Seth’s World View

Walter Bruggemman – The Prophetic Imagination

Prophets:
1. criticize – helping someone see their condition, perhaps for the first time
2. energize – be an imagination for people who no longer have one

1. Imagining the unimaginable
a. My task in the world as a Christian is to use our imagination in a world that has lost its imagination
b. Be an imagination, alternative
c. See potential in people that they don’t see themselves
d. Lions and lambs going to breakfast together

Theology of Peace has to do with more than war. Shalom means the presence of goodness, harmony, and richness. Our job is to reinstitute shalom in a fallen world. Good theology has to be unrealistic. Be creative, imaginative, different. Don’t accept what the world considers to be normal as normal. Be unreal.

What if—the basis of all story. The small child asks all the what ifs. All of life is story, story unraveling and revealing meaning. Despite our inability to control circumstances, we are given the gift of being free to respond to them in our own way, creatively or destructively. As far as we know, even the higher animals (with the exception, perhaps, of the dolphin) do not have this consciousness, not necessarily selfconscious, but consciousness of having a part in the story. And the story involves what seems to the closed mind to be impossible—another reason for disbelieving it. But, as Christians, we may choose to live by most glorious impossibles. Or not to live, which is why in the churches, by and large, the impossibles, the Annunciation and the Transfiguration and walkings on water and raisings from the dead, are ignored or glossed over.
Madeleine L’Engle, “Walking on Water”