KENYATTA GILBERT: What does “being prophetic” mean to you today?
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: I think it means to identify with some clarity and boldness the kinds of political and economic practices that contradict the purposes of God. And if they contradict the purposes of God, they will come to no good end. If you think about economic injustice or ecological abuse of the environment, it is the path of disaster. In the Old Testament they traced the path of disaster, and it seems to me that our work now is to trace the path of disaster in which we are engaged.
The amazing thing about the prophets is that they were able to pivot, after they had done that, to talk with confidence that God is working out an alternative world of well-being, of justice, of peace, of security—in spite of the contradictions.
How do we establish a sense of clarity about who we think God is in this world of radical pluralism? As long as we try to talk in terms of labels or creeds or mantras, we will never get on the same page. But if we talk about human possibility and human hurt and human suffering, then it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking with Muslims or Christians or liberals or conservatives; the irreducible reality of human hurt is undeniable.
It’s universal. Then we have to talk about the causes of human hurt and the remedies of human hurt. And then we get to politics and economics. I don’t think that’s easy given political pluralism, but the prophetic word on that basis can be fairly unambiguous. It’s no mystery about the kinds of economic practices that are causing human hurt. Under President Trump, they basically have to do with deregulation, which means unleashing greedy power.
If God is a God who intervenes on the human plane, what do we believe about God reversing or addressing those practices? I believe God energizes and empowers human agency. And human agents, when they are empowered, can change [these practices]. What happens is that well-off people, like me, don’t want to exercise human agency; we like it the way it is. And if you are terribly disadvantaged, you can be in such despair that you don’t undertake any human agency. The point of preaching is to say that God’s hopes are to be performed through human agency. The promise of the gospel is that the powers and principalities will yield to human agency that is authorized and powered by God; it’s the capacity to transfer divine authority into human agency—which of course is what Dr. King did when he mobilized people to engage in civic actions.
Kenyatta R. Gilbert, founding director of The Preaching Project, is professor of homiletics at the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. He is author of A Pursued Justice: Black Preaching from the Great Migration to Civil Rights and Exodus Preaching: Crafting Sermons About Justice and Hope.
Walter Brueggemann, a Sojourners contributing editor, is professor emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.
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