Reading Like a Prophet

Tomorrow I start teaching a 12-week Sunday School series at First Mennonite Church Champaign-Urbana.  My goal is to post a preview of each week here on first things first, so follow along if you’re interested.

The title of the class is “The Gospel of Isaiah,” although it’s kind of a bait-and-switch.  I want to use passages from Isaiah to talk broadly about the Old Testament, its value as Scripture, the nature of prophecy, and especially ways we can approach the text in order to grasp its richness and depth.  An alternate title might be: “How to Read Scripture Like a Prophet.”  Let me try and explain.

The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,
keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation,
forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,
yet by no means clearing the guilty,
but visiting the iniquity of the parents
upon the children
and the children’s children,
to the third and the fourth generation.
(Exodus 34:6-7)

The prophets of the Bible were masters of their tradition.  They knew their world, their people, their history inside and out.  One might say it’s part of what made them so capable of rendering God’s words in such palpable, raw, and often beautiful ways.  Most importantly, they were discerning individuals; they read their own context with eyes illuminated by a keen insight into the will of God for their specific time and place (many call this inspiration).  Take the passage from Exodus 34 quoted above.  It’s a formula, developed sometime during Israel’s walk with God (no need to speculate when), and used again and again in different contexts in order to say something about the God with whom they walk (for example, Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9-10; Jeremiah 32:28).  In each of these different contexts, the formula is given certain emphases or slight revisions that change its meaning.

Look at how Nahum uses part of the formula:

A jealous and avenging God is the Lord,
the Lord is avenging and wrathful;
the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries
and rages against his enemies.
The Lord is slow to anger but great in power,
and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty.
(Nahum 1:2-3)

The last two lines resemble the second half of the Exodus formula, but the first two lines have changed drastically!  Nahum is a short prophetic book condemning the behavior of Nineveh, the capital city of the great Assyrian empire, and it begins by citing a very traditional part of Israel’s faith: “The Lord is slow to anger…”  But, says Nahum, “great in power.”

The book of Jonah uses this formula in a similar way.  His citation is even closer to the Exodus text (Jonah 4:2), but Jonah employs it in a completely different context — he’s not at all happy that these are God’s ways.  Jonah knew that, if he called Nineveh to repentance, they would repent and God would spare them.  So, he says: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”  Jonah was responsible for God’s sparing of Israel’s greatest enemy!

The point here is that “reading like a prophet” looks something like a recycling of traditional material in new contexts.  But (and here’s the scary/exciting part), that recycling is often critical or even tradition-altering.  The author of Jonah knew that Israel was prone to think of their “gracious and merciful” God when it came to their own relationship with him.  But others?  The vast and horrible Assyrian Empire?  Prophets are no doubt outside-the-box thinkers, but they get all their material from inside the box.

I borrowed a lot of this argument from one of my favorite OT theologians, Phyllis Trible.  Trible calls this context-sensitive recycling of material “the hermeneutical clue within the text.”  She wants us to see that new contexts serve as the motive for comprehending the religious tradition in new ways.  As she puts it, “context altered text.”  Isaiah does this too.  He expresses God’s frustration with practices like sacrifice and fasting in order to re-cast the tradition in more meaningful ways for his time and place.  After all, what use are sacrifices when people go hungry?  And he and the prophet Joel both employ what looks like a traditional metaphor (swords/plowshares; Isaiah 2:4; Joel 3:10), but in opposite ways for different purposes.

So, to read like a prophet we must immerse ourselves in the box (in our case, Isaiah) and discover exciting ways in which it takes on new life in our own time and place.  As Trible puts it, biblical metaphors are on a “journey” through Scripture, and one of our interpretive goals is to discover how that metaphor is shaped by its varied uses along the journey.  The prophetic word declares something new in relation to something old.  So our task of “reading like a prophet” is twofold: First, we want to discover the new thing that Isaiah declared and how it relates to the old; and second (this is the part too often overlooked), we have to relate the old (Isaiah) to a new declaration of our own!  We haven’t finished reading until we’ve done both of these things.

In our Sunday School class, we’re going to look at different ways that such declarations are made.  What sorts of new declarations does Isaiah make?  Do we see development and “newness” even within the book of Isaiah itself?  How do different interpretive communities today take up Isaiah’s work, claim it as their own, and recycle it in order to make new proclamations for the people of God?

Next week:  Historical overview.  Texts: Isaiah 1:1; 7:1-9; 36-39; 2 Kgs 15-20

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