Prophecy is an embarrassing subject for a religion “come of age,” says James J. G. Dunn, for “true prophecy suffers from that most damning of all indictments for a respectable Westerner—it is ‘not nice.’ ”
It is not that we do not esteem prophets. We talk about them in terms of highest praise. We write books about Isaiah and Jeremiah and the others. We come behind no generation in building their tombs (Luke 11:47 ff.).
We even clamor for “a prophetic voice” to be raised in our own day against the evils that we see on every hand. And from time to time we hail some vocal protester as a modern-day prophet. Our generation finds it strange to be accused of embarrassment in the face of prophecy. Who could honor prophets more than we do?
But Dunn is right. Where prophecy is concerned we have debased the currency. What we call a prophet is not what the Bible knows by that name. When, for example, we praise somebody for being a prophetic voice in this degenerate modern world, chances are that he is putting out an opinion with which we agree but which we have not been able to persuade people to accept. And if the opinion in question happens to be rejected by the leaders of some ecclesiastical group, particularly the leaders of one or more of the old-line denominations, that makes it just about perfect. That is the kind of prophecy we understand and appreciate. What more could we look for in a prophet?
Sometimes, it is true, the “prophet” says something that affects our conduct. But we dismiss that. After all, it is unreasonable to expect a man to be right all the time. So we reject him when he rebukes us and accept him when he sets forward our pet ideas.
We do much the same thing when we read the prophets of the Bible. We find Isaiah sternly rebuking extravagance in dress and accessories (Isa. 3:18 ff.) and it never enters our heads that this has anything to do with our keeping up with the fashions.
We read that Jeremiah complained of the attitude of the men of his day toward their place of worship. They could not imagine God’s allowing the overthrow of a place of worship that meant so much to them and must also, they presumed, mean a lot to him. So they went on in their ways of wickedness, complacently thinking that God would never allow trouble to come to his temple and those who worshiped there. But this could not refer to us and our place of worship and the kind of lives we lead. Could it?
Or, in our prosperous age, we read Amos’s denunciations of the luxuriously selfish, “those who are at ease in Zion” (Amos 6), and never reflect that this might have implications for us. It is always someone else who is the proper object of the denunciations. Prophets just don’t hit us. They hit other people.
The trouble is that we are largely unconscious of all this. We never take a good look at what we understand by prophecy. We simply go on our complacent way, secure in our conviction that true prophets never mean us. But is this good enough?
Prophets are first and foremost men who can say, “Thus saith the Lord.” They speak from their immediate experience of God, and they say what God wants said to the men of their day. Sometimes that word is a word of consolation. More often it is a word of condemnation. But, whichever it is, it is to be received as the word of God, not man. It is to be obeyed, not argued with or evaded.
In the strictest sense the prophets are a closed group, “the godly fellowship of the prophets,” men who were inspired to utter the words that are enshrined for us in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Those words are part of the definitive revelation. They stand for all time as God’s word to man, a word that is capable of being applied to the new needs of every new generation. It is well that we take this not as fossilized revelation, telling us how men of other days came short of what was required, but as God’s rebuke to us for our repetition in our own day of the sins and shortcomings of the men of old.
But the term “prophet” has been used of other men. We read of prophets in the New Testament, men who left no books to be included in Scripture but who spoke the word of God boldly to the men of their day. And the New Testament church is recorded as having taken notice of the way these men spoke.
We need such a sensitivity to what God is saying today. Someone has said that Thomas Carlyle believed in a God who lived until the days of Oliver Cromwell. This may be a libel on a great man, but certainly the attitude is one we can recognize. Some of us live as though God’s activity ceased when the last book of the New Testament was written. Others take his activity down a bit in the pages of history, until such time as the Catholic church appeared in all its fullness, or until the time of the Reformation, or the Enlightenment, or the Evangelical Revival, or something else. We do not expect God’s activity today.
But for vital religion it is imperative that we hear the voice of God in our own day. It is not enough that God spoke in earlier days if he is silent to us.
This does not mean we should abandon the revelation made in Scripture and rely on our own living experience. I am convinced that Scripture is more than ever necessary in our day. Every word that God has spoken is important, and there is no future in overlooking the guidance he has given in the authoritative words of Holy Writ.
But there is a danger in trying to confine God to his revelation and his past activity. It is desperately important that we find the word of God to this generation, not simply luxuriate in his word to the days of old. Some of our problems are new, and all of them have to be seen for what they are, not for what the problems of men of old were. In other words there is a constant need for this (as for every other) generation to hear the word of God for its own day.
And that means listening carefully to those who have genuine insight into the ways of God and the word of God. We no longer have prophets in the sense of men who speak the authoritative word of Scripture. Perhaps we no longer have men who can say “Thus saith the Lord” in the sense of giving us some new word of God. But we do have men who can relate the revealed will of God to the new day in which we live. They are not comfortable men. If we are looking for someone to confirm us in our prejudices we must look elsewhere.
In view of their differences from the canonical prophets it may be that we should not call them “prophets.” But call them what we will, they are important. And it is important that we heed them.
For without a living word from God there is no future either for individual piety or for the church.
