'The Prophets' War Is Not Over'

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Do you have a favorite prophet?
My favorite is Jeremiah, though I don't like his politics too much. He was an appeaser and a defeatist. But he was a very great poet, and of all the prophets, he's the most human, and the one about whom we know the most. I fell in love with him when I was a teenager, and I found that when I went back to him, I was still deeply moved.

After September 11 last year, we heard a lot about these being the End Times, and that the sins of America made us deserve the attacks. Would that be considered modern day prophecy?
I was repelled by that idea when Jerry Falwell said it. I have to admit in all honesty that it's the sort of thing the prophets were always saying to the children of Israel: you brought this on yourself by your sins and God is using these foreign powers, whether it be Assyria or Babylonia, to punish you for your sins, and they will be punished by God in their turn. But there are several differences here.

There are historians who claim with some justification that the prophets were exaggerating the sins of the people in their own time, exaggerating out of what he calls prophetic idealism, and that people were not as bad as, say, Jeremiah claimed that they were. There may be some truth in that idea.

I would apply the same idea to America, but I would put it more strongly. I don't think this is a sinful country. I think it contains many sinners, and groups of sinners, as all human communities do. But on the whole I would say that this is a virtuous country, not a sinful one as a collectivity, and that far from being attacked for our sins by the Islamic fundamentalist radicals, we are being attacked for our virtues and our freedoms, both economic and political. So the charge Falwell makes I think is mistaken with regard to the nature of this country.

And secondly, I don't think Falwell is a prophet. There's a big difference between him and the prophets who were charged by God. Whether you believe it or not, these men believed they were not speaking words of their own. Very often they were reluctant to deliver the message. That's an image that you find throughout the prophetic canon: Jeremiah, who begs to be let off the hook, for example; or Ezekiel, who has to be forced literally to chew a scroll on which the prophetic message is inscribed. They were all selfless--their entire lives were submerged into the service of God, and they were instruments of the will of God. So they believed and so they acted.

If America is a virtuous country now, what do the prophets have to tell us today?
I think what they have to say to us has to do with those elements of society which are not virtuous, which are in fact idolatrous. What the prophets meant by idolatry, I concluded after studying them very carefully, was not so much the worship of false gods, but the worship of oneself. This is what we call narcissism. D.H. Lawrence, who was no believer but who nevertheless used a lot of Christian imagery when it suited him, once said that to fall from the hands of god is to fall into the bottomless pit of self. That's very close to the prophetic ideal of idolatry--that the alternative to the worship of the one true God is worship of self.

I think that this is the great sin prevalent in America -- not what some people say is worship of money or worship of fame, success and power. The prophets did not consider worldly goods to be wicked or inferior, and I think that's one of the great signs of the realism of the prophets, which is often not noticed. They were realists, they were also incidentally very political. They dived deep and dirty into the politics of their own time--they took positions, they opposed certain other ideas and supported others, all in the name of God of course.

The besetting sin of American culture is narcissism, or the culture of narcissism, as Christopher Lash calls it, the worship of self. The prophets have a great deal to say about the meaning of such worship.

Can you give an example of narcissism in our culture?
This is where I get into trouble, where my book becomes radioactive. I believe that down deep in the feminist movement, you find precisely a worship of self. The notion that a woman's needs should take priority over the needs of her children is probably the most radical anti-biblical idea ever promulgated. I doubt there is any culture in which that idea has ever taken root that my needs are primary. That's one example.

I believe that the gay rights movement contains a very strong element of narcissism in its glorification of youth. I think, to shift the ground slightly, that you find a resurgence of this idolatry in paganism, and even in the environmental movement, with the elevation of nature above man, which is exactly the opposite of the biblical idea, which gives man dominion over nature. To go back to feminism and homosexuality, and the notion that there is no natural difference between men and women, that these differences are social constructs, this too is a repudiation of the biblical concept of the nature of life.

These are mutations of the old rebellions against the laws promulgated by God in the Bible and that are explained and ratified by the prophetic literature. To that extent, what we have in the prophetic literature and in the Hebrew bible generally, is a corrective to some of these tendencies and insight into what they really amount to, as opposed to what they represent themselves as saying in the sanitized public relations version that is peddled for political purposes.

So these social movements make the prophets still relevant?
What I'm trying to argue is that the spiritual war in which they were engaged is not over, and that different forms of the same forces that they were contending against keep cropping up, and always will, so long as human beings remain human. The prophets provide spiritual wisdom and insight that casts a very blazing light on certain aspects of our own situation today, on our spiritual condition.