[Presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver, Colorado.]
Short overview
We suffer today, so goes the claim, from a shortage of prophets. What is needed is a new generation of Americans willing and equipped to speak truth to power. Hovering as we are over the precipice of irreparable political polarization, ecological disaster, and explosive racialized violence—among other impending cataclysms—we are in desperate need of those who would emulate the Hebrew prophets’ gutsy honesty. “Who will speak,” asks a modern hymn, “if you don’t?” This petition has been also expressed in a tidal wave of texts, published in the last several years, all designed to cultivate such a class of prophets. One dares to refer to this need as the “prophetic imperative”; another pleads, “where have all the prophets gone?” A particularly valuable volume from Albert Raboteau tells the stories of seven “American prophets,” whose audacity to denounce social injustice deserves both our acclaim and our emulation. As the political stakes rise, the need for bold prophets seems ever more urgent.
Among the many currently advocating the adoption of prophetic language is Cathleen Kaveny. In her 2016 Prophecy without Contempt, Kaveny contends that prophetic language is a tool—though certainly not the only tool—available to those who wish to make moral and political claims in the public square. Though she certainly recommends caution as citizens consider engaging in what she calls “prophetic indictment,” Kaveny is confident that prophetic rhetoric might be constructive in political discourse. The examples of contemporary prophetic discourse she draws on, including King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, seem to bear her confidence out. Indeed, the prophet, for Kaveny as for Raboteau, is a moral hero.
I share the enthusiasm Kaveny—and so many others—express about the value of the prophetic in contemporary public discourse. However, I sense that her account merits revision and refinement. Specifically, I claim that our understanding and endorsement of prophetic discourse is enhanced when it underscores the value of the prophet’s confession more than the prophet’s indictment. Prophetic confession better addresses both the collective and complex nature of the injustice prophets seek to bring to an end. It thus more fully enables the prophet to do three things: to understand her own relationship to the public she addresses, to acknowledge the complexity of the wrong she condemns, and to further interrogate the circumstances that brought about that wrong.
I begin by outlining the basic contours of Kaveny’s account of prophetic indictment, highlighting the valuable contributions she makes to the ongoing conversations about religious discourse in the public square. For Kaveny, prophetic indictment is quintessentially different from moral deliberation. Thereafter, I turn to the Biblical concept of confession, and explore the term’s meaning within and beyond the prophetic texts. As I show, the use of the term, both in the Hebrew prophets and in epistles from the New Testament, reveals that confession denotes a certain communality. Despite modern associations with the term that evoke images of a priest in a wooden stall, waiting to hear a parishioner’s admission of sin, the word confession connotes anything but a private affair. In the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, it is in confession that the prophet’s and the addressee’s shared identity is manifested. The prophet’s identification with her people raises the thorny subject of individual and collective agency, which is taken up in the paper’s fourth section. There, I show how a recuperated conception of prophetic confession allows an aspiring prophet to navigate the volatile waters of collective injustice. As such, prophetic confession can better speak to issues like those named at the outset of this proposal, such as ecological and racial injustice, which are uniquely collective undertakings. The confessing prophet stands at the juncture between individual and collective agency, and thereby has the ability to open up possibilities for collective amendment. By speaking with and on behalf of her audience, in both confession of sin and confession of the possibility that things might be otherwise, the prophet can initiate the change she prescribes. Like a rudder of a barge, the confessing prophet is able to steer her people to righteous collective action. Finally, the fifth section demonstrates the ways that prophetic confession enables the assessment of complexity in moral discernment.
Throughout the paper, I use the example of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address—which Kaveny herself considers an ideal example of prophecy without contempt in the concluding chapter of her book—to substantiate the argument I present in the paper. The reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural I provide confirms that this example of constructive prophetic discourse includes as much confession as indictment. This project is particularly helpful in the context of emerging conversations about moral injury, as the confessing prophet is uniquely able to name both the wrongs a community has suffered and the wrongs it has wrought. Central to the claims I make in this paper is the notion that participating in the perpetration of wrongs does not render one unable to speak out against such wrongs. In fact, repentance of and atonement for those wrongs might just require prophetic speech. The morally injured are not excluded from prophetic confession, but rather are ideal candidates for it. In the cases of prophetic confession I examine in the paper, it appears that the confessing prophet might even play a part in the process of moral repair.