Walter Brueggemann Prophetic Voices In Exile Sparknotes

Hopeful Imagination
Prophetic voices in Exile (Walter Brueggemann)

A Book Review by PJ Shrestha

METHODIST THEOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
Lecturer: Prof. Lim Sang Kook
Submission Date: 12/10/2012

HOPEFUL IMAGINATION: PROPHETIC VOICES IN EXILE
Walter Brueggemann
Fortress Press, 1986
In this book Walter Brueggemann looks at the three most prominent prophets during the period of the Jews' exile in Babylon after and around the time of 587 B.C. What links Jeremiah, Ezekiel and 2nd Isaiah is that in different ways each one spoke to the exiles. Jeremiah focuses on how God sent them into exile but continued to love them. Ezekiel focuses on God's holiness and freedom and the fact that he is calling them to recognize that God does not exist simply
Jeremiah not only has a sense of the one who calls, but he has a sense of what it means to be called. Brueggemann uses the term “call” not in the sense of a datable experience, but as a sense that one’s life has a theonomous cast, is deeply referred to the purposes of God, which gives freedom and distance and perspective in relation to all other concerns. Jeremiah is prepared to join issue around matters of truth and falsehood. Because he is a porous, impressionistic poet, however, it does not follow that he is a relativizer. Jeremiah would have found odd and scandalous our modern notions of individualized truth in which each person is free to hold his or her own perception of truth. The purpose of porous language is to leave the poem and the reality to which it points open for the experience of the listener. Poets indeed trust other people to continue the image, to finish the thought of their own experience using their own metaphorical images. Jeremiah’s rich imagination intends to challenge the settled givens which make policy too self-confident and unquestioned. Such a social function of poetry is an aspect of the critical study of Jeremiah that is yet to be
This is the question that God's people are left with in the face of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 587 BCE. With the reality of exile, Israel's faith must find a new existence with God and project a hope for the future that takes into account their profound loss. Walter Brueggemann traces some of themes from the prophetic voices of this time that allow Israel to live in exile with hopeful imagination. For Brueggemann, 587 is a pivot, even a metaphor, for Israel's existence. This point in time must bring "the end of the known world and its relinquishment," and "the reception of a new world given through these poets," the prophets of God. Hopeful Imagination traces the prophetic voices found in Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and 2 Isaiah. Each voice, using poetry as a subversive and liberating way of speaking, paints a different picture of the door that will lead to hope and new life with God. The section on Jeremiah is wonderful. This chapter, "Only Grief Permits Newness," powerfully traces the difficult task of speaking the truth of loss before a people lost in self-deluding slogans. It is Jeremiah's task to cause the people to embrace their loss, to convince them of the incurability of their wound. It is only through grief that newness can take root. "If the hurt is fully expressed and embraced, it liberates god to heal. Then all of the old power arrangements are jeopardized as the new healing transforms. Nothing