The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us…The alternative consciousness to be nurtured, on the one hand, serves to criticize in dismantling the dominant consciousness…On the other hand, that alternative consciousness to be nurtured serves to energize persons and communities by its promise of another time and situation toward which the community of faith may move. - Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 3.

Criticizing: Criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their promises, which they could not in the face of the free God. It is only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore. - p. 11.

Energizing: Prophecy cannot be separated very long from doxology, or it will either whither of become ideology…[D]oxology is the last full act of human freedom and justice…The one reality Egypt could never tolerate [is] “The Lord will reign for ever and ever” (Exodus 15:18). (We must learn that such doxologies are always polemical; the unstated counter-theme, only whispered, is always “and not Pharaoh.”) - pp. 17-18.

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