4S: Prophecy
Prophet
John Piper has always been one of my favorite preachers, and I find him far more winsome and honest than the likes of Craig. He has a sort of vulnerability that draws you in and makes you think he isn’t trying to sell you a line but is earnestly seeking the same way you are.
In this week’s podcast, I cover a talk he did on the subject of prophecy, where that self-deprecating vulnerability was on display. He said the one thing he could have that made me lean forward to listen to what he had to say. He admitted that he was also unsure about prophecy. Unlike a lot of people in his position who might say a thing like that just to get you on their side, I think he actually meant it. I respond positively to that sort of epistemic humility.
To be sure, he had some rather peculiar notions about prophecy. But I grant him the grace of the equally unsure. Back in my preacher days, I didn’t consider myself an expert on the subject either. My father, on the other hand, was an expert on the minor prophets. That was his major focus of study at seminary.
I read the minor prophets but never took to them like my father did. I don’t think he liked them because of anything to do with what we think of as prophecy. I think he saw them as the cowboys of the holy writ. We were very much into westerns. Those heroes had a certain brand of swagger about them. I suspect he thought the minor prophets had a bit of that flavor. For me, it never took.
While being at the deep end of the kook theological pool, I can’t help but come back to prophecy every year or so. It is perhaps the single most important subject for Christians, whether or not they realize it. That is because when it comes to explaining why anyone should consider the Bible to be a holy book, it always comes down to prophecy. There is no way to validate the Bible as a magic book of some kind or other without appeal to prophecy. They all do it eventually. So one can never be quite done with the topic.
Sure, I used to appeal to prophecy when I was a Christian just as Christians do now. But I ultimately couldn’t maintain it. There are far too many questions that the inquiring mind can’t let go. The answers to these questions are far too sparse, and when attempted, far too bad. So while I can’t understand how the thinking Christian can hold on to the idea that biblical prophecy is anything special, I at least want them to understand why I, and others like me don’t. Into the rabbit hole we go:
Too many definitions
When a word has too many definitions, the meaning of it becomes less clear. Prophecy is an overloaded word that means too much. When a word can mean everything, it no longer means anything. Here are three common ways the word is used by people of faith:
- A predictor of future events
- Having knowledge of things one could not have by natural means
- One who authoritatively speaks for god
There could be more definitions than these. But these are sufficient for the point I am making. I find that believers do a lot of context switching with this word, often in the same paragraph. So it can be hard to keep up. Also, the context is different from one person to another. You cannot assume that the person you are talking to about prophecy means the same thing as the last person with whom you engaged on the matter.
If I had to guess, I would say that the most common understanding of the word is something akin to fortune telling. It is a prediction of the future. That is certainly one of the strong definitions of the word as presented by the bible. You can know that a prophet is not speaking for god if they make a prediction that doesn’t come true. Not only is that a false prophet, but one that will face retributive death.
However, the way prophecy was handled in the bible suggests something a bit less. It seems to have mostly come down to warnings rather than predictions. If you don’t straighten up and fly right, god is gonna get you! Once a prophet was established as a prophet, they could make statements like that in an authoritative way.
Verification of a prophet
That leaves the question of how they became established in the first place and who actually recognized them as authoritative. I suspect the way a prophet became established then is much the way they become established today. They do it via some kind of magic. They accurately foretell the future or they do some kind of miracle that could only come from god.
At that point, they could speak for god much the way preachers do today. Preachers get up in front of audiences and teach gods will to people. In doing so, they are speaking for god, at least informally. They are validated by their congregation, at least until the congregation decides to fire them. For Hebrew prophets, it was less clear, they were accepted as authoritative by certain communities. But it seems they all died badly. So they clearly were not considered authoritative by the people who killed them.
A historian can only say that a person was regarded as a prophet by some. They could not say that a person actually was a prophet. As an outsider, I am not sure why I should care of some handful of people from a very long time ago and a place way over there considered Isaiah some kind of oracle. That is meaningless to me.
It also doesn’t matter if he was some kind of oracle. Let’s say he spoke for a supernatural power and made some accurate predictions. I am told by that same book that such could be done by spirits. How can we determine that the Old Testament prophets were not empowered by demonic forces to lead people to a false messiah? We don’t and can’t know. When I have pointed out to people that Sathya Sai Baba raised the dead at least twice, they say that it doesn’t matter if he did because it would have been by the power of demons.
The lack of reliable a way to verify that a person is speaking for god is even worse in the New Testament and into the current age. When speaking of ancient prophets, we can wrap them in mystery and ancient documents and mythology. We can’t really do that for contemporary prophets. We need something more concrete as mythology and a cloak of mystery are not available. A prophet actually has to prove herself in some way.
How did Paul do it? We can’t be sure. Did he do magic to prove he was from god? I don’t believe that was his origin story. His power seemed to come from a powerful testimony of a changed life due to an overwhelming encounter with god. So it is today. And sure, there was also magic.
Most people who call themselves Christian prophets do not do so on the basis that they have raised dead people. It is more to do with a powerful testimony of an encounter with god. It is all about the calling, and whether or not they can get enough people to believe them. Paul was very good at getting enough people to believe his claims. He based it largely on his redefinition of what it meant to be an apostle. Paul managed to change it in such a way that he could sell people on the idea that he was one. Much the same happens today. It is more about the art of the sell.
For my part, there is simply no way for anyone to validate their claim to the title of apostle, prophet, or even pastor. There is no way to verify whether a person was called by god or called by their own desire and ambition. If I can’t determine validity for today’s prophets, there is no way I could do it for yesterday’s prophets.
Circular reasoning
John Piper outlined the differences between Old Testament prophets and New Testament prophets. To my ear, it all came down to question begging and circular reasoning. How do we know that the Bible is truly the word of god? Prophecy. How do we know that prophets are speaking the word of god? Bible. It doesn’t get more circular than that.
If Christians want to claim that the validation of a prophet is that what they say is consistent with the Bible, then they can’t claim that the Bible is validated because of prophecy. They are going to have to let one of those go. If prophecy is to be validated based on predictions being fulfilled, then there has to be a lot of clarification of that criteria.
First, everyone who is claiming to speak for god must do so by first making a prophetic prediction that comes true. As we all know, that is simply not how it is done. Since that is not how most people gain the right to speak for god today, the criteria of accurate predictions is already dead.
If we are continuing with the predictions model, the prediction must be intentional and clear.
Predictions must be specific enough so that there is only one way to fulfill them. And that fulfillment must be obvious.
Prediction fulfillment must be verifiable in the lifetime of the audience. Otherwise, that person could never be considered a prophet by the people they are prophesying to. This means that for verification purposes, prophecy must be very near-term.
Truth is not verification
As was brought up in the comments, prophecy doesn’t have to come true to be of god. This is why I described Old Testament prophecy as warnings rather than predictions. Warnings and threats never have to come to fruition to be valid. The one making the warning can always say they decided to show mercy instead, or that the warning was conditional based on changed behavior. You can never invalidate a warning because the ultimate threat was not fulfilled. That is just how warnings and threats work.
With this in mind, Piper made a grave error when he recounted the story of the woman who prophesies that his wife would die while bearing a daughter. While that didn’t happen, the prophecy cannot be invalidated even by biblical standards. It might have been a prophetic warning to accomplish the goal of getting Piper to humble himself and cry out to god. Maybe he wasn’t doing enough of that at that time. So the prophecy, indeed, brought him to his knees and he did, indeed, cry out to god. Therefore, god relented, spared Piper’s wife, and granted him with a son. You see, not a failed prophecy at all.
That is why truth (fulfillment of the prophecy) is no validation anymore than the lack of fulfillment can falsify the claim or claimant. Notice the context shift. Piper was thinking of prophecy as future-casting while the woman was thinking of it as a warning from god with an unspoken conditional. In this way, prophecy is just like all the other extraordinary Christian claims: It can never be falsified.
But they were prophets
Early in the show, Piper made a big deal about how Jesus didn’t appoint prophets, but apostles. We can see this in Luke 6. But I must push back against that notion. They were prophets in all but name. Just ask yourself what the difference was between prophets and apostles. You will find almost nothing to say.
Prophets were chosen by god. So were apostles.
Prophets had authority that wasn’t to be tested. So did apostles.
Prophets occasionally made predictions. So did apostles.
Prophets spoke for god and could give messages and warnings from god that couldn’t be validated by any means. So did apostles.
Prophets usually came to a bad end. So did apostles.
In the same way that Jesus was called Emanuel, the apostles were prophets. It gets worse:
The office of prophet
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers Eph. 4:11
You might be tempted to use this passage to show a distinct difference between apostle and prophet. But I believe that would be misguided. Even if there were a difference, nothing stops a person from having a dual role. It could ever be argued that the role of prophet is a subset of what it means to be an apostle. No one would argue that the apostles were not teachers because this passage separates the roles.
What makes this passage bad for prophecy is that it seems to be assuming that there were people in the church who had the gift. Based on how Paul redefined apostle, there is no need to assume that was an exclusive title either. Indeed, many church leaders today are called apostles. You can’t possibly say they aren’t.
Therefore, we have to do something with the office of prophet. It was a named office. The problem is that it is never given a description of how it operates, or a way to determine who is or is not a prophet. It is an office with a name, but is lacking anything of use. We are left to decide for ourselves what it means.
Conclusion: The Jews beg to differ
I finish where I often do when this topic comes up: The Jews would beg to differ. If you believe the Hebrew Scriptures are prophesying the Christian, triune god, I know a few rabbis who would like to have a word with you. This is going to be true for the vast majority of Jewish scholars who ever lived and who will ever live. It is one of the least controversial things I can say. For the most part, Jews don’t believe their scriptures are pointing to Jesus.
The only thing a Christian can say to this (and they have) is that the Jews neither know or understand their own scriptures. So thorough has been the Christian appropriation of Jewish text, I strongly believe that most Christians have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the fat part of their bible preceding Matthew is Hebrew Scriptures. They are the originators. We are the interlopers.
But Christians do not tend to take into account the studied opinion of religious, Jewish scholars. This might have to do with the bias of the New Testament writers, especially the gospels. Jewish scholars were the villains of the story almost from the beginning. They were the fools who rejected and ultimately killed the immortal god. It only makes sense that Christians generally couldn’t care less about what religious Jewish teachers think about messianic prophecy. The only Jewish scholars they tend to cite are those in the diminishing minority that happen to agree with them.
At some point, Paul, the former religious Jew, redefined just about everything in the Hebrew Scriptures to make his case. He had to sell it because almost no one saw it the way he did until he explained it. Even so, he had to resort to other means to convince people. It was just a matter of him pointing out the correct reading. It was also about his testimony: the fact that he convinced a lot of people that he saw god and had a conversation with him. Where Paul can’t twist a Hebrew text into the pretzel he needs, he pulls out the trump card that says, God told me in our private conversations. I received it from the lord… That sort of thing.
Prophecy works exactly the same way today. It has less to do with any real magic and more to do with how good of a story you can tell and how strong your testimony is and how many people you can get to swallow it whole. That was prophecy then and it is prophecy now. I was once in the thrall of it. But now, thankfully, I’m out.
See you in the comments…
