The Doomsday Prophet (2)
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 – Theology is the progeny of Hellenism. What I mean is that theology—thinking about God—is not a Hebrew idea. The Hebrew idea is behaving according to God’s instructions no matter what you happen to think. But Hellenism changed all that. The Greco-Roman world made Hellenism the dominant paradigm of the West. As a result, we find statements like this:
“Theology is a task, and it takes many forms. In general, theology is simply how humans think about God. . . . everyonedoes theology—we all think about God.[1]
This expanded definition simply suggests that God-thinking is a part of Western civilization. If that is really the case, then God-thinking is just as “normal” as economic planning, vacation memories, or shopping lists. Things we thinkabout. Perhaps this is why Heschel penned, “God is either of supreme importance or of none.”[2] For if God is of “supreme” importance, then we can’t just think about Him. That means theology as thinking about God is actually useless (or worse, idolatrous). Unless God-thinking becomes God-acting, it is not of supreme importance.
Now we understand why the prophets could care less about what the people thought. They did not come with propositional statements requiring endorsing beliefs. They came with indictments! They delivered messages of doom! They were firebrands of divine righteousness in the tinder of corrupt societies. They didn’t bother to write it down. What mattered to them was behavioral response. What they sought was action like the king of Nineveh—repentance! If we read the prophets as though they provided theological truths, we will erase their real message and their real importance. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Amos, Obadiah—these men are not backwoods theologians. Neither is John the Baptizer. Oh, and neither is Yeshua. These men were prophets. Their task was not theology. It was conviction. Perhaps that’s one reason why it is so difficult to categorize, organize, and articulate what they believed.
Yeshua didn’t write a single word. Have you ever wondered why? As the founder of a movement, why didn’t he commit some of his pearls of wisdom to writing? Why did he apparently rely entirely on the memory of his followers (for we all know that memory is often unreliable)? Could it be that he wasn’t really interested in what his disciples thought? Could it be that he looked for changes in acting, in doing, in relationship? If Yeshua was (is) a prophet, why do we expect him to deliver a theology about God? What if he just wants us to live differently? What if all the theological arguments are just a Hellenized waste of time? What do we do with a statement like this: “Actually, no one ever begins with theory; that frame is an illusion”? We bring our lives—our habits of thinking and believing and behaving and feeling—with us whenever we read the Bible or ponder doctrines or consider systems for planning.”[3]
Topical Index: prophet, theology, Jeremiah 1:2
[1] Mark Lau Branson, “Disruptions Meet Practical Theology,” Fuller Magazine Issue 12 (2018), p. 43.
[2] Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth, p. 95.
[3] Branson, op. cit., p. 44.
