Prophetic Voices Interpret the Present
Some insights of Abraham Heschel on prophecy and the divine pathos.
We often think of a “prophecy” or a “prophet” as something or someone that foretells the future. But I choose to reserve these words for that which interprets the present moment. The future, I think, is open. We are responsible for our future, not guided by a predetermined destiny. Our only opportunity to exercise that responsibility is in the present moment.
I owe this conviction to Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and his magnificent book The Prophets. Heschel explores the phenomenon of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians usually call the Old Testament). According to Heschel, the experience of the prophets in scripture is not one of receiving information from God about the future. Instead, a prophet is someone swept up in what Heschel calls the divine pathos — God’s passion for justice and peace upon the earth. Prophecy is an emotional experience, the experience of “a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness.” A prophet feels what God feels, rather than knows what God knows.
Some people seek to know God by thinking their way toward God. They argue from whichever first principles they happen to be willing to accept, and reason upward toward some suitable concept that — when it achieves enough superlative properties — they name “God”. In this scheme, God is the “first-cause”, the “supreme power”, the “all-knowing knower”, one beyond time and eternity, or perhaps even the “unmovable mover”. For a prophet things are much different. God is not distant but “overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present.” The prophet does not grope intellectually toward a philosophically adequate concept of God. Instead, prophets are overwhelmed by the living presence of One who is injured by injustice and suffers with those who suffer. In the experience of the prophet, God is a supreme personal will-to-love and — far from being invulnerable to how one person treats another — God is wounded by injustice. For this reason, in a world of injustice, when a prophet speaks “God is raging in the prophet’s words.”
Heschel writes, “There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses.” These witnesses speak for God’s interests in the world. Through the words of a prophet “the invisible God becomes audible.” We are all interpreters of the world around us. We assign meaning and value to our lives, our purchases, our work, our communities, our families, our friends, our neighbours, and even our enemies. But how does God interpret and value those same things? Interpretation, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. God has a perspective too. This is the role of the prophet, to become swept up in the divine perspective. Prophets are often at odds with religious leaders. “The prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered, and awesome.” Taboos and tradition alike mean nothing to the prophet wherever justice is neglected. “Men may not drown the cries of the oppressed with the noise of hymns, nor buy off the Lord with increased offerings.” Unfortunately, collective worship often serves to soothe the collective conscience and dull the pangs of moral obligation. This makes the prophet a perennial religious trouble-maker. A prophet is rarely an established religious leader and more likely an antagonist toward worship-as-usual.
What then does it mean to “be prophetic” today? It doesn’t mean being an uncanny futurist, envisioning the end from the beginning. A prophet speaks to the present moment, interpreting it from a perspective formed by sympathy and fellowship with God as the supreme will-to-love. The God who creates is also the God of history, and Heschel contrasts the two roles. “The universe is done. The greater masterpiece still undone, still in the process of being created, is history.” History is God’s co-creation with humans, and does not necessarily turn out for the best. People must cooperate and embrace God’s will-to-love in the present moment to bring about a future worth having. Prophets are those that seek to bend history toward the will of God. They implore us to love as God loves, to see where our habits and norms harm others. They reveal how our lives appear to God, which is often as they appear to those we harm. Prophets speak against the indifference of both the crowd and their leaders. A prophet “faces a coalition of callousness and established authority, and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words.” To recognize a prophet in our midst is to recognize the divine pathos speaking through them in and to the present. Unfortunately, it almost takes one to know one.
