suggesting that those who disagree with me on whatever issue do not care about God, or the Bible, or justice.

But there is a blindness in certain segments of Christianity to what is at the heart of the Bible’s ethics: love for God, and love for others. Justice, Martin Luther King Jr. said, is what love looks like in public. The prophets call for an allegiance to God and his love, and offer a rebuke not just to individuals, but to systems, nations, peoples, and cultures wherein the most poor are oppressed. Their words are authoritative, and their message is, while not simplistically timeless, timely. They revolutionized my own faith, and if their words are heard within and through our own communities, I really believe they can revolutionize our world.

Profits & Prophecy 3: The Divine Pathos

Abraham Joshua Heschel was one of the greatest Jewish theologians of the 20th century, and his book on the prophets (titled guess what, The Prophets) cannot be recommended enough. We tend to think of prophecy as some kind of crystal ball prediction of the future, but Heschel argues it is actually about accurately describing the present (all emphases original):

Prophecy is not simply the application of timeless standards to particular human situations, but rather an interpretation of a particular moment in history, a divine understanding of a human situation. Prophecy, then, may be described as exegesis of existence from a divine perspective…The prophet seldom tells a story, but casts events.

The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism. He was often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected. His fundamental objective was to reconcile man and God. Why do the two need reconciliation? Perhaps it is due to man’s false sense of sovereignty, to his abuse of freedom, to his aggressive, sprawling pride, resenting God’s involvement in history…

Rabbi Heschel points out that the prophets were people of extremity:

To us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster. To us injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophets it is a deathblow to existence: to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world…The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?

The prophets are strange to us, especially when compared with the Greek philosophers:

A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the marketplace…The world is a proud place, full of beauty, but the prophets are scandalized, and rave as if the whole world were a slum.

His principal insight is that the prophet is one who, fundamentally, empathizes with God. We do not have the “unmoved mover” god of the Greeks. YHWH is a God who gets involved:

The prophet does not judge the people by timeless norms, but from the point of view of God. Prophecy proclaims what happened to God as well as what will happen to the people. In judging human affairs, it unfolds a divine situation. Sin is not only the violation of a law, it is as if sin were as much a loss to God as to man. God’s role is not spectatorship but involvement…Therefore, the prophetic speeches are not factual pronouncements. What we hear is not objective criticism or the cold proclamation of doom. The style of legal, objective utterance is alien to the prophet. He dwells upon God’s inner motives, not only upon His historical decisions. He discloses a divine pathos, not just a divine judgment. The pages of the prophetic writings are filled with echoes of divine love and disappointment, mercy and indignation. The God of Israel is never impersonal.

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Profits & Prophecy 2: Prophets & Priests

Ancient Israelite religion had two distinct but complementary roles: the priest and the prophet (although some, like Jeremiah, were both). The priest, via rituals, sacrifices, and temple practices, spoke to God for the people. The prophet spoke to the people for God. The priest was the religious establishment, properly credentialed and certified. The prophet was the wild man on the fringe, with no authority except moral authority.

As Aaron is the prototypical priest, Moses is the prototypical prophet. There is a long lineage of ecstatic prophets in the Bible: Elijah, Elisha, Nathan, and many unnamed figures. But in theology and religious studies, when we speak of “the prophets”, we generally mean the writing or literary prophets; those figures active from around 750 BCE through the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, the exile into Babylon, and the return. The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel make up the bulk of the literary prophets; you will find them listed in some Bibles as the “major prophets”. The 12 so-called “minor prophets” contain shorter books like Amos, Hosea, and Micah (the designations of “major” and “minor” refer to length, not importance). Daniel, while grouped with the prophets, is really a very different genre of literature.

There is a thread of rivalry between priests and prophets, because what the prophet has to say is usually not good for the status quo, of which the priest, along with the king, is the visible symbol. For instance, Amos runs into trouble with Amaziah the high priest when he leaves his native Judah and prophesies that Israel will be destroyed:

Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent word to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel; the land is unable to endure all his words. “For thus Amos says, ‘Jeroboam will die by the sword and Israel will certainly go from its land into exile.’”

Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Go, you seer, flee away to the land of Judah and there eat bread and there do your prophesying! But no longer prophesy at Bethel, for it is a sanctuary of the king and a royal residence.”

Then Amos replied to Amaziah, “I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet; for I am a herdsman and a grower of sycamore figs. But the LORD took me from following the flock and the LORD said to me, ‘Go prophesy to My people Israel.’

The prophet is an amateur in the best sense of that word. He is an outsider, and a rabble-rouser. He is usually called a traitor, because although his message concludes with hope and redemption, it always begins with woe.

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Profits & Prophecy 1: Introduction

Previously, we’ve obliquely alluded to “the prophetic voice”, which some can be forgiven for thinking means “a churchy word for self-righteously complaining about stuff we don’t like”. This series will be an exploration of what biblical prophecy was in its context, and what it can and should be for the church today. As Jesse has rightfully warned, claiming to speak for God is a dangerous thing. Why not then rather keep silent? Because sometimes, in the words of Jeremiah, his word is like a fire shut up in our bones, and we cannot but speak. So then, we’d better get it right.

But first, history. I may surprise some folks by turning now to a neocon, Norman Podhoretz. The very beginning of the introduction to his book, The Prophets, sets the stage for us nicely:

Roughly 2,750 ears ago–around the time Homer was probably singing and/or writing the Iliad and the Odyssey in far-off Greece–a man named Amos, who described himself in the Bible as “…an herdsman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit…” left the village near Jerusalem where he lived and traveled up to Samaria in the northern part of the Land of Israel. Immediately he erupted lke a volcano, denouncing its people in the name of God for their sins and calling upon them to repent.

Thus did the first of the so-called classical prophets suddenly and mysteriously stride onto the historical scene, to be followed by, among many others, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Micah. They were some of the greatest men ever to walk the earth, and most of them, like Homer himself, were also, and not so incidentally, among the greatest poets who ever lived. Then, three centuries after Amos started this astonishing parade (and just when Socrates and Plato were active in Athens), it ground to a halt as suddenly and mysteriously as it had begun.

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