living in a prophetic age

• A prophetic age is marked by an impending crisis.
• It is a time when the old stories, that have so far made sense of life, no longer work.
• It is a time when the necessary truth will be heard from the margins and not from the establishment.
• And it is a time when lifestyle becomes a political issue.

Past prophetic ages included the time of the exile in the Old Testament. As many of the people were carried off into a foreign land the old stories about God’s protection failed and a great theological ferment ensued. Prophets from the margins, like Jeremiah, pointed to the failures of the society and called them to ‘amend their ways and their actions’.

Similarly in Jesus’ time there was an impending crisis. A major conflict with the occupying Roman forces was brewing. Jesus recognised the need for a new theological understanding and called people to follow him , adopting a radical lifestyle.

Today we are threatened by an impending crisis, which is the deliberate wounding of the earth and its creatures through human-induced climate change.  Animals, plants and the world’s poorest peoples are all certain to be hurt or destroyed if we continue our wanton folly. As Matthew Taylor notes this is also a day when the old ideologies have failed, when ‘the market’ is more the problem than the solution and we need a whole new type of politics based around living well. He says that lifestyle is the new terrain of politics. I suspect that lifestyle is also the new terrain of spiritual renewal. As Christians come to recognise the call to seek the Great Peace or Shalom. so it is going to be increasingly diffcult to call yourself a Christian and participate uncritically in an earth-destructive lifestyle.

We need to go on a journey to a new kind of life – and for that we need vision.

Why use Shalom to describe this vision?

The theological background to each of these prophetic ages was a dream. It was called variously the good news, the Kingdom of God, or simply Shalom, meaning peace. In Isaiah 52 v 7 we find all three of these ideas in the same verse and they are also all found in Jesus ministry. Each of these words or phrases carries vision for every sphere of life - the personal, social, political and environmental and they tend to denote a similar set of hopes and dreams.

Yet in different ages one or another rises to the foreground.

In Jesus day, the primary crisis was political and in order to address this constructively Jesus called people to imagine a new social and polical reality, a ‘kingdom of God’.  

In our day the primary crisis is environmental. All the other spheres are involved as well of course, but the vital presenting issue to be addressed is climate change. For this reason I suggest that the lead word should be ‘Shalom’ because it carries with it a clear creation concern.