A Plumb Line in America

Reflections on the Lectionary for July 13th

The Plumb Line and the City, Coventry Cathedral. Sculpture by Clark B.Fitz-Gerald, image by Jim Linwood. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; taken from Wikimedia.

About a month ago, Walter Brueggemann died. Brueggemann was an eminent and well-known scholar of the Hebrew Bible, and his work has been read widely by both scholars and laypeople. He is best known for an early and influential book, The Prophetic Imagination, which debuted nearly fifty years ago but which has remained relevant and influential to this day. That obituary linked above claims that the book has sold nearly one million copies, which for a work of serious biblical scholarship is—and this is the technical term—bonkers.

I think about Brueggemann often, and I think often about the argument of The Prophetic Imagination. Although there have been useful and timely challenges to the Protestant tendency to read and claim the Hebrew Prophets in unproblematic ways, Brueggemann’s arguments remain convincing for large swaths of people, and for me. Brueggemann was using the prophets, in that book and in other writings, to show how biblical texts can critique political systems and political leaders both ancient and modern. In The Prophetic Imagination, Brueggemann was describing how ancient prophets spoke into and intervened in their own political situations, and he was making the case for the ongoing usefulness of prophetic texts in creating justice in the present. The book was written in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, when sentiments and citations from biblical prophets helped make the moral case against racism and segregation. The book preceded the Reagan era by a couple of years, a political revolution animated by the so-called Moral Majority, which was the beginning of American government’s wholesale abdication of social programs and the sense of communal well-being that had been the hallmark of some mid-20^th-century presidencies. The Prophetic Imagination courses with that kind of energy—energy born out of fraught and decisive political moments and the robust role religion can play in them.

The lectionary for July 13^th contains a powerful and strange text that might be familiar to many of us. Amos 7:7-17 depicts a pivotal conflict over power, proclamation, violence, and vocation, and it is a tidy example of some of the promise of Brueggemann’s work (and some of the perils of using the prophets uncritically). In this passage, the prophet Amos (who claims outright not to be a prophet at all) finds himself in conflict with both the priesthood (in the figure of Amaziah and the cultic site of Bethel) and the king Jeroboam, who was monarch of the northern kingdom of Israel. This triad—prophet, priest, and king—is an important source of tension and conflict in the Hebrew Bible and in the traditions of ancient Israel, and indeed in early Christianity and the story of Jesus. One of Brueggemann’s contributions was to show how prophets functioned in just the way Amos is functioning in this passage: as outside corrective forces leveraged against the institutional power of the priesthood and the throne. Prophets held very little hard power; in this passage Amos points out that he is “a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees,” hardly a base of authority from which one might be expected to challenge a kingdom. But prophets held rhetorical power and the power to call authority to account, and that soft and moral kind of power is on full display here. When your counterparts hold the power of armies and religious institutions, rhetorical power can seem like a thin consolation. But as Amos demonstrates, words and stories matter, and the ability to speak truth into the face of authority might be the most potent weapon of all.

I said up top that I have been thinking about Brueggemann’s arguments a lot lately. By “lately” I mean the past quarter century or so—most of my adult life, and the entirety of the time that has passed since I first read Brueggemann’s work. (I think I am responsible for buying three of those million copies of The Prophetic Imagination over the years, maybe four). If you’re a regular reader of this Substack or if you know me in real life, you probably know that I think a lot about politics, because of the ways it intersects with religion and theological reflection. My whole adulthood has felt like a series of political crises, a long slippage of American political leadership into disrepair, punctuated by a couple of moments of hope and order. Perhaps it always feels this way for people living in any era. I suppose that if I had lived through the Civil War or Reconstruction or Jim Crow or the Great Depression or the Civil Rights era, I might have felt the same way—like the story of America is a story of a promise collapsing and failing in real time. And it might even be true. But my own adulthood has seen wars launched on flimsy pretexts, massive terror attacks, several economic crises, outbreaks of prejudice and hatred, and multiple emergencies of democratic legitimacy, all in a quarter-century of time. And all that time I have found myself deeply embedded in religious communities, wondering about the role of religious people in shaping a national discourse and a national identity.

Brueggemann points out the role of prophets in pushing back against political authority. The role of the prophet, Brueggemann argues, is to undermine “royal consciousness,” which is the totalizing tendency of political power to define everything in terms of its own success and direct all resources toward its own strength. Royal consciousness insists on its own effectiveness, and indeed it insists that royal power is the only conduit and venue for strength and flourishing. The prophetic imagination stands against this. The prophetic imagination calls people to speak about the exploitation they experience at the hands of political systems, and to name their experiences as grief, which is a nice summary of what the biblical prophets do. By acknowledging the harm we experience and the grief we feel about the way the world is, we begin to be able to imagine a different and new world—a world constructed not on the false promise of royal power and royal consciousness, but instead founded on new kinds of community and new expressions of communal well-being. The prophetic imagination, in some ways, is not so far from the vision of the “kingdom of God” or the “kindom” that many progressive Christians like myself like to envision. The prophets anticipate the ways Jesus came calling for justice, and the ways Jesus’ calls for justice echo into some of our own communities today.

It isn’t difficult to imagine a place for a prophetic imagination in the America of 2025. This past Friday, which was the Fourth of July, I lost count of how many people told me that it felt wrong to celebrate America at a moment when so little about America is worthy of celebration. I am used to hearing (and feeling) some of that every year, but I was surprised by how often it came up, unprompted—a kind of grief that needed to be spoken out loud. (And I spent the holiday in deep-red Tennessee—hardly a bastion of liberal sentiment). It is difficult to think of a better representative for “royal consciousness” than Donald Trump, who—despite what his detractors sometimes wishfully think—fully grasps the way power works and manages to turn all systems and structures to the furtherance of his own strength. Perhaps Jeroboam was the same—a hoarder of privilege, a destroyer of dissent, a self-interested strongman who was motivated only by his own enrichment and by the perpetuation of his own name. Whether Jeroboam was that way or not, it certainly seems like Amos felt like Jeroboam fit the bill.

The conflict in Amos 7:7-17 comes because the prophet—the herdsman and dresser of sycamore trees—suggests an end to Jeroboam’s reign. God, Amos says, “will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword,” which is admittedly a dramatic thing to say. Amos also predicts—proclaims, calls for, calls down—a series of traumas for Israel. “The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste,” Amos declares, and then, “Israel must go into exile away from his land.” This is an attack against both Jeroboam the king and against the cultic and religious systems that feed him power. The reference to “high places” is its own kind of indictment; high places were cultic sites outside of the kinds of authorized and legitimate worship that the prophetic tradition deemed appropriate, so Amos was accusing both the priesthood and the people of idolatry. As a metaphor for all of this, Amos chooses the plumb line.

At least, we think that’s what he chose. The Hebrew word here is actually a bit unclear, but it seems to be connected to construction somehow, especially the construction of walls. So, plumb line is as good a translation as any. The metaphor works: a plumb line uses the truth of gravity to measure and judge the straightness of a wall, and therefore its sturdiness and trustworthiness. Amos is pointing to a flaw in the construction of an edifice, a mistake that will bring the whole thing down. God, Amos predicts, will bring swords against both Jeroboam and Israel, laying waste to the nation. This coming destruction has dire consequences, and verse 17 promises wholesale suffering.

This is the argument that some have made against lionizing the prophets: that their rhetoric is full of violence, and especially gendered violence. This is absolutely true. The prophetic texts unfurl fantasies of violence and descriptions of violence, sometimes gratuitously and without flinching. And women, in particular, become symbols in the prophets of the kinds of wounding that will be visited upon the nation by God’s wrath. These images are troubling, and they should make us pause to consider what we think is good and just about divine justice. If divine justice looks like “your wife shall become a prostitute in the city,” as Amos 7:17 says, or “your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,” what kind of God is that? It’s a question that’s well worth asking.

I think we can say yes to prophetic imagination while also saying no to the ways that imagination produces more violence and suffering. To read the Bible is always to be involved in this kind of reading—sorting the wheat from the chaff, taking the good while letting go of the bad. We can grasp Amos’ imagination, which is that the edifice of communal life is askew and needs fixing, without also endorsing his list of horrors, either for God or as a part of our own prophetic imagination. There can be justice without violence—truth without violation.

What would a prophetic imagination look like for us, today? The first thing to say is that there are some very good examples of prophetic imagination already underway. Times of inequality and terror tend to produce pockets of resistance that rely on mutuality for their strength. The Poor People’s Campaign is an example of a coalitional effort that has been bearing good fruit, as are some of the marches and communal actions that have popped up recently. Some of these are religious in nature (the Poor People’s Campaign in particular), in the way the Civil Rights Movement was religious—by harnessing religious language and energy for a project of civil importance.

As Amos is suggesting, and as Brueggemann pointed out, religion has an important role to play, and religion will need to be a part of any movement of prophetic imagination that arises in our own time. Religion is the way strongmen consolidate their power, and religion is a machine for justifying all manner of atrocity. This is true across political parties and it is timeless; religion is a tried-and-true way for powerful people to cloak their power in righteousness. But as so many people have noticed—as the people I kept encountering around July 4^th in deep-red Tennessee were saying, in their own ways—something feels different about it this time. If religion is part of the problem, then religion is part of the solution, and religious communities are an important voice in any movements of reform.

I certainly don’t have the answers. Amos was “no prophet nor a prophet’s son, but…a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore trees,” and I am likewise just a guy who teaches the Bible to people and writes a lot of fancy words. The truth is that not many of us are very remarkable on our own. But together—as possessors and inheritors of a fierce mutuality—we are capable of incredible feats of prophetic imagination. In the Hebrew Bible, we only see irruptions of “the prophetic” during times of crisis and moral danger. Prophets arise—or, to be more accurate, prophets are brought forth—in the moments when the nation needs to be called back to foundational principles and reminded of its most important commitments.

That sounds like now.