The Doomsday Prophet (1)
to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. Jeremiah 1:2 NASB
In the days of – From Moses to Malachi God sent prophets to provide His people with His point of view. But something happened about 2500 years ago. The prophetic chain stopped. Why? Did God think we had enough instructions? Did He have nothing more to say after the vision of John on Patmos? Did He decide we should be able to figure it out for ourselves? Or, as Heschel says, did we exile God from this world, making Him irrelevant to our lives?
Wouldn’t it be so much easier if God would just send another prophet? Not the kind who gets a vision in a cave or who has a conversation with some macaroni angel, but a real prophet, the kind who comes with blistering fire in his voice and the spark of the divine in his eyes. The kind that you can’t stand to hear but wouldn’t miss the chance to listen. But I suppose this wishful thinking is like imagining that God should just write His warning in the sky so we couldn’t miss it. Most of us just wouldn’t look up for fear that we might be found out. Maybe that’s why the prophets had such terrible times—rejected, abused, usually killed. Nothing is more uncomfortable than a man with God’s words on his lips. No, there aren’t many of those around these days when we all want to hear blessings, prosperous assurances, and self-affirming platitudes.
Perhaps there is another reason why the prophets seemed to have disappeared from society. It has to do with the massive paradigm shift that occurred between 500 BCE and 300 CE. It’s called Hellenism. You see, the Greek ideal is cognitive, not active. What matters is what happens in your head; what you think about, not really what you do about what you think about. This shift created theology, that is, thinking about God. It did not create a culture of obedience. It created a culture of belief. Once Hellenism dominated the world, as it still does, action became a subset of thinking. It was possible to have the “right” relationship with God simply by affirming the “right” propositions about God (or Jesus—or Mary—or whomever). Acceptance into the Kingdom was a matter of “correct” belief, not necessarily aligned behavior. In fact, the anti-Jewish stance of the early Church made behavior, that is, Jewish behavior (like the kind we find in the Bible) a sin. To act Jewishly meant that you denied the work of Jesus on the cross, freeing you from any of those (antiquated) Torah instructions. Now you could “love God and do as you please.”
Prophets don’t come with theological texts under their arms. Yes, I know you’ve seen all the Italian statues in the churches depicting the great prophets with heavy tomes in hand, but this is fantasy, not reality. The prophets came with verbal fire, no pen required. Someone else wrote it all down later, much the pity, because now we think of the prophets according to the book, not the voice. We have suffered a great loss. God isn’t speaking through prophets today because we are too busy reading instead of listening. How do you propose we should fix that?
Topical Index: prophet, word, book, Hellenism, belief, Jeremiah 1:2
