Just before Christmas, the radio show On Being with Krista Tippett featured an interview with Walter Brueggemann who says that prophetic imaginations are poetic imaginations whom "you cannot silence."But how do these prophets' metaphors transform this chaotic moment of history? Krista talks with him about the prophets who both anchor the Hebrew Bible and have transcended it in many places across history — a figure like Isaiah, whose words also echo throughout the New Testament as it's read at Christmastime — and how they're just as essential in our own chaotic times:
"What the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition, it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation and then it's deathly. So we have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you're going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame.
Which, again, is why the poetry is so important because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening whereas the doctrinal practice of the church is always to close and close and close until you’re left with nothing that has any transformative power."
To listen to the entire interview, click here.
