the prophetic

I've been thinking again about the prophetic. What it is to be prophetic. Maybe I'll try to put it together into a coherent whole eventually, but I just wanted to jot down a few notes. I've written about it before, in past years. Most of my thoughts have to do with the misinterpretation of the prophetic in recent years, confusing it with activism (Christian activists really like to claim the term).

One thing is that the prophets tended to speak alone, not in a crowd. Speaking boldly, but from a position of vulnerability. Speaking with the voice of God, not the voice of the people. And that's the biggest thing, that the prophet spoke for God. They weren't kicking off a social campaign against injustice, they were announcing God's judgment and prophesying what God would do. If God didn't actually make it happen, then they were shown to be false prophets. But it always depended on God, the initiative, the words (or actions), and the actualizing of the words. The prophet himself remained weak and often marginalized by the people. But God's power was evident through the prophetic words.

So the key aspect of the prophetic is not boldness or critique or the imaginative use of props. It's a deep awareness of what God is saying and doing.