The Posture of a Prophet (2): Imagine

Years ago Walter Brueggemann wrote a book, check that, the book on the role/vocation of a prophet, called The Prophetic Imagination. His basic thesis was this: like Israel in Egypt or Babylon, or the Christian in Rome, we live in an age of Empire, which tries to make us slaves, by capturing our minds with its symbols and propoganda. Its practices are not much different then those Empires of the Ancient Near East, and our cirticism of them need not be much different either. For instance under Solomon Israel's monarchy became like their pagan neighbors, and thus the prophets called down the interplay between idolatry and abusive economic policies in regards to labor (1 Kings 11-12).

The problem, Brueggemann said, was that the people would adopt what he called a "royal consciousness," which God wanted to break. So he used the prophets to do so. Their job was to dream an alternative vision of reality, one that broke imperial brain-washing that convinced people that the world was the way it was and nothing could change.

The prophetic reaction, in the words of Brueggemann must be as follows: "prophetic speech is a sharp-sword, conveying a vision designed to shock rather than edify. Moderation is a delusion, and only extremists are in touch with reality. Thus prophetic must be imaginative because it is urgently out beyond the ordinary and the reasonable." In Lawrence Thornton novel Imagining Argentina (a novel based in Argentina during the terrifying rule of Pinochet), the key character Carlos is visited with a peculiar miraclous gift---the capacity to create futures by acts of anticipatory imagination. Confronted with evidence of the miraculous, Carlos' friends nevertheless remain skeptical, convinced that Carlos cannot confront tanks with stories, helicopters with mere imagination. They can only see the conflict in terms of fantasy versus reality. Carlos on the other hand rightly grasps that the contest is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination. "We have to believe in the power of imagination" Carlos says "because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs." Writing about Imagining Argentina William Cavanaugh comments "To refer to torture as the imagination of the state is obvioulsy not to deny the reality of torture, but to call attention to the fact that torture is part of a drama of inscribing bodies to perform certain roles in the imaginative project which is the nation-state."

During the first years of Pinochet's rule, the church was asleep in the face of state-sanctioned torture and authority. The Empire had made community and human alternative impossible. Until the Bishops in the Catholic Church began to realize that the communion table (the Eucharist) was becoming a community-forming miracle; a vehicle for the rule of God and a practical instrument for generating communities of resistance against the state...it became an antidote to torture.

I think what is important for us as Christians/People in the Empire of Western democracy is the prophetic call to resist the Empires ability to define what is real. We have become complacent and numbed to the hurt and pain among us, and though "numbness doesn't hurt like torture, in a quite parellel way, numbness robs us of our capacity for humanity."

How do we speak the life-forming message of Jesus into a culture of numbness?