Introduction^*

* Dedicated to the memory of John Pettegrew.

“Prophetic politics” is the proclamation of a radical change expressed in religious language at a time of deep existential and political crisis. The term brings together two distinct fields: The first is the prophetic, a medium in all religions, usually represented by an individual who is said to be the mouthpiece of the divine. Whether pagan or monotheistic, male or female, ancient or modern, the prophet is always the teacher and the critic, instructing and scolding, never afraid to express his or her opinion, even when it puts her life at risk. The second field is that of politics. Based on the idea of the polis and the politea, it has stood, since Thomas Hobbes, for the relationship between the people and the sovereign within the body politic. Held together by unifying obligatory relationship, politics overcome the primal state of fear and war of “all against all” in “the state of nature.”

This special issue concludes a series of workshops funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The three workshops, which took place in Berlin and New York from 2018 to 2019, gathered an international group of researchers interested in the intersection of history, religious studies, and literature and straddling the three traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The group focused on clear states of crisis in history and in politics: the biblical clashes between prophets, kings, and people, Medieval confrontations between the prophetic and the legal traditions, and modern confrontations between the prophetic tradition and the rise of authoritarian secularist regimes, which can be seen as forerunners of more contemporary clashes between political systems and reformatory prophetic rhetoric. Such rhetoric is clearly evident in the twentieth century, for example in Weimar Germany, the American Civil Rights movement, and in the recent confrontation between democracy and its rivals. A sober estimate of the field cannot be achieved by engaging only with biblical, Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, nor by limiting their political and public contexts. Rather, our claim in this issue is that prophetic politics serves as a better trope to examine the complexity of the historical, political, and rhetorical circumstances within the field recognized as political theology. The emphasis of prophetic politics on counter-institutional rhetoric and sentiment lets a new form of theorization to emerge.

As contributors to this issue demonstrate, prophetic politics means speaking truth to power. It does so by drawing legitimacy from a higher principle of power – be it truth or divine authority. In times of crisis, prophets are the ones who dare to call attention to societal ills and to declare a new path, as radical as it may be. Even in its outmoded form, prophetic politics has not lost its revolutionary potential: from Jeremiah’s symbolic breaking of the vessels – that is, the breaking of the alliance between God and the people – to Muhammad’s open critique of the elites in Mecca, from the prophetic tone adopted by Martin Buber and A. Y. Heschel in their struggle against nationalism and nihilism during the 1920s, to Malcolm X’s and James Baldwin’s critique of racism and imperialism in the 1960s.

The historical trajectory of prophetic politics shows the prophetic word to be a rhetorical form that crosses boundaries of time and space, hierarchies, and identity. It operates not only in different religions – from ancient Greece and ancient Judea, to Christianity, Gnosticism, and since the seventh century in Islam – but also between communities. Take for example Jeremiah’s gesture of breaking of the vessels as it is taken and transformed by St. Paul to signal the rise of Christianity, or Muhammad’s mission as integrating all forms of monotheism under Islam. And in modern times, prophetic rhetoric has been taken to at once transgress and unite the languages of “Abrahamic” religions and communities against the dividing language of authoritarianism and colonialism.

The power of the dissenting word, as spoken by the prophets, lies in overstepping the borders drawn by rulers and their institutions as well those of the prophets themselves. Why is this transgression relevant? The history of Abrahamic religions shows how prophets frequently came to realize their role in society as a symptom of crisis. Prophets became active agents, who, by speaking out, pushed an existinig crisis forward, toward its radical culmination. In this sense, the prophet is a mediating figure who stands – even when passive herself – for change in general, or a principle of boundary crossing in particular. The prophet is the one who rejects any simple separation of religion from politics, sovereign from community, conservative and reform camps, and high and low cultures. Most importantly, prophetic politics changes the way we understand the past, present, and future: By re-narrating the past and the present, a new vision of the future emerges. Thus, prophets from Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, to Martin Luther King Jr. called for a radically changed future based on a reinterpretation of the past.

I

Specters of prophecy have haunted the very constitution of modern politics since the early modern period, often indirectly. They can be detected even where political theorists sought to break free from any religious symbol: Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) was not written in a vacuum but responded to the radical preaching and death of the mystic and public orator Savonarola; Thomas Hobbes devoted no less than twenty chapters of the Leviathan (1550) to dismissing the possibility of authentic prophecy. Politics thus broke with prophetic rhetoric. And yet, political movements drew much of their energy from specific interpretations of the prophetic tradition.¹ Recharging them with modern notions and interests, they conceived their own present by using categories and concepts from this very tradition of prophetic rhetoric, which politics had supposedly discarded.²

The specter of prophecy can be seen, then, in its depiction and style: Editorial modifications created a retroactive style that has always been central to religious tradition and politics. Such after-the-fact view gave prophetic politics its power and determined its view of history. Still, both early and later layers of the text keep the plea for change: During the early modern period, prophetic movements such as the Hussites or the Anabaptists rebelled against the authority of the church as well as of the emerging sovereign state. During the Enlightenment, prophets were conceived as teachers; Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Charles Baudelaire understood their role as critics of rationality and progress. Later, during the end of the nineteenth century, political prophets were seen as leaders who could realize and perform a Nietzschean reevaluation of values.³ According to the founder of modern sociology, Max Weber, prophets are charismatic political pamphleteers and moral anarchists who follow a tradition of radical critique and dissent.⁴

A radical call for change brings the political and the stylistic dimensions together. As a result, prophecy was also closely associated with poetry in ways that could both undermine and strengthen political prophecy. In the classical tradition, since Virgil, the figure of the poet as Vates (seer) endowed the literary artist with a supernatural authority. Since the reformation, widespread biblical literacy integrated the classical and biblical heritage into the sublime poetry of biblical epics as, for example, in the works of Milton.⁵ In English literature particularly, a “line of vision” connected Milton, Blake, and Shelley: a tradition in which every younger generation poetically “reenvisioned” their forerunners, simultaneously rewriting history and reactivating those versions of the past that the present required at that very moment, for instance in the crisis of the French Revolution.⁶ During the nineteenth century, as literature was gradually enshrined in the realm of aesthetics, references to the prophetic continued to influence literature. Walt Whitman or Stefan George, for example, sought to go beyond writing literature: They identified creative writing with the carving of new forms of living.⁷

During the twentieth century, prophetic politics became identified with the rise of mass democracy and with its medium of mass communication. After the fin de siècle and World War One, countless religious movements emerged from and beyond the established church, more often than not centered around “charismatic” individuals.⁸ Furthermore, modern “intellectuals” – men and women with hardly any actual political power to back them – staged themselves as prophets too. The poet Stefan George created a well-known circle of admirers during the early 1900s. German professors likewise addressed the public in 1914, praising the war effort as an opportunity for spiritual and national renewal – albeit with apocalyptic undertones.⁹ Furthermore, personal strain can be discerned in dissenting voices like Émile Zola’s famous “j’accuse” or, later in the century, the voices of poet-intellectuals such as Mahmoud Darwish.¹⁰

The 1920s marked a key moment for the history and theory of prophetic politics in Germany. During the unstable years of the Weimar Republic, many intellectuals employing prophetic rhetoric clashed head-on with the pettiness of everyday politics. Thus, they often turned to radical forms of conversion and spiritual revolution on either the left or the right, and have been often described as apocalyptic or gnostic. Thinkers such as Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin considered the truth “esoteric” and approachable only to the elected few.¹¹ Often, one finds in their deliverance a prophetic-messianic tone, which they used as a phenomenon belonging to the late modern era and an alternative to fascist forms of mediation and communication.¹²

Of course, prophetic politics was not limited to the European continent. It was always present in the American discourse of election and renewal, so prominent in the different strands of Puritanism and Evangelicalism. In particular, it has engendered a discourse known as the American Jeremiad, which laments the loss of values and the crisis of the social bond.¹³ At the same time, prophetic elements also guided movements of social reform, equal rights, and emancipation. Key representatives of this movement have identified themselves, since the 1960s, with prophetic reformatory modes and tropes that go beyond mere advisory roles.¹⁴ More recently, the term has been used again in the context of the current “culture wars” and has often taken an apocalyptic tone.¹⁵

II

From a rhetorical perspective, prophetic politics is, first and foremost, a speech act: A person speaks up and acts through speaking. Yet, as simple as it may sound, speech acts mark a complex social and rhetorical dynamics and should be interpreted within a wider dialogical framework. More concretely, a prophetic political speech act not only marks the embodiment of a political utterance but also emphasizes the context of such utterance. In the context of prophetic politics, the speaker and the audience always refer to the capacity or incapacity of the word as an agent of human action.

As far as the speaker is concerned, prophetic speech is delivered in the name of a higher authority. Stressing the legitimacy of authority implies that only those imbued with this legitimacy can speak. Or from a different angle: The prophet presents themselves as a messenger, a mouthpiece – someone who does not speak for themselves but as a medium for the word of God. More often than not, however, the prophet does not remain a passive medium but rather becomes inseparable from the message that he or she not so much delivers as embodies. The situation of the messenger is understood essentially as a threefold God-prophet-people axis in which a message is communicated by God to the prophet and by the prophet to the people. The Biblical prophet does not merely repeat a message but must also translate it and deliver a response. Reflecting the unease of this position, it often switches between first and third person, or between divine instruction to the prophet and a prophetic message to the people, or between quoted and reported speech. The prophetic speech projects a unique sense of determination, for it does not follow a single logic or grammar but different and contradicting ones: The prophet receives the voice of God, translates and embodies it in order for all men and women to hear. The authoritative delivery thus requires its own unique staging. The divine voice exceeds the boundaries of speech, forcing the prophet to go beyond oratory and perform the message with symbolic actions and bodily engagement, such as walking under a yoke.

Prophecy is no less complicated from the perspective of the addressee, the audience of the prophet’s speech. Facing the prophet, the people are confronted with strong claims and told to radically change their lives, but with little proof. After all, the truth claim of the prophetic word can only be substantiated by another’s word. Prophetic politics, building on the key role of prophetic speech – with its overdetermined, paradoxical, and performative nature – lacks institutional power. Neither does the prophet participate in the arcana of power nor does he or she follow the norms and expectations of his or her audience. Indeed, prophets are often quite critical of their listeners. Frequently accusing them of being castigated or idle, prophets always run the risk that their followers will leave or even violently turn on them. The beaten prophet, insulted and despised by his audience, may then become a martyr who testifies to his claims with his or her suffering. That said, the prophet is always eyed with some suspicion. After all, he might turn out to be one of the many false prophets.

What about the content of the prophecy, the message itself? The prophetic word is determined by the forces mentioned: by power and pretense, by sacrifice and performance. Often it demonstrates an inclination to paradox, a poetics of ambivalence, dramatic figures of speech, and opposition. In the literary tradition, such rhetorical tropes were associated with the hyperbolic aesthetics of the sublime, which would break with orderly and harmonious forms of beauty. In order to move his or her audience, the prophet must refer to familiar images – but he or she must do so in a novel way. The metaphors and imagery used often reveal a tendency to hyperbolize and use contrast: One might paint a grim future threatened by destruction only to change to flowery, tranquil images of consolation in the very next passage. Such contradictory modes enable the prophet to build on the existing religious tradition while also redesigning it, standing on the threshold of transformation.

III

The rhetorical power of prophetic oratory builds on the prophet’s capacity to play with time. The prophetic word breaks from normative, linear, biological time in different ways, and the prophet’s speech is always time-sensitive. As Martin Buber explained in his Prophetic Faith (1940), the prophet not only delivers – often unwillingly – the word of God but does so at “the hour of decision” and with one eye always turned towards the future. The individual destiny of the prophet is entangled with the destiny of the people. For “to be a nabi means to set the audience … for deliverance as something about to come.”¹⁶ Indeed, Jeremiah is ordained as “a prophet unto the nations” and predicts destruction and exile as a result of past sins. It is this, he says, that is the condition for new beginnings. The explosive potential of his words for modern authors and thinkers was always linked with a predictive moral “Jeremiad,” an explicit plea for radical change. If thinkers and authors wrote about the prophet as the epitome of nonconformism – Leo Baeck sees him as “the great non-conformist in history, [the] great dissenter of history” – it was always with such temporal transgression in mind.¹⁷

How deep does the prophetic demand for change go? Jacob Taubes explained that “in prophecy disaster is near at hand; in the belief that the world is coming to an end, prophecy devalues the life and ways of this world.”¹⁸ The temporal re-organization of known narratives implies a new path for mankind to overcome its biological condition. As François Hartog showed, prophecy activates the word by its appeal to the present and its own claim to realize “a recitation of performative time [Récit du temps performative, N.L]."¹⁹ In that respect, the monotheistic revolution could be seen as a rebellion against Pagan moderation and its reliance on natural order. In the three Abrahamic religions, prophecy, political dissent, and human finality define the relation to the divine and people, not nature. Judaism, Christianity and Islam called to unite the social and political; both Jeremiah’s and St. Paul’s prophecies were grounded in the image of a new covenant and collective resurrection; the Quranic dualism of huduth (come to be, insertion into time), and qidam (without origin, untimely, eternal) introduced prophetic time as a call for a comprehensive socio-political change. When adapted into constitutional democracy in modern times, the Jeremiad proved to shape “a discourse that is at once thoroughly religious and thoroughly political.”²⁰ Martin Luther King Jr.’s Jeremiad compared normative (deliberative) change to an accelerated (prophetic) change when he compared the false hopes implicit in the industrial revolution to genuine prophecy. “The scientist became a substitute for the prophet,” whereas an actual, radical change propelled by prophetic politics had engendered real change: “As on the world scale, so in our nation, the wind of change began to blow.”²¹ Indeed, politics might be the art of the possible, “but,” as James Baldwin once put it, “in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.”²² It is precisely the seemingly impossible task of breaking a system of exclusion – of race, gender, and discriminatory politics in general – that prepares a different “democracy to come.”

IV

A recent revival of interest in political theology has contributed a great deal to the analysis and understanding of prophetic rhetoric, temporality, and politics. Political theology has been, for a long time, a topic of specialists in Medieval and early modern thought. Today, it is one of the most prominent fields studying the current state of political representation. This revival of interest in secularized theological concepts abundant in political culture is not devoid of inherent problems. Two aspects, in particular, have come to the fore: First, while political theology enables an innovative understanding of the secular-political axis, it is often accompanied by Christian and universalist undertones. For example, by employing only specific Christian concepts, Christian political theology viewed the rest of the world from a privileged position, not shying away from criticizing the core values of so-called fundamentalist, non-Christian, movements. Second, a fixation with origins and foundations, on the one hand, and its suspicion of procedural processes, on the other hand, have often resulted with a pretty dogmatic approach: Instead of analyzing the affiliation of religion and politics, political theologians preferred to ponder over its own terminology.

Prophetic politics engages with the core issues that trouble representatives of political theology: The relationship between sovereign and the people, tradition and change, religion and secularization, norm and exception. Let us pause and wonder: Could prophetic politics, with its unique emphases, allow us to envision another, possibly less self-absorbed and more differentiated form of political theology? Could focusing on the schism between prophetic voice and political institutions reveal a different understanding of political theological concepts, beyond the realm of power and sovereignty? What about considering the concept of hope, or solidarity, and what about comfort? What if one thinks beyond linear language and looks at other forms of speech such as poetry, prayer, or communion? Widening the focus would allow us to perceive the inherent limitations of the dominant model of political theology. In contrast to Carl Schmitt’s hierarchical interpretation of political theology – grounded in the secularization of theological concepts for the sake of a sovereign decision – prophetic politics helps us question the relationship between the religious and the political. Here, instead of sacralizing power and even when criticizing it, prophetic politics emphasizes relationships rather than singular identities or status; coincidence and uncertainty rather than decisionist processes; paradoxes rather than fundamentals.

In other words, in contrast to Schmittian political theology, prophetic politics aims at the public sphere, using direct means of communicating its message in everyday language. Nonetheless, prophetic politics does not fit easily into this public sphere, at least not in the modern, liberal sense: Raising absolute claims and displaying pathos, prophetic politics tends to break with the silent consensus, with the implicit rule of decency that separates articles of faith from issues of deliberation. It also breaks from the usual, linear speech act that connects a figure of authority with his or her audience. Tearing down these separations might be a dangerous act – but it is necessary to question silent presuppositions and to break up the denials and disavowals of race, or gender – perhaps the toughest challenges to democratic politics. Experimenting at the border of politics, morals, religion, and time, prophetic politics reopens the fundamental questions and creates an awareness of the fundamental conditions and limitations of politics.

Acknowledgements

Other than the contributors to this issue, we would like to thank Dominique Bourel, Sylvie Ann Goldberg, Lutz Greisiger, Dana Hollander, Lukas Pallitsch, Sarah Pourciau, Eugene Sheppard, and Martin Treml; Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Elad Lapidot, Vincent Lloyd, and Willem Styfhals. Finally, this issue owes much to the thoughtful and warm contributions of John Pettegrew, who participated in the New York gathering in Fall 2018, and has since passed away. Dedicating his comments to the concept of love in James Baldwin’s prophetic rhetoric, he left us with a legacy of love, decency, and a strong drive to reform – much needed in the academic as well as in the political and religious worlds. We would like to thank also Vincent Lloyd, Leigh Anne, David Myers, and the staff at the ZfL for their help. No prophet or discussion of prophecy could exist without the support of friends.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung Berlin, The Center for Jewish History.

Notes

* Dedicated to the memory of John Pettegrew.

1 Cf. the classic account in Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

2 “The basic formula for civil religion in American history has been prophetic religion plus civic republicanism, or more succinctly, prophetic republicanism.” Philip Gorski, American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2017), 19.

3 On the Topos of Nietzshe as a prophet cf. Daniel Weidner, “Und ihr – ihr machtet schon ein Leier-Lied daraus’. Nietzsche als Prophet.” Arcadia 47, no. 2 (2012): 361–384.

4 Herbert N. Schneidau, Sacred Discontent. The Bible and Western Tradition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976.

5 James L. Kugel, Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990. William Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974.

6 Joseph Anthony Wittreich, ed. Milton and the Line of Vision. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

7 Bernadette Malinowski, Das Heilige sei mein Wort: Paradigmen prophetischer Dichtung von Klopstock bis Whitman. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 2002.

8 Ulrich Linse, Barfüßige Propheten: Erlöser der zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Siedler, 1983.

9 Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Commmunity, 1890–1933. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Klaus Vondung, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland. München: dtv, 1988. Ulrich Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister: Stefan Georges Nachleben. München: C.H. Beck, 2009.

10 For the figure of the poet-intellectual-prophet in the modern Arab world see Zeina Halabi, Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual: Prophecy, Exile and the Nation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

11 Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der Entzauberten Welt: Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den Weltkriegen. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1989; Michael Pauen, Dithyrambiker des Untergangs. Gnostisches Denken in Ästhetik und Philosophie der Moderne. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994; Jürgen Brokoff, Die Apokalypse in der Weimarer Republik. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001.

12 Michael Löwy, Erlösung und Utopie: Jüdischer Messianismus und libertäres Denken: eine Wahlverwandtschaft. Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1997.

13 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

14 George Shulman, American Prophecy. Race and Redemption in American Political Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Cathleen Kaveny: Prophecy without Contempt. Religious Discourse in the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

15 James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997.

16 Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith. Translated by Carlyle Witton-Davies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016, 3.

17 Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism. Translated by Victor Grubwieser and Leonard Peral. London: Macmillan and Co., 1936, 218.

18 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology. Translated by David Ratmoko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, 21.

19 François Hartog, “L’apocalypse, une Philosophie de l’histoire.” Esprit 405, no. 6 (June 2014): 27.

20 Kaveny, Prophecy without Contempt, 4.

21 The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Vol. 4: Advocate of the Social Gospel, September 1948-March 1963. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 528, 531.

22 James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time.” In Collected Essays. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998, 346.