At the retreat for elders and deacons which was the focus of my reflections in last month’s newsletter, we kept coming back to this statement in Walter Brueggemann’s book, The Prophetic Imagination: “…Perhaps we have no more important theological investigation than to discern in whose image we have been made. And if we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the ‘haves,’ oppression cannot be far behind.”

Brueggemann’s words grow out of his analysis of the prophetic work of Moses who brought an alternative consciousness to that “little band of slaves” which God freed from the oppression of Pharaoh’s empire. His point is that the program Moses carried out was primarily “an assault on the consciousness [my italics] of the empire, aimed at nothing less than the dismantling of the empire both in its social practices and in its mythic pretensions.”

What is important here is the role human thinking and imagination play in our understanding of who we are and where our freedom lies—what Brueggemann calls “the battle for language.” He asserts that the existence of a genuine alternative community freed from the enslavement of imperial thinking “…is rooted… in the genuine alternative that Yahweh is.” It is Yahweh who “makes possible and requires an alternative theology and an alternative sociology. Prophecy begins in discerning how genuinely alternative he is[!]”

God made us to exist in communities of justice and compassion. But there is always the temptation to understand ourselves first and foremost through other people’s eyes, or through the lens of our consumerist culture, or through the false claims of those in our own society and elsewhere who advocate violence, ethnic purity, or other guises of exclusivist thinking as sources of ultimate security and identity. Prophetic memory never lets go of the consciousness that we are all made in the image of God. That discernment is the foundation of the genuine hope and freedom of God’s alternative community.