Everyone Has A Prophetic Imagination

It was several years ago when I sat in a cozy living room along with several other students as we listened to Dr. Richard Beck explore our ideas and thoughts behind hospitality and the Church. At some point, Beck turned to me as the sole leader in the room who led a House Church movement and asked, “How do you discern and respond to heresy in your church?” At the time, I wasn’t quite prepared for the question as I fumbled through the best answer I could give in that moment.

That experience seems to have always remained in my memories as I recall it often, including when I heard an answer to the same question brought to Dr. Joerg Rieger in a class I recently was taking part in online. Building upon a theological truth that religion can be found in all things — traditions, economics, family life, politics, social systems, etc. — Rieger says the definition of heresy can be articulated both to the individual and the community through the explorative balance between two questions:

* What brings life into the world?

* What puts death into the world?

Is this answer problematic because the definition of heresy lies within two subjective inquisitions? Maybe. But historically, when the definition of heresy’s meaning has been kept within an institutional objectivity, it has often led into oppressive prejudicial corruption and harmful injustices. Perhaps the meaning of heresy was always meant to be kept within a human relationally organic and subjectivity to the pursuit of justice and creational well being. Now that truly is a mouthful!

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To maybe try and bring some practicality in working out heresy and the pursuit of just meaning in our lives, God instilled a sense of the prophetic into each of us (Eph. 4:11 — APEST). In a sense, everyone has a prophetic imagination to grow in tune with and shape the world around them.

Unlike the false assumption that prophecy is about foretelling the future, a proper understanding to the prophetic imagination as articulated by Walter Brueggemann is that it is meant to “nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” In a simpler expression shared by Krista Tippett:

“[The prophetic imagination] helps us connect the dots between the world as it is and the world as it might be. It also tends to emerge in moments of chaos and change.”

What are some practical ways we then can learn and grow with our prophetic imaginations?

To start, perhaps we can begin to allow it to weave a visualization and articulation of God’s, or the Divine’s desire for our reality. In a deeper sense within ourselves, we can envision a world that is significantly better then the one we are in. This imagination begins to build a vocabulary and sometimes poetic language within us that articulates the hopes and dreams of higher society and well being for all in equity and equality. Sometimes this breaks out in our reality like it did with Martin Luther King’s speech “I have a dream!”

Another way we might begin to practice the prophetic imagination is to provide spaces and time for lament and the processing of grief. It is courageously being a voice crying out from the marginalized wilderness saying we must seek forgiveness and redemption.

How might this practice “give life” to the world today?

When wounds have been created through unjust actions and oppressive historical events, real healing cannot truly be experienced without the willingness to grieve such experiences and seek there acknowledgment. Events such as the apartheid of South Africa, the Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsi’s, the Colonization of the Americas, the slavery and racism of blacks and the BIPOC populations, and the long historical narrative to the oppression of Indigenous People both in North America and across the globe have left a wake that leaves deep systemic roots in our society.

I don’t think we need to necessarily just see these events and wounds solely in grand accounts, either. Each of us personally has experienced grief and suffering differently. These too need to be processed and allowed space for healing. We must learn to speak these stories both personally and corporately in open confession before learning to share together in a new story of reconciliation and social transformation.

The prophetic imagination can also practically reveal pathways of mercy a