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Prophetic Imagination as hermeneutic of negation and transformation:

Implications for the Church as Prophetic

Introduction
My thesis in this paper is to propose that the role of the prophet is to constantly

recreate and nurture the new consciousness defined by God for the service of the

community. In fact, I want to propose the idea that Prophetic Ministry, as Brueggemann

implies, is characterized by two actions: critique and energizing. Critique is not simply

aiming darts at something that we disagree with; it is engaging the dominant powers of

the day and declaring them to be unable to provide what they claim to provide. I shall,

then, adumbrate on the role of a prophet and, in the end, weave how prophetic

imaginative actions impel the Church to be prophetic in her mission and to fully

experience the anguish and relief, joys and sorrows of her milieu.

Prophetic Imagination

Walter Brueggemann states as his guiding thesis that the task of “prophetic

proclamation” and of the prophet consists in nurturing and evoking a consciousness

alternative to those that are prevalent in the dominant culture around us, they must be

effective agents in the world (p. 13). This statement points toward preachers at pulpits

who try to tell words of truth, which is one of Brueggemann’s watchwords: “truth-

telling.” Prophetic imagination is about deciding and re-deciding. It concerns itself with a

protest against the fallen world and idolatry. It seeks to register in the world a deep sense

of disenchantment with the taken-for-granted. With its self-critical posture on one hand

and its dialectic embrace with the world on the other, prophetic imagination brings a
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hermeneutic of negation to the current state of things in the world. In fact, it proposes in

Paul Ricoeur’s terminology, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in the assessment of the

order of things. In John Shea’s description, prophetic imagination, “strive(s) to realize

meaning – find it, construct it, challenge it, affirm it. This process of imagining refuses to

be held bound by the past or the present. It stretches out possibilities; it envisions how the

future might be” (p. 9). Prophetic imagination seeks to subvert the religion of static

triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation. Through this process, it

proposes a dialectic connection to both in order to bring about engagement of the religion

of God’s freedom with the politics of humane justice and compassion.

However, the prophetic imagination is not simply about the imaging or a

predicting of the future nor is it merely social activism to establish social justice. Instead,

it transcends mere prophecy to proposing “no” to the vivid sense of sin and absolutism.

Congruently, prophetic preaching or imagination is a way to imagine God and God’s

purpose as something that is neither “an irrelevant transcendence” nor “a cozy

immanence.” Prophetic imagination questions our human proximity to power, and this

question at times makes modern women and men anxious and fretful. It is concerned with

breaking the enigmas of the status quo by framing alternative consciousness and

community. Without prophetic attentiveness, the community of faith or civil community

may lose the meaning of its prophecy. Such prophecies focus on fighting those forces that

entrench injustice with reckless abandon rather than make the world right.

More so, prophetic imagination, in the words of Harris, “fashions and refashions

people’s life forms” (p.64). In Gabriel Moran words, it “reshapes” the forms of life. It

aims at evoking, forming, and reforming an alternative community. This is especially

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important in the dominant institutional and cultural milieu that is grossly uncritical, and

suspects serious and fundamental critique even to the extent of stopping it. The role of

the prophet, then, like those of ancient Israel, becomes to constantly recreate and nurture

the new consciousness defined by prophetic utterances. In line with such thought,

Brueggemann writes:

the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a

consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness
and perception of the dominant culture around us. Prophetic
ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public
crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the
dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient (p.13).

To nurture this consciousness, the prophetic imaging resists the “enemy” within the self.

This enemy is what Thomas Merton calls “the false self” – false ideologies and forces

that will destroy the integrity of one’s body. Also, in recreating consciousness, it protests

against anything that can destroy the community, including racism, sexism, militarism,

patriarchy, and other biases. Prophetic ministry, according to Brueggemann, is

characterized by two actions: critique and energizing. Critique is not simply aiming darts

at something that we disagree with; it is engaging the dominant powers of the day and

declaring them to be unable to provide what they claim to provide. Brueggemann writes:

Prophetic criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting

that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their
promises, which they could not in the face of the free God. It is
only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore (p. 11).

In criticizing, the prophet gracefully stages “a divine discontent,” a resistance

which Harris calls “a religion of trouble making.” This critique consists, primarily, with

eliminating our numbness to the death of the organizing principles of our world. It creates
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space to grieve. It is the task of prophetic ministry and imagination to bring people to

engage their experiences of suffering and death. This grieving, however, can easily lead

to despair; thus, prophetic ministry must also be energizing. This act of energizing is

closely linked to hope. It is creating an alternative vision where oppression and injustice

need not continue forever. The prophet must bring hope to break through the despair left

after grief. The primary way to do this is through doxology: words which defy

explanation and move simply to praise. Poignantly, Bruggemann asserts:

the question facing ministry is whether there is anything that can

be said, done, or acted in the face of the ideology of
hopelessness. The task of prophetic ministry and imagination is
to cut through the despair and to penetrate the dissatisfied coping
that seems to have no end or resolution (pp. 65-56).

Another interesting point is that prophetic imagination, in its critiquing, as

Dorothee Soelle suggests “consists in mobilizing people to their real restless grief and in

nurturing them away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in

response” (p. 73). Thus, prophecy’s task becomes not only that of empowering and

evoking cries that expect answers from tyranny and oppression but also that learning to

address these cries where they will be taken seriously. This idea resonates with the

Israelites’ appropriation of their cries to God for liberation against Pharaoh’s rule in

Egypt. Exodus 6:5-6 states how they were heard: “And now that I have heard of the

groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are treating as slaves, I am mindful of my

covenant. I will free you from their forced labor… and will deliver you.” This episode

suggests how powerful their cries have been, in contrast to those of the Egyptians when

the wrath of God struck. It is recorded how the mighty empire cries out in Exodus 11:6;

12:30:
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And there shall be loud wailing throughout the land of Egypt.

Such as has never been, nor will ever be again and Pharaoh arose
in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians; and
there was a loud wailing throughout Egypt, for there was not a
house without its dead.

Both times the cry concerns the killing of the firstborns, the ones born to rule in the land

of Egypt. Commenting on this pogrom, Bruegemann says, “This is highly ironic, for now

the self-sufficient and impervious regime is reduced to the role of a helpless suppliant.

The cry of Israel becomes an empowering cry; the cry of Egypt is one of dismantling

helplessness. But it is too late” (p. 22). It is too late, indeed! It is evident how the

dominant empire of Pharaoh - its gods of order and its politics of injustice - is ending and

left to grieve over its days of not caring by God through the prophetic utterance and

imaging of Moses. His prophetic voice is not issues-based. It accomplishes the harder,

more necessary work of reframing the big picture of what is at stake and taking the reality

of the moment in a new way with a new sense of what might be possible.

This prophetic imagination is doxological in nature – artistic, poetic, creative and

new – but rooted in God’s freedom to act as God wishes. In this sense, the prophet like a

master teacher, in the words of Maria Harris (1974, 127) “is there to help, to prod, to

suggest… the intention always in terms of the other’s freedom… to bring together the

stones, brambles and sticks for the altar…”. Nonetheless, prophetic imagination is

parabolic in its utterances. It evokes insights, which leads to action. Like a parable,

prophetic imaging or utterance, as Mary Boys implicitly adumbrates on C. H. Dodd’s

idea, “arrest(s) its hearer by virtue of its vividness and strangeness, leaving the mind in

sufficient doubt about its precise applicability… thereby involving them, almost without

their explicit awareness… leading people to conversion, to a new view of things” (p. 83).
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Like art or poetry, prophetic imagination makes us realize the truth. It “soaks us in” for

ultimate transformation. It is subversive and an indictment of reality.

The role of the Prophet as transformative

In grappling with the idea of prophetic imagination, one can see that it elicits the

capacity to speak one’s conviction in a prophetic manner. Prophetic imagination spurs

one to consider what a prophet is and what a prophet does. It is the vocation of the

prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination as well as to keep on conjuring and

proposing alternative lead ways to liberation. A prophet protests the absurd by saying

“no” to the situation, even though, he never stops with the “no” but must always lead to

both a deeper transformation of a “yes” and an affirmation of relation, which is justice.

Walter Brueggemann accentuates that a prophet is a disturber of Israel. The prophet

embodies the alternative consciousness of the biblical Jeremiah and Moses. Bruegemann

writes:

He (the prophet) grieves the grief of Judah because he knows

what the king refuses to know… he articulates what is in fact
present in the community whether they acknowledge it or not…
what they deny in order to continue the self-deception of
achievable satiation and affirms that, all the satiation was a quick
eating of self to death (p. 51).

In speaking of what is present in the community, the prophet penetrates their numbness

as well as their despair and rants against the royal mentality that will not let people grieve

or hope. In this way, like Moses’ energizing liberation of the Israelites (Exo.15:18), the

community’s imagination is reclaimed.

More so, a prophet questions those who will die of prudence and impartiality. His

words are vivid in bringing people to engage their experiences of suffering and death. A
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prophet stirs in the people a consciousness that can lead them to numbness, especially to

numbness about death. He provides a way in which the cover-up and the stone-walling

can be ended. This prophet’s job is to reactivate, out of our historical past, symbols that

have always been vehicles for redemptive honesty.

Concomitantly, since the prophetic imagination is the saying “no” to the way

things are, the prophet must speak evocatively to bring to the community the fear and the

pain that individual persons want so desperately to share and to own but are not permitted

to do so by the institutional structures. In fact, a prophet is of all seasons. He keeps

reminding people’s consciences of the harsh words spoken by the prophets of Israel,

which continue to be verified among us. His job is to make humanity aware that, among

us there are those who sell others for money; those who sell a poor person for a pair of

sandals; those who, in their mansions, pile up violence and plunder; those who crush the

poor; those who make the kingdom of violence come closer as they lie upon their beds of

ivory; those who join house to house and field to field until they occupy the whole land

and are the only ones there (Amos 2:6-7; 8:6).

Also, a prophet in order to bring about the needed transformation speaks within

the center of the community. He or she does not speak from the isolated margin or from

the fringes of a house top. Since a prophet is incredibly suspicious of evil in the

community, he is prone to anguish about the state of affairs, especially the taken-for-

granted in in the community. His or her words are outbursts of emotions. A prophet is

one who scrutinizes public order and systems - civic or ecclesiastic. While charity is not

bad per se, a prophet is convinced that poverty imposed on the majority of people, who

have been reduced to slavery by unjust structures, must not be cowed by charity but by a
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call for justice. For a prophet, humanity must go beyond aid or charity and demand a

justice that will bring peace.

A prophet’s maxim is tied to an exclamation that, “God is not indifferent to evil.”

A prophet, in herself or himself, is not indifferent to evil but prods to discover

indifference. He revolts and rages against the evil of indifference. A prophet seeks and

challenges the root cause of injustices, violence, and unemployment as well as asks

several questions. Am I indifferent? What have I done to perpetuate such evil? What have

I done to enable the crucifixion of men and women, or what have I done to end it? Still,

he or she rhetorically asks: Why should we be afraid to see our battle for justice wrongly

interpreted or wrongly judged when Christ himself was called an agitator, a subversive

element, and an enemy of Caesar? In the public or civic arena, he or she does not fear

being accused of meddling in politics, simply for saying “no” and proclaiming the

exigencies of the common good. Writing on “Prophetic Speech,” Harris (1989 137),

captures the prophetic word this way:

If the priestly word is “Yes,” or “Speak, O God for I your servant

hear you,” the prophetic word is “No, I must refuse to let false
word pass, Now is the time for my human voice – and our
community’s voice, as a people, to be raised against injustice.

From the above, it is evident that a prophet rarely tells nice stories or sings palatable

songs. He castigates and uses explosive images because in order to liberate the

community, he must prophetically imagine. Excuses disgust the prophet, and his or her

language is meant to shock rather than edify. It is little wonder that Abraham Herchel

writes, “God is raging in the word of the prophet.”

Furthermore, it is pertinent to note that prophetic imagination is iconoclastic.

Consequently, a prophet’s posture is that of critiquing popular beliefs or established

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customs and ideas. He exposes scandalous pretenses – “to holiness, piety,” and others. He

or she is aware that sermons can sometimes become “illusive” and “deceiving;” thus he

calls the “sermoner” to conscience. He or she is not a revolutionary but, rather, a rebel

because, as a rebel he or she acknowledges limits since the focus of a prophet is not so

much to make the world right but to fight those forces that entrench injustice with

reckless abandon. His posture is that of resistance against the forces which are destroying

justice.

A prophet also appears to be indignant in his posture. Indignation is the fiercest

form of love. It fuels the prophet to compassionate action - to be the Good Samaritan and

a hope-igniter. Although hope is subversive, it, according to Bruegemann “limits the

grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present, to which we

have all made commitment, is now called into question” (p. 67). Thus, a prophet offers

people symbol for life and hope by bringing them to express their yearnings and

articulate their hopes and aspirations.

Implications for the Church as Prophetic

The pastoral vocation of the Church, as a people with a mission and ministry,

presupposes she be the voice of God in the world by following Christ and the prophets.

More so, the Church is supposed to live out the narrative of the prophets through baring

witness to the misdeeds of the world, calling the world to live rightly, and imagining a

world where the reign of Christ’s kingdom expands in dramatic, unimaginable ways. The

Church is called to do something new to develop a hermeneutic of prophetic imagination

within the structure of both the local and universal church. However, it seems that the
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prophetic witness of the Church is still largely outsourced to para-church ministries and

non-profits. This is a great good, no doubt, as the kingdom is served by the tremendous

work of Christian non-profits; however, it is troubling to see the deep disconnect between

the prophetic witness of Christians from the pulpit and corporate worship. Thus, I argue

that there is a dire need for local and universal churches to be witnesses against the

dominating ideologies of our current culture and churches by using an alternative views

rooted in the prophetic witness of the Old Testament prophets. She can do so through her

classical educational forms of didache, koinonia, kerygma, diakonia, and leiturgia,

cognizant of their sameness and difference. Maria writes “to be any one form of ministry

is also to be with all the others. Only, then, can they be complete” (Harris 1989, 44).

In fact, seeing Church ministry or education as an interplay of these great forms,

the prophetic Church and contemporary prophets will be able to draw more fully from the

past and from the deeply embedded tradition of the Old Testament prophets. With the

interrelated mentality, the prophetic Church and her ministers can draw from the heritage

of scripture, tradition, lives of our ancestors in the faith, creed, gospel, prayer, sacrament,

preaching, and worship as they seek the transformation of the earth.

As prophetic, the Church has a responsibility to call for a cultivation of prophetic

resistance to the injustices around us. Her job is to ignite the embers of the “sleep-

walking cultures” of our time to rise against the royal mentality of brutality, torture, and

capital punishment. Her responsibility is to assist people, in her various forms of

ministry, to feel comfortable discussing their fears, laments, pain, and sorrows, as well as,

at other times, naming and celebrating their joys and accomplishments. It is imperative

that the Church not only insists on speaking metaphorically and concretely about evil in
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the communities but also creates opportunities for people to break-through the numbness

of life and situations- whether it be sexism, clericalism, racism, militarism, and any other

bias.

The Church needs to prophetically critique her-self as well as the socio-political

system that enslaves people. She needs to, in her ministers and workers reflect the

audacity of modern prophets like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Helder Camara, Oscar Romero,

and Mahatma Gandhi, whose sense of being a witness to justice and peace was

strengthened by Jesus’ prophetic character. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount- the Magna

Carta of a moral life gave them new insight and transformed them completely. For

example, after returning to Germany to become a university professor at Berlin,

Bonhoeffer served for five years and was removed from the post by the Nazi Minister of

Education because of his frantic “looking the Nazi’s evil in the eye.” This period became

a turning point in his life as he began to prophetically study the Sermon on the Mount

among other things. In a letter Bonhoeffer wrote to a friend at the time, Eberhard Bethge

says he wrote:

I discovered the Bible for the first time….I know that at that time
I turned the doctrine of Jesus Christ into something of personal
advantage to myself….It is from this that the Bible, and
especially the Sermon on the Mount, set me free. Since then
everything has altered….It was a great liberation (p. 57).

The Church, and indeed Christianity, using the paradigm of the Sermon on the Mount, is

a religion of crisis. It refuses to follow the path of least resistance or to align with the

status quo. Prophetic imagination urges the Church to be a vehicle of dismantling the

royal conventions of its time. It reminds the Church once more that she must have an

unyielding determination to live the life of truth, to be true and honest to its Lord and
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Master, and to speak for those whose voices cannot be heard. Also, a prophetic Church,

in the spirit of the Beatitudes, makes the world uncomfortable and indicts those usurping

privileges, such as the arrogantly rich, powerful and selfish. It bids the prophets to be at

home with the vicarious nature of Christian vocation that as Bonhoeffer says, “when

Christ calls a man, he bids him to come to die (p. 79).

Nonetheless, prophetic imaging urges the Church to join the battle for

development and social justice – justice not only for the privileged few, but also for the

vulnerable. This is crucial because, if the Church is to give the example she must, - if she

is to be the living presence of Christ among men and women as well as with men and

women - it urgently and permanently needs to cast off its concern for prestige, to

unharness itself from the chariot of the mighty, and to agree to live the prophecy of

Christ: “behold I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, They will hand you over

to the courts of judgment (Matt.10:16-17).

Still, prophetic imagination, like its artistic sensibilities, forces the Church to

reveal the truth she would rather hide – the truth of painful abuse, caused by a failure to

report and the negligence of those in authority, and of other anguish. It forces the

Church’s hierarchy, cognizant that at the core of religion is the non-rational and non-

mechanical outfit to be intent in their prophetic postures. Moreso, it helps the hierarchy

savor the fact that religion is better sung than recited, better danced than believed, and

better painted than talked about. In this way, the Church can commit itself more to the

service of humanity, especially those who are made to live subhuman lives, rather than

focusing on trivial doctrines.

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Congruently, prophetic imagination, as hermeneutic of negation, calls the Church

to seriously consider the rebellious hymn of the Magnificat (Lk.1:46-55). This hymn is

disturbing; it is serious, subversive, and agitating! It speaks out against the established

order, against the rich and powerful, making it clear that the Church should transcend the

sidelines of historical process and follow Christ who makes the Church dynamic. In fact,

the Church, in prophetic imagining, should follow Christ who lived, worked, battled, and

died in the midst of a city, in the polis. Her entrance into the socio-political world - into

the world where the lives and deaths of the population are decided upon is necessary and

urgent if we are to preserve, not only in word but indeed, faith in the God of life and

follow the lead of Jesus.

In conclusion, this paper argues that prophetic imagination is saying “no” to the

way things are; it is saying no to lukewarm-ness and complacency. We are all called to

cultivate prophetic imagination. It demands the ability to speak our conviction with a

passion that must be tested in the body of society or the community. Also, this paper

states that prophetic imagination must speak metaphorically and concretely about the real

"deathliness" that hovers over us and gnaws within us. Prophetic imagination critiques

the current consciousness, speaks metaphorically about hope as well as concretely about

the newness that comes to us, and redefines our situation, providing an energizing force

for the new consciousness. Thus, a prophet becomes an oracle who censors and protests

against the complacency of his time and people. Above all, the prophet seeks to aid

transformation. For him or her, justice is as great and necessary as grieving and mercy.

The paper makes a case however, that, the Church, as prophetic, can be relevant to the

contemporary age by harnessing a creative interplay of its life and educational forms. Of
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course, the prophetic Church does not only involve announcing the beauty of eternal

salvation but also has to involve itself in the real problems of men and women in the

world. She should be faithful to her mission of denouncing sin that puts many to misery

and proclaim the hope of a more just and humane world.

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References

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Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1982. The Cost of Discipleship. London, SCM Press.

Boys, Mary C. Parabolic Way of Teaching. Boston College, MA: Chestnut Hill.

Bruegemann, Walter. 1978. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

Harris, Maria. 1989. Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church. Rev, ed.

Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press.

Harris, Maria. 1976. Religious Education and the Aesthetics. A. Newton Quarterly.

New American Bible. Rev. ed. St. Joseph. New York, Catholic Book Publishing Corp.

Shea, John. 2005. Finding God Again: Spirituality for Adults. MD, Rowman & Little-

Field Publishers, Inc.

Soelle, Dorothee. 1984. Suffering. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.