Towards the Prophetic Church

A Study of Christian Mission

John M. Hull

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780334052364
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Thirty years ago John Hull wrote "What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning?". This new book asks "What Prevents Christian Adults from Acting?" How has it come about that the Church appears to be so preoccupied with itself? What happened to the quest for the social justice of the Kingdom of God?

Part 1

The Origins of the Prophetic Church

The biblical basis for the prophetic tradition of Christian faith is found mainly in the prophets of the Old Testament and in the work of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, neither of these sources are without ambiguity. The society in which the prophets worked is long ago and far away from that of the modern West. It is not easy to reconstruct the beliefs and attitudes of that ancient culture and in many ways we today do not share the same assumptions.

The first chapter describes the changes that have taken place in the interpretation of the prophetic books and discusses the several ways in which these texts present serious ethical difficulties. The next chapter is more positive. In spite of the problems, there are features of the prophetic teaching which are universal and perennial. The challenge to modern society is unmistakable; they, although long since dead, still speak.

The Gospels, discussed in Chapter 3, present us with a different situation. As the Church became more powerful the prophetic work of Jesus seemed more remote. The interests of the post-Constantinian Church were not those of the Galilean villagers of the first half of the first century. Over the last several decades New Testament scholarship has begun to recover the circumstances in which Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, but as modern Christians begin to understand these insights, our own inherited assumptions make it difficult for us to turn them into action. In these chapters we will show some of the biblical problems that prevent Christian adults from learning, and at the same time we begin the long process of recovery.

1

The Prophets of Ancient Israel: Developments and Difficulties

Recent developments in the interpretation of the prophetic texts

The Book of Isaiah has been enormously influential in the formation of Christian faith. Isaiah is referred to about 250 times in the New Testament (Sawyer 1996, p. 21). If one also counts the allusions and paraphrases the number increases to more than 400 (Childs 2004, p. 5). Isaiah is referred to by name 20 times including six specific quotations in the Gospel of Matthew. Two passages were particularly significant in the early Church: Isaiah 7.14 ‘a young woman is with child, and she will give birth to a son and call him Immanuel’, which because of the influence of the Greek Septuagint was regarded as a prediction of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1.22–3). The second influential area was the various passages, mainly in Deutero-Isaiah, which refer to blessings upon the Gentiles (Isa. 42.6, 49.6). The crucial expression was ‘light to the Gentiles’ (Luke 2.32), which was regarded by the Church as justifying its mission to the Gentile world. Yet, other passages which are frequently referred to today did not strike the early Church as being particularly significant. Let us take Isaiah 2.4: ‘they will beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore’. This passage seems to have been hardly noticed for 1,000 years. In 1263 James I of Aragon summoned a debate to test the claims of Christians and Jews. The contestants were the famous Talmudic scholar Moses Nahmanides and the Dominican Pablo Christaini, a convert from Judaism. Nahmanides claimed that the Messiah could not have arrived since the promise of universal peace foretold in Isaiah 2.4 had evidently not taken place. By way of contrast, the Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) interpreted the passage not as a prediction of the Messianic Age but as a reference to the outcome of the threat against Judah from Rezin King of Syria and Pekah King of Ephraim, which took place during the reign of Ahaz King of Judah (Isa. 7.1) (Childs 2004, pp. 230–5). On the other hand, whereas Grotius gave the passage an exclusively historical interpretation, Abraham Calov (1612–86), a Lutheran Professor at the University of Wittenberg, regarded the passage as exclusively eschatological, referring to the end times, when Jerusalem would be exulted and the nations would be gathered to Zion.

The characteristic twentieth-century use of the Isaiah passage interprets it in a political sense, as an expression of the hope for reconciliation between the nations. In 1959 a bronze statue with the inscription ‘Let us turn our swords into ploughshares’, created by the distinguished Soviet sculptor and artist Yevgeny Vuchetich, was presented by the Soviet Union as a gift to the United Nations. The statue itself depicts a blacksmith working at his anvil, using a hammer to beat a sword into the curved shape of a ploughshare. It is one of the most striking monuments in the park of the United Nations building in New York. This powerful allegory was soon to be interpreted much more literally.

In 2002 three Dominican sisters, Ardeth Platt, Carol Gilbert and Jackie Hudson, cut through the gateway to a military installation in Colorado. It was a silo for the launch of intercontinental nuclear weapons. They attacked the silo with hammers fulfilling Isaiah 2.4, where the instruments of war were to be beaten. They then poured flasks of their own blood on it in the shape of a cross (Nepstad 2008, p. 1; Berrigan 1997, p. 117). They were members of the American Catholic protest organization, the Plowshares movement. The original inspiration of the group had been the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and the example of the peace activist Dorothy Day, but their search for a biblical basis soon brought them to Isaiah 2.4, which became the name of the movement. The British Ploughshares movement, although more secular than its American counterpart, retains the reference.

This wide range of interpretations, although rich and challenging to the imagination, presents the Christian interpreter with a problem. Is there a consistent Christian way of interpreting the Bible? If the Church down the ages has been guided by the Holy Spirit through Scripture, how can it yield such diverse meanings? The more one studies the reception history of Isaiah and the Prophets in general the more pressing these questions become. Brevard Childs, one of America’s leading biblical scholars, asked:

Can one still speak of a divine coercion or pressure exerted by the text upon its readers? Is there any concord between doctrinal claims regarding scripture and its actual effects on the church throughout its history? (2004, p. i)

The issue was made more complex not only by the diversity of interpretation but by the radical changes in scholarly methods and approaches for studying the prophetic tradition that have arisen in the last four or five decades. These developments will now be described.

To what extent was biblical prophecy distinctive?

The Bible itself does not claim that prophecy was unique to Israel (Blenkinsopp 1996, p. 41). Balak, King of Moab, engaged Balaam, a well-known prophet from the Euphrates, to prophesy against Israel (Num. 22.4–6), and the prophets of Baal were in conflict with Elijah (1 Kings 18.19). There was, however, little independent knowledge of prophecy outside Israel in the ancient Middle East until the excavation of the ancient city of Mari, located in modern Syria not far from the Euphrates. The excavations began in 1933 and brought to light thousands of clay tablets including many making reference to prophets or actual texts of prophetic oracles (Nissinen 2003, p. 13). The city of Mari was destroyed by Hammurabi King of Babylon in 1740 BCE, and the second major collection of prophetic documents from the ancient Middle East comes from a period 1,000 years later. The library of Ashurbanipal King of Nineveh from 668 to c.627 BCE was discovered and excavated in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The library consists of about 20,000 clay tablets, but, although their significance for prophecy was recognized by the end of that century, it was not until the 1970s that their scope was realized, and not until 1977 was a scholarly edition of the neo-Assyrian oracles published (p. 3). In addition to the basic collections from Mari and Nineveh, documents of a prophetic kind have been recovered from Egypt and other parts of Mesopotamia. Nissinen concludes: ‘The existing evidence of prophecy comes from all over the Fertile Crescent, witnessing to the wide distribution of prophets and proving prophecy to be a common cultural legacy which cannot be traced back to any particular society or place of origin’ (pp. 40–8).

Comparing the prophetic documents in the Bible with these other ancient texts is far from simple (Nissinen 2010). But a number of interesting conclusions are suggested. Most of the texts regarded as coming from prophetic sources are relatively short and often leave us with little knowledge of the circumstances which produced them. There are some traces in the Nineveh collection of prophetic oracles being used again in later situations (p. 5). But the extended collections of prophetic oracles gathered together, edited, accumulated and re-edited over centuries, which is what we find in the biblical literature, are unknown elsewhere. Prophecy was always regarded as sacred, because it dealt with the mediation of the divine will, but only in the Bible do we find a ‘canonized composition of texts of different age as the result of a centuries-long editorial process’ (p. 8). The biblical prophetic books were treasured by a community for whom they had become authorized responses to an ancient covenant with God that expressed the heart of the faith of Israel.

In addition to the information yielded by the prophetic context of the ancient Near East we have the cross-cultural comparisons arising from modern anthropological studies. Thomas Overholt has compared the biblical Isaiah with the indigenous American prophet Wovoka, who operated in western Nevada in the later part of the nineteenth century. Overholt then extended his study to the prophetic figures from other cultures (1989, p. ix). The concept of the Shaman has been used to understand the nature of the biblical prophet in its own cultural context (Craffert 2008, pp. 135–68; Grabbe 2010). Overholt points out that theological discussion of the biblical prophets has tended to concentrate on what they said or the content associated with their names whereas anthropological studies have highlighted the relationship between the prophets and their audiences, recognizing the character of socially constructed knowledge (1989, p. 9). These studies have helped us to identify characteristic features of prophetic inspiration such as the spirit journey (Ezek. 8.3), visions (Isa. 1.1, 6.1) and the calling to the vocation of a seer (Jer. 1.1–7; Amos 7.15). We may conclude that biblical prophecy, although not unique, has many distinctive features, not least its status as sacred Scripture in the early Jewish/Christian communities, its incorporation into what had become by the second century CE the Christian Bible and its profound influence upon the development of all three of the monotheistic religions. These are often described as the Abrahamic traditions, but could just as well be known as the prophetic religions.

Prophecy as prediction

Almost all Christian theology until the beginning of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century believed that many features of the New Testament had been predicted or foretold by the prophets of the Old Testament, and this understanding of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments as being one of prediction and fulfilment dominated interpretation of the prophets for 1,500 years.1 Although the slogan that the prophets were forth-tellers not fore-tellers has gained some currency amongst thoughtful Christians, it is doubtless still the case that many Christians believe that the prophets did predict things in the long distant future, and that some of these things are still waiting to be fulfilled. Some believe this dogmatically and others because no other meaning of prophecy has ever come their way, and it is certainly true that the Church through many of its hymns and liturgies, especially during the Advent season, encourages this view of the prophets.

Belief in prophetic predictions was first queried seriously in the Enlightenment and especially in the work of Benedict Spinoza (1632–77). The first three chapters of his Theological-Political Treatise deal with prophecy. Spinoza thought that prophetic inspiration is mediated through the imagination of the prophet and its content reflects whatever the prophets could reasonably imagine, bearing in mind their own context and biographies. The prophets saw things according to their temperament and their background and therefore the only certainty we can derive from their words is that of moral and spiritual truths.

If the prophet was of a cheerful disposition, then victories, peace and other joyful events were revealed to him; for it is on things of this kind that the imagination of such people dwells . . . the visions were of oxen and cows and the like if the prophet was a countryman, of captains and armies in the case of a soldier . . . (2001, pp. 23–4)

Prophecy did not render the prophets more learned, but left them with the beliefs they had previously held, and therefore we are in no way bound to believe them in matters of purely philosophical speculation. (p. 26)

Spinoza never denies that the prophets may have and actually did predict various things, indeed, from time to time he says so, but only in passing, ‘Isaiah bewails and foretells the calamities, and prophesies of the restoration, not only of the Jews but of other nations’ (p. 41). I describe this as a passing reference, because Spinoza’s concern is not about prediction as such. He is arguing that the Jewish people have no particular privilege that was not also granted to other nations. Although the possibility of prophecy is never denied, the foibles, inconsistencies and the various personal characteristics of the prophets are described with such cool, acid irony that one feels that Spinoza is quietly mocking the true believer.

God adapted his revelations to the understanding and beliefs of the prophets, who may well have been ignorant of matters that have no bearing on charity and moral conduct but concern philosophical speculation, and were in fact ignorant of them, holding conflicting beliefs. (p. 32)

To put belief in prediction in context, it is worth pointing out that this quality was not attributed to the prophetic books alone but to the books of Genesis and the Psalms and indeed to all the Scripture (O’Brien 2008, p. 3; see also Luke 24.27). It was in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, that it was first clearly realized that the prophetic books were more or less unintelligible unless the prophets were regarded as having spoken to the people of their own day (O’Brien 2008, pp. 11–14). Not that these insights were confined to Germany; one of the leading theologians of the nineteenth-century English Church F. D. Maurice appreciated the way that the lessons in the Anglican lectionary were designed to bring out the meaning of the prophets for their day as well as for ours.

The compilers of the Lessons have been much more careful to exhibit the Prophets as preachers of righteousness than as mere predictors. I have felt that this aspect of their lives has been greatly overlooked in our day, and that there is none which we have more need to contemplate. (1871, pp. xiii–xiv)

It is true, I believe, that the Hebrew Bible does not represent a closed and fixed final faith, but partly because of faith in God as Lord of history it can be said to anticipate a richer fulfilment. The same is true of the New Testament. It also recognizes an element of ‘not yet’ in its theology and looks forward in hope to some greater and richer ful...

Table of contents

• Towards the ­Prophetic Church
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Prophetic Theology in the Church Today
• Part 1 The Origins of the Prophetic Church
• 1 The Prophets of Ancient Israel: Developments and Difficulties
• 2 The Prophets of Ancient Israel: Their Message for Today
• 3 Jesus Christ as Prophet
• Part 2 The Betrayal of the Prophetic Church
• 4 The Christian Crusades of the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries
• 5 Prophetic Theology and Imperialism: The Colonial Sermons of the Early Seventeenth Century
• 6 Imperialism Replacing Prophetic Theology: The Hymns of Isaac Watts
• 7 Mission on the Edges of Christianity: Three Conversations
• Part 3 The Recovery of the Prophetic Church
• 8 Prophetic Theology from Martin Luther to Max Weber
• 9 The Prophetic Theology of Paul Tillich
• 10 The Prophetic Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr
• Part 4 Towards the Prophetic Church
• 11 A Theory of Theological Development from the Perspective of Western Christian Faith
• 12 Towards a Theology of Prophetic Action
• 13 Theological Education for a Prophetic Church
• Appendix 1 Criteria for Prophetic Action
• Appendix 2 Annotated Bibliography for Chapter 3
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography