A Peaceable Faith: Part 5, The Prophetic Imagination

If you've followed the argument threaded through the last few posts, I suggest in The Slavery of Death that worldview defense can be attenuated and avoided by adopting a kenotic posture towards our life, a posture that is cultivated by receiving our lives as a gift to be surrendered back toward God in acts of service and with thanksgiving and praise. Instead of anxiously clinging to life, we are able to give it away.

While this kenotic, non-grasping posture is foundational for acts of self-giving love, the "psychological pre-requisites of love" if you will, what I've been describing doesn't precisely get at the issue of worldview defense, how difference is threatening to us. So, what can be said about this particular issue?

Addressing this in The Slavery of Death, I keep with the notion of eccentricity. But in this instance, the eccentricity is applied to God. 

God is eccentric. 

What does this mean, and what import does this have for thinking about worldview defense?

Borrowing from Walter Brueggemann's description of "the prophetic imagination," injustice, oppression, and violence occur when God becomes an object of possession held by the community, when a group claims proprietary ownership of God. Such a community "hoards" God, defending God against the claims of others. 

Given this "captivity of God," where God is used to sacralize and legitimize current political and social arrangements, Brueggemann describes how the first act of the prophet is to proclaim the "freedom of God." God is set free to stand over against the group. That was the shock of the Exodus, how God wasn't aligned with the powerful in Egypt but was, rather, found among and for the slaves. 

This is the idea of an eccentric God. The community doesn't own or possess God. Rather, God exists beyond the boundaries of the community and is at liberty to stand with and for the victims of the community. 

In short, the practice of the prophetic imagination is to nurture the moral capacity to imagine God's radical eccentricity, the shocking freedom of God to show up beyond the boundaries of my community and to stand with my victims, and even with my enemies (read the book of Jonah!), in prophetic indictment against me. When this capacity is lost, God becomes "captured" by the group and is used to baptize and justify our violence toward others. God becomes an engine of worldview defense.

But an eccentric God, a God who is free enough to speak against me, puts the breaks upon worldview defense for God is now found among Them rather than among Us. That's the eccentricity of prophetic imagination, always imagining God outside the borders of my tribe. 

As a historical example of all this, this is what Barth was doing when he proclaimed God to be "Wholly Other." The radical eccentricity of the Wholly Other God created the prophetic resources Barth required to emancipate God from the ideological captivity of German nationalism.

So, that's the answer I gave in The Slavery of Death. How do we avoid worldview defense? How can we practice a peaceable faith? We can cultivate the prophetic imagination. 

But this is not the end of the series! One more post to go to bring in some more recent reflections since the publication of The Slavery of Death.