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In Reconciliation in Communion: A Word to the 76th General Convention of the Episcopal Church, we, the authors, make the claim that we “reject the way of unilateralism and self-sufficiency as undermining the very justice it seeks to establish.” Of course, to claim that a means to an end undermines that end is to engage in paradox, and, for the sake of clarity, paradox needs unpacking. In this series of articles, I hope to do a bit of that unpacking by showing why we as The Episcopal Church must renounce unilateralism and self-sufficiency if we are to see the fruits of justice that are the hope of our prophetic ministry. In Part I, I will draw upon the work of Walter Brueggemann and Charles Marsh to explore the nature of prophetic ministry and show how the prophetic drive for justice necessarily results in the reunion of the separated. In Part 2-4, I will begin to examine the intersection of ecclesiology and soteriology to explore the mission of the Church and show how a ministry that subverts the well-being and good order of Christian fellowship that are themselves means of grace ceases to be prophetic. Finally, in Part V, I will offer a constructive account of principles of discernment in communion the practice of which nurture and protect the theological vision that is essential to authentic prophetic ministry.

A Theological Account of Prophetic Ministry

Prophetic Christian ministry, understood theologically, is that ministry which calls God’s rebellious people out of our variegated forms of rebellion that constitute our refusal to perform our God-given identity as God’s people. As the Easter people, we are the people who receive our identity from the Holy Spirit as gift and on that basis enter into the Father’s promises to Israel; and, as the Body of Christ, we are “the concretization of what ‘gift’ means.” We receive the gift of identity as God’s people, and, by denoting concretely the Giver of existence and of that gift of identity, we bring others into that gift.¹ Prophetic ministry thus calls us to repent and embrace our identity as Body of Christ through whom “the world in its entirety becomes conscripted into Israel's destiny in and for the world.” ²

This rather dense theological description suggests several important characteristics of prophetic ministry. First, it is a “call;” that is, it is a proclamation, a word spoken, performed, and embodied. Indeed, that word is God’s Word, given by the Holy Spirit and proclaimed by particular members of and from within the Household of God.

Second, it is God’s Word addressed to a particular community of faith in a particular historical context. This means that the prophetic Word is not a universal word addressed to the ‘world,’ but rather is a particular Word addressed to the baptized, who alone have ears to hear it. Thus, the prophetic Word is a Word spoken by the baptized to and for the baptized. Prophetic ministry calls the Church to be the Church.

Third, this prophetic Word from the baptized to the baptized has a specific content. It is the Word that summons the baptized to remember and return to the Covenant of the Cross into which they were initiated in their baptism. That is, it is a summons for the baptized to return to the Way of holiness and faithfulness revealed by Christ. Moreover, it is a summons for the baptized to embody the unity of the triune God in their common life together.

Fourth, the specific content of the prophetic Word redirects a particular community within the Household of God to the path of the people “sent” to be a light to all the nations. That is, it redirects the church to her vocation of embodying Christ in the ‘world’ so that, as a result of that encounter, others are brought into the ‘gift’ and thereby receive the blessings God intends for them. In this sense, the prophetic Word propels the Household of God beyond the boundary of Church and ‘world,’ so that, as mercy and righteousness kiss briefly in history, the world is brought into Israel’s destiny of rest in God.

Prophetic Ministry as Embodied Judgment

Insofar as it is addressed to the “rebellious” people of God, prophetic ministry is a Word of judgment that “serves to criticize ... the dominant consciousness.” It aims at a “rejection and delegitimizing of the present ordering of things,” ³ a termination of a particular politics and “removal of subjugating structures” ⁴ by which the rebellious people of God cling to gods that are not God. As an embodied Word of judgment engaging “false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric,” ⁵ “prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated.” ⁶

Because the prophetic Word is judgment proclaimed from within - from the baptized and to the baptized - that bears witness to the rejection of the gift of identity by God’s people, prophetic ministry entails both a “suffering with” (compassion) and a mourning. The “suffering with” means that prophetic ministry imitates Jesus in “pitching tent” with those addressed, and especially with those oppressed by the idolatrous politics and subjugating structures, joining them in their circumstances.⁷ “Suffering with” the oppressed in its pitched tent, prophetic ministry stands in the breech between God and God’s people, expressing imaginatively the pathos of both in view of the people’s embrace of idols and rejection of their vocation of mercy and righteousness. Like Jeremiah and the psalmists lamenting the ruins of the Temple, “There is mourning to be done for those who do not know of the deathliness of their situation. There is mourning to be done with those who know pain and suffering and lack the power or freedom to bring it to speech.” ⁸ Such compassionate grief is the “precondition to joy,” for only in recognizing the tragedy of our rejection of the gift of identity and existence do we see once again the giftedness of Creation and our re-creation and so turn towards the right relation between created and Creator through which God blesses us with peace and joy.

Prophetic Ministry as Embodied Hope

Insofar as it redirects the community to the path of the people “sent,” prophetic ministry is a Word of hope that “serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move.” ⁹ In this sense, prophetic ministry is necessarily imaginative, for, with its tent pitched in the present politics, it points to a future beyond the horizon ordered by “the politics of Jesus” ¹⁰ in its effort “to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception and alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture.”¹¹ Indeed, prophetic ministry is “incarnational evangelism” that proclaims its Word of hope by embodying it.¹² It reminds God’s people, by “performing” concretely the solidarity with the oppressed that Jesus manifests, that Jesus did not send a book of wisdom or an abstract law as the agent of his salvific mission, but rather a unified and “spirit-filled fellowship,” a koininia of sufferings to be passed from generation to generation.¹³

Prophetic ministry redirects the people of God by incarnating the Easter Word of hope in the present.¹⁴ Amidst the reality and dominance of the ambiguous and unsatisfying present, it points to the future in which God will perfect and complete the present.¹⁵ It then calls the oppressed people to claim, cling, and rest in God’s resurrecting promise not merely as a future hope but as a present reality. Prophetic ministry thereby claims in a particular community within a particular context a liturgical space where concrete, “face-to-face reconciliation” is possible,¹⁶ that “social space of reconciliation introduced into history by the Church, empowered by the ‘triumph and beat of the drums of Easter.’”¹⁷

Prophetic Ministry as the Justice-Seeking Drive Toward the Reunion of the Separated

In view of Jesus’ summary of the law with reference to Dt. 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 in Matt 22:37, all of the foregoing could be unpacked from Paul Tillich’s famous account of love as “that which drives towards the reunion of the separated.” Tillich’s account focuses our attention similarly on the demonic structures of subjugation that perpetuate the politics of estrangement. Prophetic ministry does “the strange work of love” in destroying or re-creating those structures that trap persons in the despair of profound alienation. Tillich similarly presses us never to be content with merely abstract pronouncements that fail to address the particular realities of a community.

“Every decision which is based on the abstract formulation of justice alone is essentially and inescapably unjust. Justice can be reached only if both the demand of the universal law and the demand of the particular situation are accepted and made effective in the concrete situation. But it is love which creates participation in the concrete situation. Justice is just precisely because of the love that is implicit in it.”¹⁸

So prophetic ministry is never fulfilled by the achievement of consensus about abstractions, but drives intentionally and inexorably towards the real embodiment of a social community reflecting the justice and compassion of the triune God.

This begs the question of the meaning of justice. In our secular age, we can no longer assume in our discernment of God’s will that we share a theological understanding of justice. It is conceivable in our time to imagine and care profoundly about justice without showing much interest in how our understanding of God ought to shape our understanding of justice. The justice of ordinary time presupposes our ability to calculate what is just based on an ethic of proportionality; justice is distributive or retributive, giving to each according to what they deserve. This is the world’s understanding of justice.

The Meaning of Justice

But prophetic ministry that is not grounded in what God has revealed about the nature of justice aims at a telos sustained entirely in the immanent frame of humanistic good intentions, and thus is not really prophetic ministry at all. It has no nourishment beyond itself; it is a flower cut off from its sustenance; it is like the grass that withers and dies. For we cannot embody a politics of justice and compassion that is not itself the politics of the One in whose image we are made. For those engaged in the prophetic ministry of Christ - and especially those who assert their autonomy in pursuing justice in the world - the question is not whether justice is an urgent priority or how we are to weigh intrinsic claims to justice, but rather why the Church’s pursuit of justice should ever be guided by any standard other than the Incarnation.

All that we know of our telos - of what it means to be the image of God - is revealed not in the acts of men, but in the acts of God. We discover the authentic politics of justice and compassion in the politics of Jesus. Our prophetic pursuit of justice thus begins properly with revelation. And that leads us to consider the Cross. When we contemplate the Cross, we discover that the principle of divine justice is grace. The Cross is the gift of Godself so that we might be at one with God and with each other. What's revealed is that divine justice is not at all about getting what we deserve, but about getting what we don't deserve. Justice is not about proportionality or retribution at all. It’s about reconciliation and transformation. When we contemplate the Cross, we discover that, in the mind of God, there is no distinction between justice and mercy. Indeed, to posit a distinction between justice and mercy is to create God in our own likeness, as F.D. Maurice warns:

All notions respecting a conflict in the Divine mind between the claims of justice and mercy; all notions of the Son winning from the Father that which did not proceed from His own free, gracious will; all notions which substitute the deliverance from punishment for the deliverance from sin; all notions which weaken the force of the words, or make them anything less than the classical words on this matter, “Lo, I come to do thy will, oh God,” are, it seems to me, of this kind, subversive of the Divine Revelation, Rationalistic in the worst sense of that word, not to be countenanced or tolerated....”¹⁹

When we contemplate the Cross we see that, in the inner life of the triune God, justice and mercy kiss. And it is that inner life that the Church is called to denote. Divine justice is creative and life-giving; justice is the form of that of which love is the substance; and, since love is that which drives towards the reunion of the separated, justice is the form of reconciled, reunited, resurrected community. We recognize justice in real unity, real restoration, real healing, a real return to wholeness for that which is broken. The powers and principalities that prevent any of God's children from participation in the abundant love God intends for all are conquered so that all are restored to the capacity for worship. In short, justice takes the form of creative reunion that makes peace and joy with God and neighbor possible. Authentic prophetic ministry is therefore the justice-seeking drive toward the reunion of the separated that results in the new life in Christ we are called to walk together.

Looking Ahead

This understanding of prophetic ministry as that which drives always towards the creative justice of the resurrection community has important implications for its boundaries. As we shall see in Part II of this series, a ministry that subverts the well-being and good order of the Church that are themselves means of grace ceases to be prophetic.

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