Jesus penetrates the numbness by his compassion and with his compassion takes the first step by making visible the odd abnormality that had become business as usual.

– Walter Brueggemann –

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Recently finished reading The Prophetic Imagination. 

My first foray into Brueggemann’s work. He was not an author who was “on the table” growing up, and my early adult vision was plenty narrow enough to have excluded him. I’ve mentioned somewhere before a telling anecdotal story about a boy in the early 90s (me) who proudly bought a Jimmy Carter book as a Christmas gift only to discover, after some adult-splaining, that Carter was (not harshly, but essentially) persona non grata and that his Christian faith, it seemed, warranted little more than an eye roll from our Christian faith — and from our politics. Considering that Brueggemann gives Jimmy Carter a shout-out for his own “prophetic imagination” at the end of the book, it’s easy to see why…or how… or at least that Brueggeman was not lying around on the family bookshelves next to R.C. Sproul or Chuck Colson or even J. Vernon McGee.

But life is funny and we’ve all changed, and keep changing. Though, of course, genuine change is not guaranteed, as Brueggemann is zealous to remind us.

Egypt, like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, and possessed. If there is any point at which most of us are manifestly co-opted, it is in this way. We do not believe that there will be newness but only that there will be merely a moving of the pieces into new patterns.

“We are all children of the royal consciousnesses,” Brueggemann says. “Royal consciousness,” like some of the language he uses throughout the book, is not a helpful phrase to me. By it he means the established, stubborn, “socio-ideological” mindset of ancient Israel in and to which the prophets spoke. Brueggemann himself 40 years later admits that he would change the phrase, reckoning that “totalism” would be a more widely applicable word. However, I don’t find that word much more helpful — maybe even less so. But what we certainly are prone towards, regardless of the phrasing, is being blind and numb to the world around us.

All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation?… We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.

It’s not the sort of thing we ever admit about ourselves, that we have been robbed, or have robbed ourselves, of the courage or power to think an alternative thought. Though most of the time we are not even conscious of it, at best we might sometimes catch ourselves in this “co-opted” state.

I can’t help thinking of the spoof on those stickers they give you after you leave the voting booth, the one that, instead of saying “I voted today,” says “I rearranged piles of shit today.” This cynical attitude may not be fooling itself about the “regime” or the “regime change,” but what it lacks is vision and purpose, imagination and motivation.

Even if we do at times manage to catch a glimpse of our co-opted or fatalistic selves, we know and must regularly admit that it is unlikely to change us. We need a sterner judgement and a livelier, more surprising hope.

In both judgement and hope, prophetic articulation—in elusive poetic form—voices the interruption of the known controlled world of the totalism and the emergence of an alternative world that is dramatically other than the world managed by the totalism. The prophets voice a world other than the visible, palpable world that is in front of their hearers. For that reason, prophetic utterance must perforce be “imaginative,” an act of imagination by world and image that evokes and hosts a world other than the one readily available. Thus the prophets, with their passionate rootage in tradition, their passionate grasp of social reality, and their passionate force of language, imagine the present world under threat and judgement, even while the regime continues to imagine itself as absolute and abiding.… The totalism imagines itself absolute to perpetuity, while the prophetic imagination—in contradiction—imagines an old world ending and a new world emerging. It is a contest of imaginations that admits no easy resolution but that puts the hearer in crisis between a failed imagination and a new imagination.

And the newness of that imagination is rooted in one thing and one thing alone: the absolute freedom of God. Prophetic imagination, says Brueggeman, “depends on the reality and confession of God’s radical freedom.”

That freedom, Brueggeman constantly emphasizes, is a freedom to make changes. As such, when it confronts our stubborn and numb world, it is a freedom that manifests itself in “passion and pathos” before it turns to blessing and peace. God’s freedom presents as “the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice.”

“…and then to rejoice.” Perhaps too often we assume that we are already prepared to rejoice.

It’s worth pointing out that, as far as Brueggemann is concerned, “regime” could easily be replaced with “church.” It’s not difficult to imagine that many Christians might be walking around believing that, because something called “the church” will always endure, the thing which they (or we) know and experience as the church is that very same thing which cannot fail or die. Certainly many Christians throughout history have thought, by simply saying “church,” that the thing which they experience as the church cannot be the thing which needs to end or be interrupted. Though it might be.

That’s a sobering thought. And not one that is easy to remain open to. But we must. And not in hypothetical ways but in real, concrete ones.

In the end, of course, “prophetic imagination” is not simply “a good idea.” It is a concrete practice that is undertaken by real believers who share the conviction of grief and hope that escapes the restraints of dominant culture.

Defining that concrete practice “will become more crucial and more difficult, and perhaps more joyous, in time to come.”

I hope that’s true. It’s been at least mildly true in my own experience. (Not because I have it, but because I get to read people who do 🙂 )

The specifically “prophetic” imagination aside — and in simpler, personal terms, rather than the megaphonic voice that seems largely to characterize it — my own Christian faith, which has certainly become more crucial and difficult, remains in part because it has also become, I think, more heartbroken and more joyous. Not bouncy castle joyous, but (to borrow a line) “that seed of being that can bud even in our circumstance of ice” joyous.

Yes, the older I get, the less I like people — but the more I feel I actually love them. For all of the negative, rambling and inconcise logorrhea that I put down, I love all of it.

The notion of a “prophetic imagination,” or “prophetic alternative,” is inspiring. I can see why so many have taken to Brueggeman’s work and why half a decade later people like me are still happily stumbling across it. There’s something remarkably true and needed in it. Though I wonder — lightly and carefully — if the capacity for newness, grounded in the total freedom of God, is overdone. After all, you can only say “alternative reality” so many times — and can only drive the freedom of God toward those endless alternatives for so long — before nothing, not even God himself, feels real or trustworthy.

In a way, I think there’s a smallness and a bigness that aren’t quite hit on in my reading of Brueggemann.

The smallness is perfectly put in a poem by Kay Ryan. (My assumption is that the “branch of rabbinical thought” she refers to is the concept of tikkun olam.)

Least Action

Is it vision
or the lack
that brings me
back to the principle
of least action,
by which in one
branch of rabbinical
thought the world
might become the
Kingdom of Peace not
though the tumult
and destruction necessary
for a New Start but
by adjusting little parts
a little bit—turning
a cup a quarter inch
or scooting up a bench.
It imagines an
incremental resurrection,
a radiant body
puzzled out through
tinkering with the fit
of what’s available.
As though what is is
right already but
askew. It is tempting
for any person who would
like to love what she
can do.

Needless to say, this is not the sentiment I took away from Brueggemann. The poem doesn’t use the language of an absolute newness opposed to a present totality. But the act and trust of “adjusting little parts a little bit” is one I greatly admire when I see it.

But it’s the act and trust in the act. The trust is the bigness, which is a kind of bigness (sovereignty?) that is missing, or perhaps just evasive within the book. What I have in mind is explained wonderfully by William T. Cavanaugh in six simple words: “stop trying to change the world.”

A changed world is one in which self-assertion has given way to an openness to the gifts of others. A changed world is one in which we abandon the assumptions that we know what is best for others, that we are good enough to impose our solutions on the world, and that are powerful enough to make our good intentions reality.

It means trusting the small things because God has and will take care of the big things. It means, as Cavanaugh puts it, “living as if God has already changed the world.”

There was one place in the book where I found something like this from Brueggemann (and in a fashion echoing Lao Tzu), where he expounds on Isaiah 40:30-31. (Cavanaugh himself receives a shout-out by Brueggemann, in an updated postscript, for his book Torture and Eucharist.)

The poet contrasts us in our waiting and in our going ahead. For those who take initiative into their own hands, either in the atheism of pride or in the atheism of despair, the words are weary, faint, and exhausted. The inverse comes with waiting: renewed strength, mounting up, running, and walking. But that is in waiting. It is in receiving and not grasping, in inheriting and not possessing, in praising and not seizing. It is in knowing that initiative has passed from our hands and we are safer for it.

The initiative has passed from our hands and we are infinitely safer for it. Because it has passed from our hands, we do not necessarily have to wait for a grand alternative to the royal consciousness or the totality in which we live. We can trust that when any divine imagination is granted us, we can work for an alternative reality even by adjusting little parts a little bit.

No matter which way the change occurs — en masse or incrementally, in determination or in patience, by the prophetic or the commonplace — one thing is certain: it starts with grief. As Brueggeman puts it, “real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.”

And then comes hope, then comes life. “It is a move,” says Brueggeman, “from scarcity to abundance that is likely routed through lament to doxology.”

Gilbert Meilaender:

“That in these gray and latter days/There may be men whose life is praise,” Martin Franzmann’s great hymn says. But how easily we forget it. Forget that the gospel means freedom from the tyranny of good works — so that we may serve God in the whole of our life with good work. Work which in its quality and character would be an offering of praise and thanksgiving to God and would, therefore, serve our neigh-bors.

In its simplest and least complicated sense the word of the gospel announces that God is pleased with us, that God is on our side. Hence, anxiety about our fate, anxiety that might cripple our spirit and distort our work is dispelled. The energy that might have gone into trying to be sure that God is pleased with us is released for service to others. Freed from incessant introspection about our own fate, we may for the first time see rightly, see the tasks that God sets before us. Now we can do more than talk about freedom from sin and guilt; we can live as people who are really free. […]

Faith brings God’s acceptance and our security, not that we may simply bask in it but that we may live.

Not that we me complicate it, not that we may simply bask in it, but that we may simply live.

Walter Brueggemann:

Prophetic ministry seeks to penetrate the numbness in order to face the body of death in which we are caught. Clearly, the numbness sometimes evokes from us rage and anger, but the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament. Death, and that is our state, does not require indignation as much as it requires anguish and the sharing in the pain. The public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in and let the death go.

… And we do know that the only act that energizes is a word, a gesture, an act that believes in our future…

In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost. Grief and praise are ways of prophetic criticism and energy, which can be more intentional even in our age.

Three or four related things and thoughts from this week.

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First, Nick Catoggio, on the continued lack of anything even pretending to be respect or reverence from Trump — and the continued futility in pretending that it even matters:

Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so? […]

The same goes for Trump’s photo op. Who would have thought a regulation might need to be extra specific in order to stop politicians from campaigning in military graveyards? Shouldn’t shame suffice to deter them?

Trump has no shame, and Republicans have completely abdicated their civic responsibility to make him behave as if he did. In a thoroughly amoral, persuasion-proof political culture, the only solutions to moral problems are legal ones.

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I think fairly often of a moment described in Frontline PBS’s 2021 interview with Frank Luntz. Seven minutes into the interview, Luntz describes a major political turning point. He refers to an interview he did with Trump in 2015, the not-as-infamous-as-it-should’ve-been one where Trump belittled John McCain’s status as a war hero. “I never liked him as much after he lost [the election] because I don’t like losers,” Trump said. “He’s not a war hero — he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

In the PBS interview, Luntz recalls observing the shocked look on the faces of journalists, but not on the faces of Republican voters. “Not only did those voters allow it [the belittling of McCain as a POW],” Luntz recalled, “they were nodding their heads in approval.” In the 2015 interview, you can hear Luntz asking the giggling audience, “You agree with that??” And it is this that Luntz believes to be “the single most significant moment of the [2015 presidential] campaign,” and of the shift in right-wing voting.

Something was deeply, deeply wrong.

This is the classic “Now, we’re f***ed” moment in the movie timeline. You can imagine Luntz — and, frankly, much of the yet-to-sell-their-souls Republican Party as of 2015 — saying along with Jason Statham (in British-accented unison), “All he’s gotta do is stay down”— this has to be the moment that we move past Trump. But it wasn’t. The man — and, more importantly, his voters; and, even more importantly, his just-asking-questions excusers and shruggers — didn’t stay down, won’t stay down. And we (the sane not entirely insane ones) are all left with a stupid look on our faces.

The “different kind of voter” that Luntz goes on to describe does not, I think, do justice to the actual changes — nor to the years of self-priming for those changes — that have taken place in the GOP/right wing. Nevertheless, while not everyone laughed right away, the shrugging did start and before long the momentum of bullshit excuses was well on its way.

And here we still are.

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I was reading a sermon from Gilbert Meilaender the other day on the Jesus who said, ya know, love your enemies and turn the other cheek. Meilaender points out that one of the sad realities in this country is that you are not unlikely to meet an isolationist-type Christian who denounces military/government intervention in many if not all cases and who yet believes quite passionately in his right to defend himself in any and all circumstances. Yet this gets things precisely backwards, Meilaender says. We are called (commanded) to defend others and not ourselves.

Jesus does not here legislate for society. He speaks to his people, to us, and tells us not to defend ourselves, not to pour energy into making certain everyone respects our rights. Not to do this — so that the very same energy can be used to defend the rights of our neighbors.

Given Meilaender’s history, it’s fair to say that we are not talking here about the kind of consistent anti-militarism you’d find in conversation with someone like Stanley Hauerwas — a prophetic conversation which should never stop taking place.

What comes immediately to my mind is a growing group of people, one which seems not only filled with but championed by self-professed Christians (not the generic, fill-out-a-form kind that some claim are blurring the definitional lines of “evangelicals,” but the “I’m a Christ-follower” kind), who exactly five meaningful seconds ago — and of course, right on cue — started using the phrase “military industrial complex” to describe their ironically (shall I use this word for the first time ever?) “woke” new understanding of American power and exceptionalism, but whose very souls don’t seem to even blink at the anticipating and boastful thought of blowing an intruder’s head off in their living room — and likely with a gun sold to them by that very same industrial complex.

(Not all are this extreme, and most are full of shit, but this openly expressed sentiment is not, in my experience, even a little bit rare.)

I have in mind the kind of Christian who thinks the second amendment is as sacrosanct as the ten commandments and that it enshrines his right to defend himself anywhere, at any time, to any extent, and yet who also seems to think — again, suddenly — that a fraction of a percent of an exceedingly wealthy country’s GDP is too much to spare on behalf of a people who would like to defend their country, themselves and their neighbors, against a violent invasion.

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It is painfully plain to say, and to feel the need to say, that none of this makes any sense. Of course, these are not new inconsistencies. Two of my longest-standing intra-faith debates are on the default, gun-loving belief in the self-evidence of violent self-defense, and, more broadly, the deeply hostile way that partisan reaction passes for, and under the guise of, principled stance. But these debates have long since stopped being cordial or meaningful, and certainly aren’t fun anymore. Most of the time, if I’m being honest, they don’t even feel intra-faith.

All of this chaos, as mentioned above, seems to take place in some persuasion-proof realm. But I can’t help wondering if — more accurately, and more tragically — it takes place in some repentance-proof realm.

It was in that same 2015 interview with Luntz that Trump first stumbled around an answer to the question, “Have you ever asked for forgiveness?” “Why do I have to repent or ask forgiveness if I don’t make mistakes?” Trump later clarified.

Jesus said that those who mourn will be comforted. “Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted,” wrote Walter Brueggemann. Numb people, he added, will never understand that “only grievers can experience their experiences and move on.” Is it any wonder that the Rupublican Party, and the church that supports it, seems stuck where it is?

Genuine prophetic criticism, Brueggemann also said, which Jesus understood and embodied, “knows that only those who mourn can be comforted, and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away.”

I think this is another good way of describing the heart of my troubles: the lack of serious and faithful mourning. Trump and the GOP and the church that excuses him — all numb peas in a persuasion- and repentance-proof pod that has no desire to turn, to move on.

(Too harsh? It feels too harsh, though no less accurate for it. Harsher words have been uttered against this demographic.)

I write stuff like this down from time to time simply because I spend a decent amount of that time thinking about it and an equal amount of time being exhausted by it. (It’s the water we swim in and I don’t seem able to close my eyes and wish it away with happier blogging.) Writing it down here is a fairly benign way of sharing it while also continuing to think about it.

Catoggio’s piece above, titled “Mourning in America,” is worth reading, but not in this case for the enjoyable and honest punditry he reliably offers. It’s worth reading because it really is about a certain mourning that… I want to say isn’t taking place, but it’s one that is taking place across the country only at nowhere near the level it ought to be taking place, and certainly not in the places that it ought to be.

It made me very, very sad.

Because if you can read that piece and be reminded afresh of just how poor the character is that we’re talking about, and if you can overlook the lightyears-beyond-hypocrisy pivoting that has taken place in so many politicians and voters and friends and family members, and if you can still cast a vote for that man, or if you are still so governed by your scripted hatred of Democrats that you stutter to offer a word of condemnation against him…

Well, I guess part of the dilemma in my own conscience over the last ten years is that I’ve never quite been sure how to finish that sentence.

Freddie deBoer

If there’s been one dominant message in 21st-century American artistic culture, it’s that you have permission — permission to consume nothing but superhero movies, Barbie, pop music by a recent Disney Channel star; permission to never eat your cultural vegetables; permission to never expand your cultural palate or stretch your attention span.

(NB: this is the opposite of “permissioning.”)

Seth Adelson:

I have to concede that I am a fundamentalist. No, not like what you’re thinking of when you hear that word: I’m not a literalist, not an extremist, not an ultranationalist, not one who shuns modernity. Rather, I am a fundamentalist in that I believe that what we need to focus on, in this world of infinite choice and limited time, are the fundamental aspects of Judaism: Shabbat (Sabbath), kashrut (holy eating), Talmud Torah (learning the words of our tradition and making them come alive today), ritual (connecting our actions and thoughts and feelings with our tradition), and community. […]

… the key is to lean into Heschel’s “realm of endless peace.” Shabbat is a taste of a world that could be, a 25-hour glimpse into a healthier, less stressful and more even-keeled existence.… It allows you to let go, to lose sight of the give-and-take of Sunday through Friday, and just breathe, and accept, and enjoy. By mandating a pause, Shabbat enables us to see once again the beauty of creation, to return to the simplicity which God gave us, stripped of human elaboration.

May be it’s just my mood given… well, many things, not least being that I’m currently reading Shūsaku Endō’s Silence. But something about Brad East’s over-zealous search for the Real Eucharist sounds more like voodoo than the Lord’s Supper.

Walter Brueggemann:

I believe that the possibility of passion is a primary prophetic agenda and that it is precisely what the royal consciousness means to eradicate.… Passion as the capacity and readiness to care, to suffer, to die, and to feel is the enemy of imperial reality. Imperial economics is designed to keep people satiated so that they do not notice. Its politics is intended to block out the cries of the denied ones. Its religion is to be an opiate so that no one discerns misery alive in the heart of God. Pharaoh, the passive king in the block universe, in the land without revolution or change or history or promise or hope, is the model king for a world that never changes from generation to generation. That same fixed, closed universe is what every king yearns for— even Solomon in all his splendor. […]

In the imperial world of Pharaoh and Solomon, the prophetic alternative is a bad joke either to be squelched by force or ignored in satiation. But we are a haunted people because we believe the bad joke is rooted in the character of God himself, a God who is not the reflection of Pharaoh or of Solomon.… He is a God uncredentialed in the empire, unknown in the courts, unwelcome in the temple. And his history begins in his attentiveness to the cries to the marginal ones. He, unlike his royal regents, is one whose person is presented as passion and pathos, the power to care, the capacity to weep, the energy to grieve and then to rejoice. The prophets after Moses know that his caring, weeping, grieving, and rejoicing will not be outflanked by royal hardware or royal immunity because this one is indeed God. And kings must face that.

Jürgen Moltmann:

As a result of this hope in God’s future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labor, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of the realization of justice in the light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world. This world is not the heaven of self-realization, as it as said to be in Idealism. This world is not the hell of self-estrangement, as it is said to be in romanticist and existentialist writing. The world is not yet finished, but is understood as engaged in a history. It is therefore the world of possibilities, the world in which we can serve the future, promised truth and righteousness and peace. This is an age of diaspora, of sowing in hope, of self-surrender and sacrifice, for it is an age which stands within the horizon of a new future. Thus self-expenditure in this world, day-to-day love in hope, becomes possible and becomes human within that horizon of expectation which transcends this world. The glory of self-realization and the misery of self-estrangement alike arise from hopelessness in a world of lost horizons. To disclose to it the horizon of the future of the crucified Christ is the task of the Christian church.