Hope & the Prophet's Message

(Excerpted from The Prophetic Imagination, by Walter Brueggemann, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1982)

"The task of the prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those very hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there. Hope...is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts.

Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion, and one does that only at great political and existential risk...hope is subsersive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question..."

About the prophet's role: "...a prophet has another purpose in bringing hope to public expression, and that is to return the community to its single referent, the sovereign faithfulness of God...Only a move from a managed world to the world of spoken and heard faithfulness permits hope..."