William Blake: The Ghost of a Flea
Prophets and prophecy: the most misunderstood part of OT, “mysterious messengers”. A random chunk from a prophetic book will offer a confusing, seemingly muddled, confusion of vivid picture language. Yet, three simple principles can (usually) unlock the mystery and allow the prophets to speak:
- conversion not prediction
- context not timeless
- conversation not monologue
As I’ll explain briefly in this podcast these three principles can cause mere fortune tellers to become evangelists, and their mysterious messages to become a call to convert, to change our behaviour, to redeem our world…
Tags: 3 simple rules, Context, E100, prophet, prophets, Reading
I will remember the 3 C’s! Thank you Tim. That was very clear.
Very clear, simple yet room for depth inquiry.
Great!
Thanks Tim
Thanks Dr Tim. Your approach is simple but profound, it answers, could use and in a sense could by-passes a lot of interesting insights of “critical/ Geschichte”-type research. Your e-mail regarding using it at my application to Pasifika pastors is apt. In the light of my remark about von Rad’s “re-interpretation” aspect of the prophets I would arrogantly add a few aspects to each of the “C”‘s. It is also so applicable to folk not versed in original languages which has facets touching my approach to “narrativism” and “non-literatism”!
Yes, this is just the very simplest presentation attempting to get the essentials into five minutes 🙂 There is certainly more to say, for hours and hours (36 class hours in my undergraduate course, and the same on Isaiah at postgraduate level) but to capture the most significant things that can be said in 5 minutes I’m pretty happy with this 😉
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